I am currently sitting in a car, driving from Toronto to
Ottawa. This is a reasonably comfortable car. I can fully stretch my legs out
in the back seat, which is a rare gift for someone over six feet tall. My
laptop is hooked up to a mobile charger. This is a good place to write.
Last night, I was on a pull out futon in my cousin’s
basement. It was reasonably comfortable, as far as futons go. There were no
loose planks of wood jutting into my back. It was almost long enough to let me
stretch out fully. It was plugged into a power bar. That was a horrible place
to write.
As much as I enjoy writing, it is downright shameful that I
am so finicky about my writing spaces. I don’t need a perfect storm of atmospheric glory to buckle down and write,
but it certainly helps. I can tell when reading my manuscript whether I was in
a good or bad place to write. My good writing places result in more vivid,
imaginative, emotional writing. My bad writing places get ground up by the
great chomping edit machine more often than not.
I’m sure that every writer has their own perfect writing
days that they’re constantly trying to recreate. It’s almost like Captain Ahab
and Moby Dick; you want to take another elusive glance at something that’s
always out of reach. For me, two days come to mind, neither of which are
anywhere near duplicable. The first came on a gorgeous summer day on
Vasilyevsky Island in Saint Petersburg, Russia, when I sat in a park with bright
flowers and towering fountains and wrote for an hour about canoes. The second
is far less picturesque. I was feeling sick, stressed and unable to sleep at 2
A.M., so I threw a blanket over myself, propped myself up in my living room
IKEA chair, and wrote for two hours about grief.
I’ve tried to recreate these two golden writing experiences
(the first one more than the second, because I was wading through misery that
I’m not keen on recreating) and it hasn’t worked. No park has been able to
trigger the same feelings of “THIS IS PERFECT IN EVERY WAY” that the park on
Vasilyevsky Island did. I’ve sat in that same creaky IKEA chair many times, but I
haven’t been able to fall into my writing in the same way. Failing to capture
the necessary conditions, I cycle through every permutation of location and
emotion to find something that clicks. Coffee shops generally do the trick, as
long as I’ve engaged my SelfControl app that blocks Twitter, Facebook, and
every other distraction. Trains do too, and I’ve done some great writing on the
Taipei MRT. My home does not. Airplanes are hit and miss for me. It really
depends on how much leg room I have, and if the screaming babies next to me are
loud enough to breach my headphones and make my brain slowly leak out through
my ears.
Recently, I’ve stopped trying to recreate my perfect writing
days. I figure that I’m reaching for something that doesn’t really exist. They
weren’t perfect days because I was filled with the spirit of some goddess of
writing. They were perfect days because I was really proud of what I was
putting on paper. I really felt like I captured my main character’s grief an
emotional turmoil when my torso was sinking into those festering black IKEA
cushions. It wasn’t Swedish design that made me write well. Besides, my second
perfect writing day came about because I decided I’d rather write than vomit.
It would have been good whether I was in my stained IKEA chair, or sitting in
McDonald’s and munching on fries, or sitting alone on a log in a forest.
Ultimately, if your story wants to come out, it’ll come out, no matter where
your posterior happens to be.
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