A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction–Virginia Woolf
As an only child, I always had my own room. There were many, many rooms during the years when my father was a golf course construction supervisor. Some were cramped and generic, others included an adjoining bathroom or even a private balcony. One, at a ski resort, was technically its own rental unit with a separate address from my parents. At nine I had the entire second floor of our condo, which included two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a loft, though I usually hung out in the storage nook halfway down the staircase, which I also claimed. At our house in Maine, half the basement was mine. Not such a prize, as I had orange shag carpeting, no door, and a quarter of my space was taken up by the woodstove, which meant my winter sleeping quarters were five degrees hotter than hell. My dad eventually finished the basement and built me a proper room because he’s awesome like that.
I read, wrote, and drew constantly as a kid.
When I started college, my parents literally lived on the other side of the world—Thailand. Everything I owned had to be hauled to Missouri and stuffed into a shared dorm room. (Apologies to my roommate, who never complained.)
All creativity vanished.
Eventually, I had my own apartment and wrote a rough draft of my first (literary vomit) novel in three months.
When I married, my “room” shrunk to a shared office. Two kids later I downsized to a cramped computer armoire tucked into the corner of a cluttered common room, the TV mere steps away. I responded to e-mail while the Little Einsteins theme song played in the background and took social media “breaks” when the hubby watched The Walking Dead. I wrote during those brief, precious hours when I had the house to myself, with frequent interruptions to let the dogs in, out, and back in again. Damn squirrels!
A single draft took years to accomplish. I feared I’d never have a successful writing career at that pace.
Other writers I knew, both female and male, have expressed similar frustrations when they lack a room of their own. What makes this room so essential for creativity?
Having a dedicated space is a signal to yourself that writing is not an idle hobby that you peck away at between household chores or doom-scrolling Twitter sessions. Ideally, there should be no Twitter allowed in this space. It is a place you go to work.
Having a dedicated space is a signal to everyone else in the household that writing is not an idle hobby you peck away at between household chores or doom-scrolling Twitter sessions. It is your job, regardless of whether it brings in an income, and should be treated with the same respect as any other job. If the door is closed or noise canceling headphones are on, you are working. Boundaries should only be crossed only for emergencies.
Having a dedicated space allows for disengagement from the world. Focus can be in short supply under the best of circumstances. None of us are living that right now. 2020 is an awful year on so many levels between this nightmare election and the disruption of this pandemic. We are all grieving, be it for lost loved ones, lost jobs, lost vacations and canceled milestones. In a world where even the act of going out for coffee with a friend is a calculated risk, there’s a lot of free-floating anxiety in the air. Creative types are generally more sensitive to all that negative energy. We need a buffer.
Having a dedicated space allows us to world-build in a visual way. We can surround ourselves with photographs of our settings or characters and wallpaper our whiteboards with sticky note maps of our plotlines. If we thrive on clutter, we can keep our research and notes spread out or piled up. If we crave order, we can tuck everything neatly away at the end of each day.
Of course, all this is easier said than done in many households, as it was in mine until a couple of months ago. I write this while sitting in a comfortable chair, in a silent room, and behind a closed door. A mug of tea and burning candle sit to my right and two of my great-grandfather’s paintings hang to my left. My writing craft books and TBR books are all in here with me. I can even read in bed.
A blog post that would normally take me two days to write has taken two hours. I’m certain that’s because I finally have a room of my own.
What about you? Do you need your own space in order to be productive? What do you use as an office? What would be your ideal space? Can you make that happen?
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About Kim Bullock
Kim (she/her) has an M.A. in English from Iowa State University. She writes mainly historical fiction, though has also contributed non-fiction articles to historical and Arts and Crafts publications in both the United States and Canada. She has just finished The Unfinished Work of M.A., a novel based on the rather colorful life of her great-grandfather, landscape painter Carl Ahrens.
Thank you for the article!
My entire lil log house is my own room for the last 7 years! I can write wherever I wanna!
However, when I was married, I often used the guest area downstairs to write and it was perfect.
I require quiet–I can’t have the TV on or music. It’s just how my brain works.
Hi Kathryn,
I have to have quiet, too!
I honestly don’t remember the last time I had the house entirely to myself for more than a couple of hours at a time. My oldest was thirteen when she switched to online school due to her dance schedule. She’s nineteen now. I thought once she was in college I would have time, but now with COVID I have the younger one home. I don’t see her going back to an in-person option this year. Ugh!
