#oneaday Day 309: Writer's Room

Today's post is inspired by a Daily Inkling from Normal Happenings, a thoroughly pleasant site about appreciating everyday life, a blog I support here on Patreon, and a place where I'll be taking part in a hugely ambitious collaborative project next year!

The prompt reads thus:

As a writer, is there a particular room where you live that inspires your best work?

I'm not sure I have a simple answer to that. I do most of my writing in my living room simply by virtue of the fact that that is where my computer is, but the living room is also probably the room I most readily associate with being "home". It's where I spend the majority of my time when I'm here: it's where we eat dinner, watch TV, movies and YouTube, and where I play games. My cats like to hang out here (both of them are asleep in here right now, both in extremely odd positions) and it is, as it should be, a focal point of the house.

But is it conducive to writing? Perhaps. By virtue of the fact that it's the room where all my "toys" are (with the exception of those in my "retro room") there is plenty of inspiration to be had here, particularly when I'm writing material for MoeGamer or deciding on subjects for video projects. My only real bugbear with it is that it's not the most comfortable place to sit and write for long periods; I sit on a sofa and my keyboard is on a coffee table, which isn't ideal for good posture. (I've been considering investing in one of those "kneeling chair" things; anyone ever used one?)

I'd actually like to do a bit more writing in the aforementioned "retro room" upstairs, but it's not quite optimally set up to do so right now. I have a laptop up there, but I don't love typing on the laptop because its keyboard is a bit crap. I could always attach an external keyboard to it, I guess, but I haven't gotten around to sorting that out.

One thing I have found is that if I'm writing things "by hand" I like to do it in that room. A while back when I was having a course of therapy, one of the things my therapist suggested was to write things down when my head felt like it was getting "full" of negative thoughts and emotions that were causing me to ruminate. I found the process quite helpful and should probably get back into the habit of doing that, having been feeling a bit low recently; there's also just something quite pleasing about writing things just for yourself in a lovely notebook. I bought some really nice notebooks specifically for that purpose. No you can't read them.

So in answer to the question… no, I'm not sure if there is necessarily a specific room in which I produce my best work, but I do know there are ideal environments. I find it very difficult to concentrate if other people are in the room, for example; I become paranoid that they are watching me write and are judging my thoughts as they spill out of my mind onto the page. Somehow this is much more scary than actually finishing a post and spooging it out into the world in a "finished" state for people to read in its entirety; I'm not entirely sure why, but I certainly prefer solitude and privacy while I'm writing.

This doesn't necessarily have to mean a lack of people, though. When I had a long period of unemployment a few years back, I used to deliberately go to a local coffee shop with my laptop to write as I enjoyed the environment. I'd tend to have headphones on and "tune out" the other members of the public around me while doing so, and just enjoy relaxing somewhere other than my home, in my own little world, just me and the words.

Oh, fuck writing on phones though. That shit isn't good wherever you do it.