We’ve had builders in the house. For more than 4 months there has been noise, disruption and disturbance, none of which is conducive to a writerly life. There was no dry rot, no roof that needed replacing so why were they there? I can’t leave a house alone, that’s why!
I have to keep doing things – knocking a wall down here, adding a porch there, twiddling and tweaking, knocking down, building up, improving. I’ve done it with all the houses we’ve lived in, and there have been quite a few.
It’s the same with writing – I love the fiddling about, the cutting and changing, polishing words into sentences. Getting the ideas on paper, building the story brick by brick, word by word is very hard, but once that’s done there’s the pleasure of twiddling and tweaking. The building work will be worth it in the end too, because I will have a study!
My DH has always had one, a room where he could shut the door and do Important Things (or go to sleep) and I was delighted when I got a shed at the bottom of the garden where I could write deathless prose and gaze at the wildlife on the pond. But it was hard to leave the kitchen table on days of rain or ice, and too easy to make scones or do the ironing rather than hack words out of the coal face of the laptop.
Now, for the very first time I shall have a place, a room of my own as Virginia Woolf advised, where I can have all the impedimenta (and I love that word) essential to getting words down on paper: the iPad, the laptop, the A4 paper, the printer, the whiteboard, the cork board, the small notebooks, the large notebooks, the middle-sized notebooks, reference books, files and the post-it notes, the marker pens in different colours, the pencils, the biros. I could go on but if you’re a writer you’re probably a good customer of stationery departments too.
So I’ll have the study, I have the tools of the trade; I just need inspiration and perseverance. Wish me luck.
