The place where I write has changed on many occasions. Sometimes the days are long enough that the library becomes a temporary residence learning hotel, whereas on others I find myself being poetic on spare napkins (my only paper on a long train journey home). All of these places have been the sites in which I’ve often written thought after idea and epiphany alike. Sometimes they have been the locations where I have squeezed my brain but not come up with a single thing, and despairingly sit instead reading a book. In all these moments, I was more a space than myself and that’s what writers are. We are there, but we are not – we are somewhere far from this particular place where we are still, to the point where our eyes are glazed and we seem to be sleepwalking.
Perhaps for this reason, I’ve always found it easiest to write alone. When there is the luxury of choosing a spot to retreat to, like a hermit crab I’ll head for my favourite chair and guard my territory for as long as possible. The silence permeates my personal style and you can tell, probably even now, from my use of commas how much I love to pause and let the words linger for a while. I write at my desk in the back of the house, the furthest away from the front door and the nearest to the sky and trees that live by our chimney. It’s there that it’s easiest to escape this reality and find a thousand alternates or to imagine myself back to simpler times where there were not this many people and no such thing as crowds full of noise unless there was an occasion worth celebrating.
But more than in moving train carriages or cafes, more even than under the whale skeleton of my favourite museum, I write in my head. More so I write in my head whenever I possibly can. I write about the future and dream up the rooms of my future house, in which there are going to be at least two rooms completely full of books; I even have the organisation system of how to order them completely summarised and tucked away in a useful corner. In the mean time, I use the same principals to file my thoughts. Sometimes I re-write my regrets in a manner that any jazz ballad would be proud of. Through everything in every day, through gardening, reading, swimming, there is always time to click away at my metaphorical type writer. There are ideas which make it out for other people to read, ones such as this, but there are equally as many which remain unheard also. In that way perhaps, I like to imagine that I am writing in secret ink and will prove an interesting enigma one day to someone.
In summary, I write in the world. There is no room that can contain me, nor no page on which my vocabulary will be taken hostage. My words are as free as the sparrows as they move swiftly to warmer ground, and they dress themselves up, restyle their meanings, as often as they please. I write from inside the sentences, burrowing my way back out using only my imagination. The result? I have composed enough graffiti that it will last in the universe. No matter what happens to me, I will always have something somewhere that was said and that may echo even in a vacuum.
Take a look at SPG’s tips on Improve your Writing Skills.
