As Alexander Chee recently wrote in a lovely essay for the Morning News, we should all definitely go to writing colonies as much as possible. But not everyone gets to chill at Yaddo with the lit stars. So how can a writer acquire that enviable writing-colony glow if she’s not experienced enough, lucky enough, or possessed of enough free time to chuck it all and head to the woods?

Good news: people, especially those who don’t fit perfectly into the traditional literary establishment (see also: women, genre writers, people of color, people with day jobs), have been writing for centuries without delightful daily lunch baskets waiting for them on the steps of their light-filled studios. People even write without MFAs, or Twitter followings! We write wherever we can, however we can, and we get our life stuff done and manage to keep on writing.

Here are a few suggestions for writers without a (free) room of their own:

1. Weekend Quarantine, otherwise known as “staycation.” We know, your apartment is small and filled with distracting stuff, and your roommate blasts Taylor Swift all night long. You know who has a nice apartment? Someone else. Ask a friend if you can swap places for a weekend. Keep your eyes peeled for housesitter gigs. Basically, try to spend a chunk of time anywhere that is different from the place in which you normally write. NB: Working in a café won’t cut it. You need space and quiet if you’re ever going to replicate that magical “I’m Only Here To Write” feeling.

2. Once you’ve scheduled a Weekend Quarantine (or its younger cousin, the Day-Long Writing Binge), take care of any creature comfortsbeforehand: Stock up on food and coffee, and pre-plan your meals. If you’re really persuasive, maybe you can get an elfin friend to deliver you a lunch basket, but leftover pasta will probably suffice.

3. Go to the library. Have you heard of these places? They’re amazing. They are full of books and electricity and you can get stuff done in there! And they are free.

4. One of the best things about colonies is the interactions you have with other artists while you’re procrastinating — er, processing. To get a hint of creative cross-fertilization, begin a writing session with some non-writing. If you write prose, read a poem; for a different view of the world, peruse a book of photography or paintings for ten minutes. And listen to music. (I prefer music without vocals — my go-to writing albums are Coltrane’s Africa Sessions, Chopin piano pieces, and anything Explosions in the Sky, Dirty Three, or Electrelane.)

5. Log onto your Facebook profile. Go to the little “account menu” arrow in the upper right hand corner (or wherever they’ve moved it lately). Choose the option that says “Account Settings.”  Choose “Security.” Click on “Deactivate your account.” There, you've just cleared hours a day off your schedule.

Extra Bonus Pro Tip: Don’t sweat the scene. So you’re not besties with Andrew Sean Greer? So what. Suck it up and write, already.

Image courtesy the author

In honor of his birthday (June 25), Brainpickings related George Orwell’s top four motivations for writing: egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. I have often thought that pinning down why I write might give me insight into how I could proceed with new creative work, so I was quick to connect Orwell's motivations with my own. In my twenties I was big on getting things right, creating vivid moments of some sort of true experience, kind of like Orwell's historical impulse. More recently, the sound and impact of words—pure aesthetics—have come to the forefront.  

What intrigues me now is Orwell’s attention to early development and inescapable "emotional attitude." This is from his essay "Why I Write":

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in—at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own—but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

For me, this relates to Ben Marcus’ theory that each writer has one essential story to tell — a story that must be repeated in different ways and can never be resolved. The thought that the compulsion to write can be understood as some kind of unresolvable psychological tic ... tickles me. There is something wrong with writers, and we've made it our business to publicly pick at our scabs.

It’s interesting to compare Orwell’s insistence on early influences with Joan Didion, who has a "Why I Write" of her own. Didion says, “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

With Didion, I find the answer to the question of how to proceed. While I very much enjoy thinking about early influences and uncontrollable compulsions—and I love Orwell for saying "Good prose is like a windowpane"—I really don’t have a hold on why I write until after I am writing. The compulsion to write in itself is only really examined, for me, in the process of writing. I don't have any real ideas about what my scabs might look like until the writing itself shows me. It may be my poor memory, but I need the physical presence of words to spark any kind of recognition of that which is real.

In any case, thinking about writing never quite gets any work done. The only thing is to keep writing.

image: bambinipronto.com.au

Looking at Liu Wei’s cityscapes made from old school books, I find myself flooded with a familiar sense of reassurance—of the calm that emanated from the cakey volumes on my parents’ shelves and the delicately preserved archives hidden in libraries. I like these cityscapes in great part because I like old books, and I like seeing things done with them.

Of course, I do have requirements. I wouldn’t want to see old books spliced into wet naps or shredded into lining for a bird cage. Shredded into sentence-sized strips to insulate a special gift, however, I might just get behind.

So. What other ways can we ramp up the nostalgic power and the functionality of our old books?

Aromatherapy. One of the most magical traits of old books is their smell. Part dust, part glue, with a dash of mystery, old books smell like a memory of family dipped in a kind of determined hopefulness. Why not treat old books like potpourri? They've already made the perfume.

Hiding your gun. Faux books have been around for a long time, hiding everything from money to drugs, but don’t you think it’s time to put that revolver in some vintage Chaucer? Or, if you're not the "Just Carry" type, take your precious volumes and chop them into guns. What else are you going to do with that frayed copy of Moby-Dick? Make a gun out of it.     

Protection. If you’re not prepared to chisel your old books into guns, they can still be used as weapons. The important part is to keep that stack by your front door to make it easily accessible when you need to clobber somebody. Also, if you don’t want to actually assault someone, you can just give them a stack with overzealous encouragement and expect to never see them again.

Insulation/Wallpaper. Okay. Some of the books in my collection I probably won't ever read again. Once they reach a certain age, I think it’d be a fair and lovely thing to paste them to my walls. True, I have lived in several severe weather climates where I've spent a lot of time blow-drying plastic to my windows. But how wonderful would it be to be surrounded by books, not only with slender spines peeking out from the shelves but entire walls of full covers?

While I'm quite capable of throwing away the most precious and sentimental knick-knacks, there's something about books I have a hard time letting go of. If I can class it up and make some art objects that also act as furniture, I could send fewer boxes off to storage. 

image: collabcubed.com