I suppose, if you’re like me, you probably dream about your ideal writing spot. Perhaps it is an antique study, with an old cedar desk and walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases (neatly dusted). Perhaps it is a room by the sea, where a gentle ocean breeze blows through a window and the sound of seagulls slowly soothes your ears like a distant song.
However, if you’re actually like me, you don’t have a place like that at all! Instead, you live in some noisy house in the suburbs: the TV blares, the phone drills at your ears, and the washing-up glares at you in an ever-increasing tower. All the talk in how-to-write books and seminars about constructing your perfect hideaway where you can quietly write day after day, month after month, seems like a cruel joke.
And so I have learnt, over the years, to write in all the wrong places. I am writing this sentence, in fact, on a busy commuter train, with announcements blaring (but I have mostly tuned out of those) and people getting on and off every few minutes. It’s surprising what you can do when you have to. I find that the very act of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) creates a mini-environment of its own. The words form—and such is the power of those words that they draw me in. I listen to the sentences as I construct them, and the linear form of the sentences draws me on into the next sentence and the next.
It doesn’t always work like clockwork, of course. Sometimes I run into a blockage in my thoughts, and then my actual environment reasserts itself. It means I’m jolted back to the packed train. My attention wanders through the windows to the fast-passing buildings. My storyline is gone.
Yet writing “anywhere” has worked for me so many times that it has become, over the years, a major feature of my writing life. (I have got off my first train now and am sitting on a platform waiting for my next connection. But I’m still writing.) It makes me think of all the odd places I have scrawled out sentences at different times.
I have written at bus stops and train stations. I have written on ferries and long-distance coaches. I have written in noisy food-courts in shopping centres (where the hundred conversations become mere white noise). I have sat on the sand writing on the beach, or perched on a clifftop looking over the sea. I have set up a rickety old desk in a shearing shed in the country. I have sat writing on logs in the bush. And of course—but this is a no-brainer—I have written in coffee shops and libraries.
Many of my published pieces have come from odd places. I’ve written poems by the sea, and parts of a novel staring at rugged cliffs. One of my favourite short stories—about an alien creature—was substantially written at a lonely coach stop in rural New South Wales. But that is a story in itself. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.
So these days, I’m again taking opportunities to write anywhere and everywhere. I’m finishing these sentences on my second connecting train. I’ve barely noticed the trip. It might not be the “right” place to write, according to the experts. But it’s worked for me more times than I can remember, and I’m not about to give up yet.
