writers room 13

There's a simple purity to this writing area, a clarity. The white walls, the little old desk facing the window with no curtains. The writer looks forward and out at the sky, no swags, no nets, no accessories for window treatments to distract, no nets to wash. The writer comes here and leave s all that little stuff behind. I love how the room feels timeless, a classic Persian style rug, a wooden chair, pens in a pot. Only the office chair puts any date on when the photo was taken. Fashion, decor, consumerism, the little distractions and concerns of modern life seem stripped away here. The space is kept simple, a blank canvas for the imagination. It looks very peaceful in this writers attic haven, the writer ascends the stairs and leaves the rest of the house below. It gets quieter and a writing state is entered further with every footstep the writer takes.

What the writer says: It's a bedroom at the top of the house (you can see the bed on the right) overlooking the gardens, because I like to be high up when I write, feeling as if I'm away from real life. The old white desk is the one I've written on since I was a poverty- stricken single parent and I wrote my first novel on it - it feels like part of the writing process to me now. Ditto most of the stuff I have around me there - the stuff on the wall which my kids gave me, the carpet I inherited when my grandmother died - they're all part of the real me and my history from which my writing mentality comes. The room's never been decorated since I moved into it, as `i think you can see, because I can never get to allowing it to be disrupted. At the mo it's in novel-rearranging mode - all my plans laid out on the table, and the old version laid out in sections on the floor (with the felt tip pens! I know it looks mess, but it's not, in my head!

I love this. I don't know any writer who doesn't have the concern that their work space looks a mess to the outside eye, piles of paper on the floor, pages spread out, yet to the writer there's often so much more to it. When I was young my mother bought me a desk because she couldn't stand to see 'the mess'I made of my bedroom floor.Now you can work at the desk she said.She wasn't happy that even though she had made the effort to buy me a nice second hand desk papers still got laid out on the floor. I'd come in and find them tidied away. It was a feeling of dismay, 'Noo!' I had a system. I needed to see the pages laid out on the floor like that, in that order. Sometimes words need to be spread out. Ideas are bigger than a desk , no matter how adequate the desk may be. There's something to do with spacial awareness involved, the necessity of seeing a page in relation to another, a phrase in the context of the pages previous. For this often nothing but the floor will do, it looks like paper out of place to anyone who walks in, but it's not. I like that this writer forgives themselves on this and just recognizes, I need space, it will look messy, but this is my area to work in and I will use it as I need. I suppose this is one of the reasons people believe writing is an anti social activity- writers need quiet sometimes, need thinking time, need a little space, and need to make a mess now and then. I suppose the families of writers need to know this, understand and tip toe around papers sometimes if the writer doesn't have the luxury of their own room to do it in. I'm glad I'm a writer instead of living with one because it may not be easy at first.