Do You Need a Writer’s Room?
Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, bought Monk’s House, a small Sussex cottage, in 1919, for seven hundred pounds. It had no electricity or running water. They improved it, adding modern amenities and two rooms. A modest shed at the bottom of the garden became a writing lodge, where Woolf worked on novels including “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse.”
Today, it’s possible to visit the house and the lodge, which belong to Britain’s National Trust. “I have an image in my mind of the place where writers work,” Katie da Cunha Lewin explains, in “The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love.” Arriving at Woolf’s lodge, she finds this image largely confirmed. Light flows in from the garden, and quiet reigns. Woolf’s desk holds crumpled sheets of paper, books, and a vase of daffodils. It looks like the perfect writing retreat. There’s only one problem: although Woolf worked in the lodge, she did much of her writing in the main house, sitting in a low chair. On her knees she balanced a wooden board, to which she’d affixed an inkstand and notebook. While bent over this laptop contraption, she generated what Lytton Strachey called “filth packets”—little bundles of old nibs, paper clips, and balled-up paper. She was, in other words, an ordinary writer, as undignified as the rest of us.
“There is something about the writer as a character or an archetype that enthrals us,” da Cunha Lewin observes, and the same goes for the rooms in which writers work, or in which we imagine that they work. For aspiring writers, in particular, writer’s rooms are talismanic sites. Making a pilgrimage to some writer’s space, we might want answers to practical questions about their process. But we also want, more abstractly, to gain insight into “the route of creativity,” as da Cunha Lewin puts it, from inspiration to text. “What is writing?” she asks. Contemplating someone’s long-unused desk, staring through the window through which they stared, we hope to see the writing process externalized, so that we can understand “what it actually is.”
Da Cunha recalls her own fascination with writer’s rooms: “I wanted to fashion my own creative space, as if, by getting it just so, I would become a writer.” She describes buying a new desk, picturing it laden with “notebooks and tea and candles and mess.” With such a desk, she thinks, she’ll adopt new habits—getting up early, then writing all morning and reading all afternoon instead of watching TV. On her way to Monk’s House, she muses about buying “some gorgeous Woolf paraphernalia, like a beautiful illustrated image of the house,” even “a tea towel”—a relic she might add to her own study, bridging the distance between Woolf’s space and hers. (She settles for using her phone to take a photo of Woolf’s desk.) Back at home, she arranges her own “piles of books, proofs, notebooks, pencils, and bowls of dried fruits.” And yet her writerly tableau is always getting disrupted: eventually, her desk is taken over by her infant son’s changing mat.
In touring the history of writerly spaces, “The Writer’s Room” elegantly describes the rooms kept by Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, John Keats, and other luminaries. It finds that, a lot of the time, the quest for the perfect room is self-defeating: tormented by sounds in his neighborhood (among them a neighbor’s rooster), Thomas Carlyle tried to construct a soundproof chamber, but it turned out to be “the noisiest in the house.” Many people, meanwhile, don’t have room for a writer’s room, or live lives that preclude solitude, or just don’t like to sit still. They work in libraries or cafés; they write on subways, in hospital beds, or in Google Docs. Da Cunha Lewin notes that, although we often picture a writer within a room, there’s also “the writer with another job,” “the writer who is in a queue,” “the writer who is a carer,” “the writer who is in prison.”
There’s a sense, she comes to think, in which the image of an inward-focussed writer concentrating at a desk might be fundamentally misleading. Emily Dickinson, for instance, had a little writing table by her bedroom window, but the dress on display at her house museum also possesses a small, added outside pocket—what the poet Mary Ruefle calls a “workman’s pocket.” (It appears to be well-sized for a pencil and paper.) Dickinson might have spent almost all her time inside the house, but it still seems as though she wanted to write while away from her desk. There is “an undeniably romantic and alluring quality to the desk space,” da Cunha Lewin writes, but bodies, like minds, are always in motion. We might do better to imagine a writer as someone conversing, exercising, socializing, and interacting, instead of merely observing—someone who is out in the world instead of shut away in a room.
In “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” from 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen explored the purchase of luxurious and unnecessary goods. We buy nice things because we like them, and because they’re better, and because we want other people to admire and envy us, he argued, but we also do it to influence ourselves. Consider hunters: “Even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking,” Veblen wrote. If you buy a Birkin bag, or an over-specced rifle scope, or an expensive new camera, you may or may not be trying to wow other people, but you’re certainly trying to wow yourself. This is why it can actually be embarrassing when another enthusiast notices your splurge and wants to talk about it. You didn’t necessarily want to be seen by others; you wanted to see yourself.