Enjoy that lil log house!
Yes, yes! While I’m well aware that an office like I have—with its space and light and beautiful view of the trees—is evidence of my social privilege and life-stage (kids are grown and gone), I know that I absolutely need that quiet seclusion in order to enter the immersive world of a story. However, I also know from a blog I did last winter (under the title “A Place to Write”), after interviewing about two dozen other writers, that some people write best in a crowded coffee shop (well, pre-Covid) surrounded by impersonal “white noise.” I think the key is whether one has that choice—the opportunity to retreat to a quiet office or a white-noise-filled Starbucks when one wants to. Dare I say that there’s a gender issue here as well; for women, small children can make that nearly impossible. I count myself among the lucky ones. When I embarked on this new career, a number of years ago, my partner got me a sign to hang on the door: The Queen is Not Accepting Audiences Today.
Hi Barbara,
Love the sign! I have one on my door as well, but it just says Writer At Work. Works great if people try to enter from the hallway. More often than not my younger daughter will come through the shared bathroom. She does virtual school for the foreseeable future, so we are learning to adapt to each other’s schedules and it is mostly working.
When I had both kids home, I did work best at a coffee shop, but that was because I wouldn’t be interrupted there.
It is so fantastic to finally have my own space, though I temporarily lose it whenever my older daughter comes home. That’s never for more than a night or two.
Good morning, Kim. Loved this. I wrote at an old wicker desk in high school and it has followed me to all my homes. In California, I shared an “office” with my husband who was often gone, volunteering for the homeless. Now in Chicago, we again share a writing space, but with Covid, I’m not sure how this is going to work out. I still have my truly ancient wicker desk and can escape to a small room upstairs to write. Options are good. Writing is the sustenance of my life. Thank you.
Beth,
Yes, COVID did throw a wrench in everything, didn’t it. My older daughter had been doing school online and through various private tutors from age thirteen on. She’s nineteen now and I thought I’d have the house to myself when she went off to college. Nope! Now the younger one is home. We do have an in person option, but it is the same curriculum either way and didn’t seem worth the risk. We are learning to work around each other’s schedules!
I seem to have lost the ability to write at a desk over the years. I actually have two “spaces” in our house. I use my common room desk for e-mail, social media, and things like answering these comments. For composing, I’m in a chair in my room.
Thank you for commenting!
I do agree with you! Having a door is the operative word. I have a great office but it lacks a door, having been the front “parlor.” My husband will ask me something from his office which is across the foyer. There is a silver lining here. I’ve learned to jump right back into my story world. Probably because it’s all around me on visual boards.
Hi Ane,
Oh, do I relate to the ‘husband asking something from across the room” thing. For the most part, he really would try to leave me alone, but there was something about the energy of having him less than eight feet away, typing on the keyboard or laughing at whatever show he was streaming, that very much broke my focus. Add to that one Boston Terrier who loves to pace the house and a lab who is endlessly fascinated by squirrels and…well, you can imagine how many times I was ripped out of ‘story world’.
Visuals are everything, aren’t they?
Thanks for commenting!
Oh, YES!
I love my husband, but I HATE the fact that writing is so difficult with him underfoot.
Standing next to me, waiting until I look up – yes, disruptive.
Asking – am I busy? When I answer Yes, he walks away, saying that he won’t disturb me. I point out that he already has. It often takes me snapping at him to just tell me what he wants NOW to get him to spill. Very seldom all that important.
Kills my train of thought.
COVID is KILLING me. I’m not worried about illness or even death – it’s the constant presence of my husband while I’m trying to write, that is doing it.
This is fateful timing for me. My son is coming home from college at Thanksgiving and won’t go back (thank you, COVID) until February. That, plus the uncertainty of in-person public schooling, may have my little house quite crowded for the foreseeable future. I’ve never yet had a room of my own, and I’m almost finished with my third novel. (thank you, grit – haha) Just yesterday, I got it in my head to convert the laundry room. A quiet tomblike area is preferable to the sunny dining room table where noise and boys will be… Not perfect, but always striving for better.
I hope you go for it, Kelly!!
Hi Kelly,
Oh, do I know about that crowded house thing! Last spring I had two daughters at home 24/7 – one in community college and the other in high school. This year one is off to regular college but the other one is still home. We have an in-person option here in Dallas, but we are also getting over 500 new cases a day and I’m watching the numbers rise in the school district. (Currently 62 active cases). It seems nuts to risk it, so home she stays!
