I once professed my love of writing in cafes in the presence of two authors who are fixtures of the Canadian literary scene.
Both of them insisted to me that the only place to write was in the privacy of one’s own home, at your own desk. One of them looked down at me and said,
“Dear, writing is not a public sport.” A great quip at the time, but wholly misguided for this world and even worlds past.
The beauty of writing has always been that you can do it anywhere. Whether at the combat front of a war or in a house of ill repute, writers just write and write anywhere. Where they prefer to write has always been a matter of personal taste and even inspiration. Many writers claim that the milieu of certain cities inspires them, the scenes in Paris, New York, London or New Orleans. Or, escapes to the country, the mountains, the beach, places that are the opposite of a city have also been claimed by many a writer to be their favorite places to quiet the busyness and get some writing done.
And some, like me, do write in public from time to time. I need to get away from my desk. I want a change of scene; that treat of getting out of the house and I don’t think David Mamet, the famous playwright and screenwriter, wrote a book called, Writing in Restaurants, because he thought it was a cool title. It is a cool title, but I think he was really writing in restaurants and happily so.
Other authors, not of the literary scene, but making buckets more cash, have told me that they can write anywhere because of technology. Some, including me, are writing on their phones and compiling later. Many are using voice to text software to churn it out much faster than they could type. Even when I do write/text on my phone, the technology allows my fingers to skip the doldrums of typing every letter. The technology provides the logical next words for the sentence and is frequently correct. You can curse auto correct all you want, but on the flip side when word suggestions work you are saving a ton of time and keystrokes by that little piece of technology. This is also helpful for where I like to write. I frequently write lying down, preferably in a hammock. I know Hemingway wrote standing up but I have less energy than the man and anything that cuts down the sitting time has got to be good. Many writers use speech to text because they can no longer do the hours at the desk they used to. Ergonomics are getting to us, a drawback of the profession.
So in the hopes that I will get some interesting comments to this blog post…
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