The Day Job: Get Out of the House

When writing isn’t the day job, then your writing “office” is probably in your house. Of course, for writers who do make their living through words, their office is probably at home too. For many, the idea of working from home is the ideal. Sleep late. Trundle down to the computer with a coffee in one hand, a croissant in the other, wearing pajamas and the floppy ear bunny slippers.

Writing from the same space where you sleep, eat, raise kids, and do the dishes, however, isn’t always the best practice, though. For me, my computer sits four feet from my bed. With a half twist of the desk chair and a good lean, I can be taking a nap. Let me see…Ahh!

Oh, you’re still here? The space between this paragraph and the last represents a two-hour snooze. Or, it could be I dug up a garden for spring planting, or put up that shelf I’d been promising my ten-year-old, or watched the cool Buffy episode without any dialog in it. What I’m saying is that home can be darned distracting to a dedicated writer. Sometimes you just have to cut the strings.

This is a lesson I keep relearning.

Last winter my 14-year-old joined a city-league basketball team. Practices were several miles away and lasted for two evening hours. It wasn’t quite practical for me to drop him off, get back home, and then turn around to pick him up, so I packed my laptop with me and sat in our minivan, writing, while he played. One night, it started to snow after I’d turned the computer on, huge snowflakes that fell like doilies between me and the streetlight. I watched for a minute, then dove into the story I was working on. A couple of times I got cold enough to turn the engine on (the computer’s heat on my lap was a comfort), but I kept writing. The interior of a minivan provides a great writing space! No one knocks on the door, and it’s not comfortable enough to lay down.

Sometime later, I looked up. Snow had completely covered all my windows. Everywhere I looked, the light from my computer reflected off the snow. It was beautiful, and I’d added 2,000 words to the current project.

The same sort of effect happened to me earlier this month. I attended the Rainforest Writers’ Village for four days. The thirty or so writers there spent most of their writing time in the resort’s lounge which was open just for the writers. Without access to cell phone service, and far away from home’s many distractions, we all wrote and wrote and wrote (this was between the times we chatted, ate, generally goofed around, slept, or hiked). Beside giving a presentation on plot and listening to several dynamite professional writers give their presentations, I managed to finish 6,000 words I’m proud of. We tallied everyone’s progress. The best word production during the retreat was a writer who tallied 22,000 to finish his novel. Another one knocked down 15,000.

Sometimes the best bump I can give my writing is to get out of the house. A retreat is great, of course, but packing up my laptop and heading to the bagel shop or library is effective too. There’s a power in changing the environment. Connie Willis says that she does most of her writing in a favorite coffee shop or at the University of Northern Colorado’s library. If it works for Connie…well.

I’m talking about getting out of the house to become more productive, by the way, not to set up the laptop in a public place to just look like a writer. I guess that some people actually do this, because John Scalzi wrote an entire book about writing entitled You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, which is a very good book about a lot more than being a poser.

You get three real positives to moving your writing space around, and here’s why it works for me: the first is that getting a little out of my comfort zone physically (I did mention my bed four feet away, didn’t I?) seems to get me a little out my comfort zone mentally. Since the new environment is challenging, even just a bit—it’s not like the bagel shop is exactly dangerous—I have a tendency to challenge my own writing too. The second positive is when I’m out of my home environment; the responsibilities of being at home are temporarily removed. And the third is that I’m almost always stealing time to write somewhere else. I mean, I can be at the bagel shop from 3:30 until 4:30, and then I have to pick up one of my kids or get home for dinner. The time feels stolen, and stolen things feel precious.

Ray Bradbury said in Zen in the Art of Writing that he wrote all of Fahrenheit 451 on a library typewriter that charged him a dime for thirty minutes of typing. He left his normal writing space, the garage, because his children wanted him to play, which he always did, so to get writing done, he found the dime-a-half-hour typewriter at the university library. He took nine days and a lot of dimes to pound out the rough draft. In between writing times, he wandered through the books. As he said, it was a good environment for writing a novel about the love of books.

In 1988, Chevy Chase starred in a fairly forgettable movie called Funny Farm. He plays a guy who quit his day job and moved to the country to work on his novel. On the first day, with a contented smile, he sits in his office, the perfect writing environment, complete with the singing of a bird just outside his window, a stack of fresh paper beside the typewriter, and a big mug of coffee at hand. He has all the time in the world and all the comforts of home. The problem is that he doesn’t get anything written that first day. The second day, the situation is the same: singing bird, waiting paper, willing typewriter, and steaming coffee. He’s not smiling, though. Again, the writing doesn’t happen. On the third day, clearly frustrated, he sits at his typewriter. You can see the white in his knuckles as he clutches the coffee cup. Everything else is the same. The bird sings cheerily. The paper is ready. The typewriter gleams. Then that damned bird sings again. Chevy throws his coffee on the bird.

I love that moment.

Chevy needed to get out of the house.

Sometimes I do too, and I’ll bet, if you haven’t tried it before, you might also.