What I Learned The Hard Way: Where I Write

This was going to be the subject of my newsletter, but I decided that this was better suited to a blog post, and my newsletter could get into the hard squishy feeling stuff. If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, I would recommend that you do! It only goes out once a month and I try to be really honest and transparent in it.

So today on What I Learned The Hard Way, I’m going to talk about something I am only JUST learning.

Pre-pandemic, I wrote exclusively outside of the house.

“I can’t write at home,” I’d explain. “Too many distractions.”

“If I can see my bed,” I joked, “I’ll take a nap!”

People would nod and people would laugh and no one was ever like, “Yo, that might big time screw you when everything shuts down during a pandemic.”

And I certainly didn’t think that. I did think, “This is expensive!” because when i write at a cafe, I buy things at a cafe. And I would write for hours, and I’d buy a lot. Let’s just go with the fact that I gave Starbucks its own line item in my budget, okay?

But then the novel coronavirus arrived, and the COVID-19 pandemic came to the United States, and everything shut down. My beloved local Starbucks where I wrote Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday every week for the last two years. The banh mi place where I used to sneak in a few words before lunch on Sundays. All the places I relied on for my productivity, to keep me away from my distracting house and my distracting, tantalizing bed.

Now I’m home in my little apartment, oddly shaped and oddly configured, trying to stay productive. I can basically see my bed from anywhere. I really do want to take a nap all the time.

Though we had plenty of warning, I didn’t quite comprehend what a drastic shift of my writing life this was going to be. It felt like suddenly, I had to learn how to write at home. Revising at home has never been an issue, but first drafts? That required something from me that I thought I couldn’t find at home.

That’s somewhat true. It’s definitely harder at home.

But that’s because I also had preconceived ideas of what my working environment needed to be. I had both the romantic idea of working at home—I need a library! I need a home office! I need soft curtains and an Instagram-filtered life! I need piles of books and notes, story ideas taped on the walls! I need little sketches and talismen and stones and ideas everywhere!—and I’d really bought into the idea that I’m not someone who could work from home. I need the clatter of the coffee shop, I thought. I needed to be sitting at a window. I need—

Okay, what it turns out I needed was a really clean and organized workspace. Not procrastination cleaning, but truly a cleaned, minimalist workspace. My brain is a crowded, cluttered space. Remember that idea of a four-burner stove and the apartment I was talking about? My brain as a studio apartment? That apartment isn’t neat and tidy. That apartment is a disaster. My ADHD brain means I’m tripping over everything in my head, the radio’s going and the record player, all the windows are open and the street noise is coming in, i’m cooking on four burners and prepping the forthcoming meals, the fridge door is always open, and there are cats everywhere.

That’s my brain.

So because my brain’s like that, I need everything in my real physical space to be as tidy as possible for me to do my best work. This is not my natural state of being. I am not a neat and organized person.

But I need to be so I can write and create. i need to have a cleaned, cleared off desk. i don’t want a bulletin board near me or story notes. I want a notebook, headphones, a candle, and my laptop. i can handle small stacks of other things—my apartment is small and so sometimes yes, there’s a camera on my table or a stack of postcards—but I can’t have chaos.

I need to write in a clean, crisp, uncluttered environment in order to make sense of the clutter in my brain.

This is probably the reason coffeeshops worked for me before—they’re clean and uncluttered unlike my house. But now I’m treating my house like a coffee shop. I won’t show you the before pictures, because they’re too embarrassing but below, you’ll see photos of where I work now. My “dining room” table, and my desk next to my bed. That’s right. Next to my bed. They’re clean, and fairly uncluttered (for me, okay, this is uncluttered).

Because it turns out that while my romantic ideal of what my house looks like, full of story and books and piles of creativity everywhere the eye can see, is not actually what I need to be creative. My brain needs to be that romantic ideal, cluttered and full of story and brimming with papers and ideas tacked up on every surface. But my real life? It needs to be open and clear.

How has the pandemic changed where you work? Have you learned anything about writing from home?

While i was writing this, I flipped through a lot of photos on pinterest of beautiful writing spaces. Sigh. I so wish I owned my own little farm and had my own little writing shed. Alas! That’s a long time coming. But I highly recommend you go check out beautiful writing spaces, not just for the inspiration but because we can all use a break to look at pretty things sometimes.

My bedroom desk. i pulled this desk out of someone’s trash five years ago. I love it so much. Banner is from Rayo and Honey, a Black-woman owned small business in Brooklyn.

Where I work for my dayjob and write frequently. My table. Not a lot of natural light in this room so I have a standing lamp with “daylight” bulbs in.