A Space to Write

All I really need to write

I've been complaining about my writing space. I know this is a stupid thing to do. It's actually a form of procrastination which has nothing to do with writing. I know, people have different styles and preferences, and I understand the rituals some writers have to go through before they can actually get words from their head onto the page. It's still a delay tactic that I've been employing. Which is silly because it doesn't get anything written.

I recently moved and I find it easy to complain because I've condensed my workspace considerably so that others can have a greater living space. For family bliss it was the right thing to do. But I remain jealous because in my last place I had a real office. An entire room, with sliding glass doors that lead to an unkempt yard with beautiful views. A far cry from my present condition. But I'm romanticizing, because when I stop to think, with that office space I was probably the least productive I've ever been.

This makes me think of my prior writing environments. When I first moved to San Diego I had a sun room in Bankers Hill with a nice view of landing airplanes and the blossoming skyline. During the day it was too hot to work in there. At night, believe it or not, it often got too cold. When it rained, the windows leaked. We began to use it as a storage place as our family began to grow. But it's the room I first used an Apple computer and the first time I went online using one of the ubiquitous AOL CD-Rom's we got in the mail.

Before that, as a newlywed in Boston, my office was tucked behind a large dresser in our bedroom. A large laminate board resting on top of two file cabinets served as my desk. The old Smith Corona PWP3200 Word Processor sounded like machine gun fire that reverberated through the tiny apartment. But I penned several screenplays in that space and taped each rejection slip to the wall.

Before that was college, hunting and pecking on standard issue desks or sometimes on the floor in the hall of the dorm.

In high school, most of my school projects were by hand. I had wanted a Commodore 64 but instead had a very fancy Brother Word Processor that has a 16 character LCD screen and printed in dot matrix on thermal paper. This was for my important work, like my very first screenplay (and yes, the original has faded away).

I've had a lot of writing spaces I've never been happy with. That's because when I spent time trying to improve them, I wasn't writing. Even though it's still easy for me to bemoan the space I'm writing these very words in, the truth is, it doesn't matter. I have a laptop. I can write anywhere. And if I don't have power, or want to be out in the bright sun or in a darkened corner, I have pens and notebooks. (and now's the time to stock up on even more).

In the late spring I spent several nights at my Dad's kitchen table with just my laptop and it was perhaps the most productive, word count-wise, writing period I've ever experienced.

Sure, it's nice to have a space to spread out, like Mark Twain's billiard table. Add it's great to have a wall devoted to a whiteboard and another one or two devoted to books. These show nice to friends and validate that yes, I'm a writer. But there is something better. Actual writing. Finished manuscripts, published posts, bound books, Amazon rankings ... all more satisfying symbols to point toward.

As long as a writer has passion for the subject, they can write. Everything else is preference. Meeting those preference may be important but probably won't improve your writing. The thing that improves your writing best, it writing more often.

So crappy space be damned. Write right now! I just did.

The Writer's Demise?

Based on a few thought provoking articles I've read recently there are two schools of thought on the publishing industry. One being that it's rapidly going in the direction of the recording industry, which one could interpret as more "freedom" for the artist. The other camp points to the fact that the majority of services that are making self publishing easily accessible to today's writer are run by huge corporations who, let's be honest, do not generally have the writer's interests as their central focus (unless by interest you mean money.) Either way lends itself to the premise that the fall of the publishing industry will be quickly followed by the elimination of the writer as a profession.

How could that be? In the democratized world of the Internet were everyone now has the ability to write and publish their own content, it makes the practice a little less special. Not only does it take the mystery out of the process, it also shrinks the cachet. Wearing a black turtleneck and sauntering into a party as a writer isn't so impressive to people anymore. In fact the caterer and valet probably have better blogs than you and probably write more often.

So does that make writing as a profession go away? No, but could it be less valuable since everyone has the capacity to do it? Maybe in the short term. There's actually a movement to halt some writing and publishing because there's too much out there and much of it isn't very good. The real rubbish is that belief. Telling a writer to stop writing akin to telling someone to stop breathing. Sure, they can try for a little while, but they turn purple and irritated very quickly. While it's true there's a good amount of junk out there, there always has been. I would guess the percentage is the same, though the numbers are larger. Let's go with the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the writing you're reading is probably mediocre or worse, and twenty percent is probably pretty good. (that may even hold true for this post).

What's going through transformation is the fall of the gatekeepers. In traditional publishing there are filters, from selected agents, to a cadre of specialty editors who move writers from good to great. Without those gatekeepers you see things unfiltered, rife with errors. You also come across genius and ingenuity that just a few years ago would have been squelched. It's like panning for gold. You could use some help deciding which stream to step into, but you have to get your own hands wet to find some treasure.

So how does the writer now stand out? I suspect the same way as they always have. Be a better writer. Work on the craft as well as your passion, everyday. Also remember, just because your writing is good there's no guarantee it will be read. The word is full of people, but many of them are still illiterate. That's why today's writer has to be professional. Not only in the discipline of writing, but also in the skills of marketing, negotiating, finance and public interactions. The writer shouldn't allow themselves to be mockable. Being a professional to everyone, particularly readers, will ensure the writer's profession remains an important role in our society.