Office Space -- Garbo

I've tended to be a grump when people talk about how they'll do some writing someday, once they are at a serene writer's retreat or have a little cottage to write in, something near a pond. Or perhaps a charming little boat shed.  

Dylan Thomas wrote in this boat shed.

In the past, I've never resisted the opportunity for a mild rant or two (or three) about how Real Writers can write anywhere -- on the bus, in the dentist's waiting room, and so on. You put the spiral notebook on your knee and you scribble like mad. 

I'm going a different way today. While I can get something written in an unsupportive environment, I'll admnit that I can't do my best work that way.  I've discovered that to create good stuff, I have to have four basic needs met.

1.  The right balance of storage space and working space is vital. Since I write historical fiction, mostly, I end up with a lot of notes and timelines and imagery to keep things authentic and realistic. And I like a reasonably tidy space but the ultra-spare, super-modern look is not for me. I need the comfort of some familiar items.

My office space is a room meant to be a guest bedroom so it's medium-size at best. It's pretty full. There are two desks and some wall shelves and a couple of bookcases. For little stuff, I've tucked in  two of those sets of three Sterilite drawers, plus a shelving unit at the end of one desk which holds my printer and some audio equipment. It takes effort to establish order in this room and to keep on top of potential messes. I need familiar stuff and my research materials, but I can't have clutter. I can't function in disorder. Lots of stuff, not much space, a need for some kind of order; not an easy balance to achieve.

2. I need freedom from the constant distractions of media and people's responses to it. There are categories of professionals who must have the very latest updates on everything. News correspondents are an example. And there are other people, including creative types, who get a happy buzz from a constant flow of new information.

 Not me. Too much incoming stuff makes me frazzled. While working at the computer, I often have earbuds in and quiet music on. I'm even considering noise-cancelling headphones. I enjoy the sounds of daily life: occasional cars going by on the road, the ticking of the clock, and so on. But people on the sidewalk do not realize HOW LOUD THEY ARE on their phones or talking to their walking partners. 

I know the yelling folks need to make themselves heard over the traffic sounds but the loud conversions (mostly gossip and complaints, frankly)  jars me. During the years when I was actively parenting, I learned with time to mentally turn off the sounds of children and neighbors and the theme from "Teen Titans" on the television, but I'm not so good at the tuning-out thing now.

3. Access to fact-checking material, without too much struggle, has been a long time in coming. My current system is to use literature mailers, which are side brown boxes with lids which fold over or tuck in. The boxes hold anything up to legal-size sheets but each is only a few inches deep. That was I can group research notes, print-outs, magazine articles, photos and other items together. Even if I look through a box and don't find what I need, I know whatever I wanted didn't get lost down in the layers and layers of stuff a deep storage carton can hold. I can look systematically, putting each box aside until I come across the right one. Usually i don't have to go through more than two boxes to hit pay dirt. I have limited space in my workroom so I keep a stack of these lit mailer boxes at the top of the attic stairs. There's a moderate amount of cursing if I discover that what I need is up in secondary storage, but on the other hand it's my chance to get a little cardio in, and that's a rarity when one's job is to sit in a chair and type. 

4. To get anything done at all, I must have separate spaces for internet browsing and actual work. The temptations of blogs, YouTube, and Facebook are too strong for most of us. We tell ourselves we are "doing research" or "taking a break." Ha. 

For me, time management hinges on workspace management. Am I working or playing? Currently, I'm having less of an issue with this. I was lucky enough to have received my holiday gift early and now have a laptop where my real writing gets done. The clunky old PC is where I do Facebook, emailing, Twitter, read and blogs, and so on. Before I had the laptop, I had a writing table where I did revisions by hand, conducted my research, and so on. Since this material had to be transferred to the computer, I had to segregate my time to tell work from play. I forced myself to note the time when I sat down at the computer keyboard and be realistic about where the minutes and hours were going. 

I've always admired writers from earlier eras who wrote with pen and ink, under dim lamplight, inside smoky peat-heated stone houses in cold climates, or in more modern times wrote and lived in one room up six flights of stairs in a city apartment building. If I had to write in a really challenging environment, I'd tough it out. But I'm grateful that I have a reasonable workspace in which to get my daily writing done. And also slightly alarmed that I really don't have any excuse for doing less than my best work. 

Garbo

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