The laundry room may be a wise idea! I hope you do it, for your own sanity.
I spent my child-rearing years writing at the kitchen table at night or on coffee breaks on jobs, although I wouldn’t really call it writing. I scribbled down ideas, wrote scenes, played with dialogue and world-building. Nothing cohesive. Sort of like hitting the floor to do three pushups when you can’t go to the gym. Fast forward to now. I have a room in our cottage, a husband who respects my need for quiet, and a hard-won understanding from family members that I don’t say no to social stuff because I don’t love them. This space we carve out for ourselves is sacred. How we make it look, feel, and sound, is part of the work. I love hearing how everyone has come to this, and I love this post. Thank, Kim.
Hi Susan,
The child rearing years were a lot like treading water, weren’t they? (I still have one at home, but she is 15 and quite self-sufficient. We do our own things and meet at certain times of the day to eat or have coffee – which is a must for both of us.)
I loved, loved, loved having both kids home, especially in these uncertain times, but I am also love, love, loving having some time to just be. That helps the work flow so much better!
Some folks have nightmares about earthquakes or plane crashes or falling into a bottomless pit. I have nightmares about losing my writing office.
I have an amazing wife who gifted me one of the best rooms in the house we bought three years ago, and I’m eternally grateful for that. Still, it doesn’t stop me from hissing at her whenever she enters the space without knocking.
Writers are crazy. Writers without a dedicate space are deadly.
Thanks for another great piece, Kim!
Greg,
Your comment about the nightmares made me laugh, but I get it. The thought of losing my hard won space makes me want to jump out of my skin. My room isn’t entirely ‘mine,’ unfortunately. When the older daughter left for college, I gained a room, though I lose it again whenever she visits. Her school isn’t far away so that happens about two-three nights a month.
Sounds like you have a very supportive spouse! I think all writers need someone who gets their version of crazy.
Hi Kim. I think this question has no answer beyond the one given to it by this or that writer. I definitely need My Space, My Room. My next-door neighbor writes historical romance, and does it every day in a busy Starbucks. I might be able to train myself to do what she does … No, I wouldn’t, and since I don’t have to, I won’t.
Hi Barry,
When I had both kids at home, and they were old enough to be left there alone, I started retreating to coffee shops to work. (Not Starbucks – that’s way too much activity and the coffee isn’t even that good.) I got some work done there if I had noise canceling headphones on. The problem with home was that I had trouble focusing when there was always something that could pull me out of story world. A ringing phone. A pacing dog. The mail carrier dropping off a package. One of the kids. My husband. At a coffee shop there may be activity, but none required my attention.
Still, I much prefer the quiet of my own space now.
Kim, thanks for this post. When writing at home I need a dedicated space. I just moved to a new place and I am trying to figure out where that place will be. I am also productive at Starbucks, but the one I used to go to was closed for a long time during the pandemic. It is now re-opened, so I have been going there. Procrastination is another challenge. It’s easy to use the lack of a writing space as an excuse not to write. Be well and stay safe.
Chris,
You are right about using the lack of space as an excuse. I’ve definitely been guilty of that. If the words aren’t flowing easily, my mind will drift to the laundry I should really do, or the errands I could be running. I have the attention span of a gnat at my desk in the front room. I do still have that space, but use it solely for non writing activities.
Hope all is well with you!
Kim, how could you not delight in orange shag carpeting? I shared (and battled in) a tiny room in our house with my older brother for 15 years, until our older sisters moved out and we each got our own rooms. Finally, to breathe…
I just moved back into my ’66 Airstream office this week, after spending a numbingly slow year and a half to refurbish it. I’d been in there 10 years before the restoration, and it was always a writer’s retreat, though sometimes more a daydreamer’s retreat.
My girlfriend didn’t try to pretend she was sorry I was going back to the Airstream, since she works in the house too; my sighs over correct punctuation are tiring after a time.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Hi Tom,
That carpeting was something else. Probably original to the house, which was about twenty years old when we moved in. I really hadn’t cared at the time. It had been my choice to move into the basement after a year in a much smaller room right across the hall from my parents. I even offered to keep the woodstove stoked so no one had reason to come down there.
