Susan McElcheran is a PhD candidate at Regis St Michael’s Faculty of Theology, working now on writing her dissertation after completing all other requirements for her degree. Her doctoral research focuses on the intersection of intellectual disability and Christian mysticism.
It’s Wednesday morning, time for writing circle in the solarium at RSM. One or two people enter the sunlit room full of windows, entering a quiet space of greenery and light. People arrive when they can and set up to write.
What is the best writing environment? Some write best in their home, with slippers and a drink. Many people find a noisy café a congenial writing spot. Others prefer an open space like a park picnic table or a public library with people coming and going around them. There are those who inhabit their carrel and equip it like a small house, with fridge and emergency rations. D. H. Lawrence used to write among the trees, and those who prefer a natural setting praise its ability to fill the senses with inspiration. Many say that the proximity of water aids their mental processes, locations like a lakeside, by a river or waterfall being choice for fluidity in more than one sense. Some take this to the point of immersion while writing: Agatha Christie, for example, wrote novels in the bath. It is a well-known fact that Jean-Paul Marat habitually wrote in the bath and had a table custom-made for the purpose. Dalton Trumbo famously wrote film scripts in his bathtub, even keeping scissors and tape at hand to piece the final product together.
I have four preferred places to write: at home, in my library carrel, at a café, and in the writing circle. My home writing experiences are dominated by my cat, to whom my writing time exists solely to provide her with a warm spot to sleep. Lying across my two forearms, she is completely happy and contented until one of my hands moves too much and she suddenly and ferociously bites my arm. My carrel has all my books and the quiet that I need on most days. At other times, a busy café provides a background of white noise and the special, distanced companionship of strangers that is a perfect background for focused concentration.
The one day per week that I meet with the writing circle is another kind of experience. This group writes, not with each other but in each other’s presence. There is no reading of each other’s work and no giving feedback with suggestions. This group is for each one doing one’s own writing at a common time and in a common place. People come when they can and go when they need to. One person sets an alarm for a forty-minute writing block, “Here we go!” and each one becomes absorbed in their own work. The atmosphere of quiet focus is contagious. Knowing that others are so completely absorbed in their work helps you to focus on your own.
A phenomenon occurs to me as operative here – the “sitting in front of your page until something occurs to you” phenomenon. Several writers say that the trick to writing is just to sit down and write, which seems singularly unhelpful until you try it and find that it also requires a certain attentive and focused waiting. The trick is not to allow yourself to become distracted, which is actually harder than the writing part. Famously productive writers have set a time aside each day for sitting in front of the page/screen whether anything comes to them or not. At some point, something comes. If you keep looking at your work and manage to avoid distractions, writing happens. This is why the writing group is so beneficial: setting the alarm, and the quiet concentration of others around you, calms the tree full of monkeys that is the human brain. It’s harder to allow yourself to get up to make another cup of tea, put out the garbage, or make that phone call you should have made three days ago. The forty minutes often flies by when focus is maintained, and people comment that the last ten minutes, when you know the time is almost up, is often the most productive.
Breaks are full of conversation, solitary or companionable walks to the coffee shop for refueling – “Does anyone want anything?” – or solo work if you’re not quite finished when the forty-minute alarm rings. The Dean brings a bowl of chocolates. A student shares tomatoes from her garden, another brings freshly picked homegrown beans. Someone buys cookies to share. The companionship is good. But the focused and distraction-free environment is priceless.
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