How do artists come to see themselves as artists? Any piece of art begins in triviality. The first note, brushstroke, or sentence is meaningless; an unfinished first paragraph is humiliating. The circumstances in which many creative efforts arise are rarely propitious. Da Cunha Lewin reports that, with a small child at home, she now writes while “slumped on a chair in the living room.” Everything tells a creative person to give up. And so writers must assert their own seriousness to themselves—perhaps by sitting down at a nicely curated desk, or by strolling into a cool coffee shop dressed in what da Cunha Lewin calls a “uniform of middle-class artistry” (chore coat, round glasses, wide-legged pants).
An elevating writer’s room can strike a blow against triviality. But how powerful is that blow? When I was in college, I struggled to write short stories in my dorm room, while my roommate snored behind me in his bed; I did better once I found, in the basement of the building, a kind of closet that had been accidentally left unlocked, and turned it into my study. The next year, when a few friends and I created a tech startup, I often spent nights writing fiction in the office we rented, surrounded by computer servers. It wasn’t exactly a writer’s room, but it was one for which I was paying, and its very existence signalled my own capability.
As a graduate student, then a lecturer, and then a journalist, I sought out a series of better writing spaces. I’ve worked in numberless coffee shops, academic offices, and libraries; I’ve rented an office within a law firm, and today I work from one with a water view—exactly the sort of place in which I once envisioned writing. I’ve been equally devoted to curating my digital drafting environment: having tried all the word processors and writing apps, I now rely mostly on a niche e-ink tablet made by a Norwegian company called reMarkable. When I deign to use a computer, I write in a program called Ulysses, styling the type in Sabon—a typeface I purchased for myself decades ago—and setting it up so that the text appears in a narrow, magazine-like column.
Having access to these spaces and resources has been a privilege. There’s no question that they’ve helped me write. And yet, if I look back over my career as a writer, the value I’ve derived from carefully controlling my environment has paled in comparison to my main source of motivation: scary e-mails from editors. When I wrote mainly on my own, I did all right. But the quality and quantity of my output increased substantially once I started receiving terrifying notes about how, if I didn’t submit my draft immediately, a magazine issue might not come together. After getting such messages, I’ve completed projects swiftly and effectively, in all sorts of places—on trains, in cars, once in a bar, writing on my phone. The fact that I sent such notes as an editor myself, often with an eye to inspiring productivity in my writers, hasn’t diminished their power over me. “The problem of the writer’s room is that not everyone has one,” da Cunha Lewin concludes. Yet the scarcest resource for writers may not be space but expectations.
“The Writer’s Room” takes a dim view of the writerly experience today. Thanks to housing crises in big cities, many aspiring writers can’t afford rooms of their own, and contractions in the media industry have made writing as a profession less tractable. Literacy is in an over-all decline, and artificial intelligence threatens to undermine the value of human writing and thinking. And yet, against this picture, there’s the somewhat troublesome fact that, for better and worse, it has never been easier for a writer to find an audience. Anyone can self-publish a book or start a Substack. Physical space is scarce, and editors are elusive, but readers are everywhere.
What would it mean, da Cunha Lewin asks, if we tried “making ourselves at home in the very act of writing,” no matter where and how it happens? Her answer, broadly, is that we might develop a sense of the writing life that’s centered on reception, rather than on production. She quotes bell hooks: “Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone.” Arguably, in the age of social media, more people have experienced this feeling than ever before. And so da Cunha Lewin suggests that we might replace the image of a writer alone in a room with that of “an unknown person, a reader, sitting with and living with the ideas over which someone else has spent countless hours.” Increasingly, she explains, “this beautiful sense of intimacy is how I want to envision being alone when I write.”
The tools for writing are cheap and omnipresent; an audience is waiting; the room is optional. If all that’s true, then what’s stopping you? The challenge has to do with language. Words have to refer; writing has to be about something. The fantasy of a writer in a room can be glamorous, conjuring writing as a kind of life style. It also has a dark side: a writer with her head in her hands, bereft of inspiration, blocked. Both aspects of the fantasy leave out the writing itself—its subject, content, intention, meaning. Da Cunha Lewin is inclined to agree with the English writer Geoff Dyer, who thinks that writer’s block is a myth. If he hasn’t written anything, Dyer says, it isn’t because he’s blocked. It’s because he’s in the default state from which all writers must extricate themselves, wherever they are: “I just haven’t had anything to say.” ♦