While both kids were home, I had dreams of a She-Shed in the back yard, but that never came to pass…
Oh, do I understand this–and it’s so nice to read about everyone else’s rooms/solutions. My goal of having a room separate from the living space got suspended when we called off our search for a house in the early days of the COVID shutdown (we renewed our apartment lease instead). And my husband is working at home for the foreseeable future–meetings/calls all day in an open plan apartment.
My current solution is a chair and adjustable table in the corner of the bedroom, and I just added a lamp: the shortening days made for a very dark workspace, and now at least it has this cozy little bubble of light over my writing surface. Still using the noise cancelling headphones so I don’t hear the meetings or the stereo. And I’m looking forward to that proper room with a door next year. I don’t care if it’s small, but it needs a door and a window–I’m not a good cave dweller.
I completely agree that interruptions slow the drafting process, but I’m doing my best to learn how to make this work…and sustain the story world in my head.
Hi Alisha,
I feel your pain. My husband is a gamer, and I spent SO MANY years with his desk about three steps behind mine. He did have the courtesy to wear headphones, so I wouldn’t have to hear the soundtracks to his games, but some of those games required him to verbally communicate with other players, so he would talk! I was also located about ten steps from a big screen TV and for some reason the acoustics in this room make the sound from the TV louder by my desk than it was by the couch.
I still have a desk in the common room, but it is where I answer e-mail or doomscroll on social media.
Hope you get your room soon!
It was cheaper than a divorce…
When my husband retired, I lost it. He retired from teaching 5th graders and does not own an “inside” voice. Even though we had a den with doors that close, his conversations with the dog, TV, and himself were driving me bonkers. I needed quiet. It was no longer quiet.
In order to save my marriage of 46 years, I offered a solution…he could move all his belongings into the garage, or he could build me a She-Shed. He must like me (or hates the garage), because he opted for the She-Shed.
He and the neighbor finished the inside of a Tuff-Shed into a beautiful beach-themed small but efficient space with heat and AC, coffee and wine bar, shelves for all my craft books, and most of all…peace and quiet.
I named it No Boyz Allowed (the dog is a girl) and he knows he’d better be bleeding from a main artery or the house on fire if he decides to disturb me. So far, it’s worked out beautifully.
Besides, it was cheaper than a divorce!
Susan,
I would have killed for a She-Shed during the main childrearing years, even if I would only have able to be in it when someone could watch the kids. It would have been great during the early days of COVID as well, since everyone was home for months. I knew, though, that soon there would be one less bedroom being used all the time. That’s where I am now, and all but a few days of the months it is mine alone.
My husband’s voice carries, too, so I totally get it. He’s a gamer. Nothing like trying to write while he’s playing Call of Duty six feet behind me.
Glad you got that She-Shed!
I can’t even read with music on or people talking, so going from a chair with laptop in a corner to a whole room to myself has been heaven. Though if I really need to write and concentrate, I have to pull the shades. I’m a terrible window gazer. I went from spending four years on one draft of my WIP to four more drafts in less than two years. So, yes, a room is essential.
Elaine,
Same! It must be quiet or I can’t function!
My chair isn’t by the window, or I might be in trouble.
I’m also an only child, and I was raised by my dad. When I was a teen, he’d leave on Friday and come back on Sunday, meaning I had our entire house, which was in the middle of nowhere, to myself. I do so much much better with my own space, and now I’m fortunate enough to have that. It’s not posh! But it is mine and it does help me feel free to write.
Marta,
I would have LOVED that as a teen, or now for that matter. What I wouldn’t give to have a weekend entirely alone!
For many years, my definition of having arrived was not have my desk and my bed in the same room. Things have improved since then.
Now, I have a couple of places to write. First, there’s my office. It’s functional but grim. It’s the room that’s been the last in line for rehab. Then, there’s an office in the garage. It has a door and everything else that I might need. Other than that, it’s only virtue is that it’s close to the power tools. I tend not to write there unless I’m really desperate for privacy. My favorite place is the desk in the library bay, where I can sit and watch the comings and goings at the birdfeeders.
Wow, Bill, I would love to have so many options. I still have my desk in the common room, though it is now an actual desk and not a computer armoire. I use that for social media, e-mail, and non writing related things. For composition I go to my room, where I have a laptop computer and a comfortable chair. That’s it!
Living alone with all the time in the world, my own house on ny own acreage in a piecefully quiet neck of the woods, why I am having difficulty writing? Shouod I not be able to pump out words and books like bullets?
I write in my study, in the lounge, in the bedroom, in the diningroom, in the car, and every public space I find.