All writers need somewhere to work. Some have studies or spare rooms kitted with a desk, some curl up on the sofa with their laptop on their laps. Some, in those halcyon sunlit pre-Covid days (remember those?) prefer to go to a cafe and scribble in a notebook.
Some need absolute silence when writing, some put together sound-tracks to listen to, others are happy to write with the hubbub of every day life going on around them.
Since the pandemic struck and so many people began working from home, full-time writers (who always owned the home space during the day) have had to get used to the other half, and maybe the kids too, being there all the time. How they've managed to continue writing books is heroic. Hats off to the writers with day jobs they had to do from home, and kids they had to home-school, and novel contracts they still managed to stay on top of during 2020.
When I still had a day job, I worked from home anyway - I had done so since 1998, before it was fashionable (using a dial-up modem, no instant messaging systems, certainly no video-calls!) I'd do my day job in our home-office, then move to a sofa in the evenings to write. After I gave up that job last year, I kitted out my old work desk as a writing desk but I often still find I prefer working on that sofa. Maybe it's psychological - I equate being curled up there with writing.
We're now in the process of moving house. The large family home is too big for just two of us. When house-hunting, I was always eyeing up potential writing-rooms. I knew I'd need somewhere to put a desk, somewhere for the four full-height bookcases to go, and somewhere I could escape to, and curl up away from the TV and general husband-noise. We've chosen a bungalow, and we plan to add a garden room to it. A beautiful, wood-clad, fully insulated room, that I imagine as MY room. Something like the one in the photo below. I envisage all the books lining the back wall, my desk to one side, and a sofa-bed in the middle, facing out into the garden.
It might not be until next summer before the garden room is built, but I am looking forward to having that perfect space in which to write. Or read. Or day-dream. Or nap!
Where do you write? What's your dream writing-space?
