"If you want a room to write in, just get a room...If it doesn't leak, has a window, heat in the winter, then put in your desk, bookshelves, a soft chair, and start writing."
"We make these exquisite rooms of silence and then long to write in noisy, chaotic cafés...It is natural in our studios to have books lying open, at least one cup half filled with old black tea, papers spread out, piles of unanswered letters, a graham cracker box, shoes kicked under the desk, a watch with a broken second hand lying on the floor."
-"The Writing Studio," Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, p.103
I'm reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg as part of my preparation for NaNoWriMo, and nothing relieved me like reading the words above. I've been trying to perfect "my room" for more than a year now, and it's still messy and full of boxes and papers and piles on the floor (read: books). I've been meaning to pull it together for November, but now I feel like, maybe, it's better if I don't. Maybe my writing will be more natural if it happens in my natural state of mess. That's where I am right now. And that's okay if that's where my room is too.
Having a room of my own, both literally and metaphorically speaking, has always been important to me. While Virginia Woolf is not my favorite for numerous reasons (not least that she basically created the myth that women writers of Shakespeare's time did not exist), I agree with her basic premise that women (and everyone) need rooms of their own. People need space to create, to think, to be.
And this is mine.
Comments
I think journaling is helpful and inspirational too, it's what we need to get down first sometimes, at least in my limited experience. And now I wish I had my old dream catcher, I wonder whatever happened to it...
Chicken
and the car won't go
spells Chicago.
Smells pretty good.