Briefly, recently, I had a desk and a clearly defined workspace, and I loved it, but I’m not sure it made me more productive. Often I would dump my laundry on the bed behind the desk and so I would end up folding it, because it was annoying to sense all these armfuls of crumpled clothes. There is a large shed with no electricity connected in the garden that I’ll work in someday, but for now it’s full of my ex’s stuff, waiting for him to move it out. When we broke up one of the points of contention was that the shed had just been built and I found myself saying I can’t stay with you because of a shed!, and enough time has passed, entire years, that this is quite funny to me and I hope to him, even though at the time it felt abject. Now my best friend lives in the room I used to work in and this is much better, because the house is a lot more full of laughter and less of pointless, luxuriant, performance anxiety, less full of my crushing alone-ness, and when she leaves for work in the morning we get to shout I love you! if I am also inside and awake and working where I usually do at the moment, which is on the living room sofa. The kitchen table is preferred, because you can sit upright and feel professionally aligned, but it’s too cold at the moment. I’ve rediscovered writing in bed, too. It’s better than I remember. Perhaps being somewhere so soft and so vulnerable makes writing feel looser, an element of truancy. I did realise that I wanted to write when I kept skipping college post-GCSEs, in favour of filling notebook after notebook with looping handwriting at a local café. I do think I am always trying to return to how that felt: as if suddenly there was a secret, invisible room that I could go into whenever, and that I had been looking for it my whole life.
I wrote most of The Water Cure in bed or in coffee shops. It’s in coffee shops that I am often most productive, even now. There was a cafe called All You Read is Love in Leytonstone (RIP!), and I would go there most Saturdays and write for a while, amongst several other people doing the same. But sometimes I’d get distracted walking past my dear friend L’s flat on the way and we’d end up hanging out in her garden all day instead, which felt a different kind of necessary and joyful. The place I did the best work on The Water Cure was at the end of writing it, when on my lunch break I would run to the Starbucks two minutes from my work office and buy a mug of £1 filter coffee and write next to a large and unatmospheric glass wall, suited people striding past with purpose outside. I remember writing during those last days as overwhelming, devotional, the only thing I wanted to do, and that hour barely held me through the rest of the day until I was back home again after work, and could write until I slept.
I wrote Blue Ticket during mornings in a cafe near the office where I worked in the afternoons as a marketing manager, and sporadically in cafes in Melbourne and Sydney for a month when I was on holiday. I wrote through a six hour layover in Singapore fuelled by very strong sweet coffee, wrote on my first ever residency in north Wales where I unbelievably did nothing but work and run and sleep and read, wrote at the dinner table in the living room of my old flat in Leyton, on a chair so old the grooves of my body had worn into the sticky fake-leather seat. We bought the house where I live now, and it was so hot inside it that summer that I did my final edits on Blue Ticket outside on the filthy plastic garden furniture that had been left on the patio, laying out a tablecloth first. The garden was full of abandoned objects that I tried to ignore. Once more I was in that devotional place where a book is finished, knowing I was at the end. In the heatwave I’d wake before six and work at that table in the dawn with the sound of the swifts above me, the strange red bricks and green concrete of the garden below me, and it was like another planet. It was another planet. I would work until it was too bright to work any more, even with sunglasses on. And it was objectively not an ideal place to write but I was so happy to be there, the air already gathering heat, nobody else around.
Beautiful description and I love the bit about the shed!
I love this! I don’t think I’ve ever written in bed, but I may need to start! I do find I pass over my specifically assigned desk in favour of a cushion on my lap on the sofa though.