Who Placed and Having a Writing Place and Time

Alyssa Liljequist

Rye Mason

Rebecca Pennefather

Jordan Newhouse (Received two votes)

Monica Burke

Courtney Calvert

Katie Scheidhauer

Avery Wall

Sammie Weiss

Justin Jones

Monica Burke (also placed second)

Congratulations to everyone! Tomorrow I’ll try to have some of the winning entries posted.

Before I forget, if your name is Anna and you entered to win Trish Perry’s book … you won, but I don’t have an email address for you. Please email me!

Today we’re talking about the importance of having a designated time and place to do your writing.

I’m a schedule girl. So in an ideal world, I would have a set writing time and place. I would write every morning from 9 to 1 or so in my office. The afternoon would be for blogging, marketing, running errands, or whatever.

But with small kids underfoot, I’m at the “take what I can get” stage of my life, and if you’re in school or working, so are you, right?

As a kid, this was my “office”:

In case you can’t tell, it’s a lap desk. Those top two compartments hold pens, and the desk part opens up too. It holds a decent amount of paper, and back when I did my writing in notebooks and on loose leaf, it was ideal. I also had one of those expandable file thingies that held all my different stories, but I must have thrown it out a while ago because it’s not in my closet.

In high school, this was frequently my office:

Although my hair looks too good for this to have been taken during high school… Might have been a year or two after I graduated. Anyway. This is a picture of me on vacation. Don’t I look like a blast to travel with?

We’re at my Nana and Papa’s house in California. I did some of my best writing at that table because the coffee was always fresh, the refrigerator was stocked with candy bars, and there were very few distractions.

But once I grew serious about writing, I definitely needed a place of my own.

In On Writing, Stephen King says:

I wrote my first two published novels, Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs … The space can be humble (probably should be, as I think I’ve already suggested), and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

While I can write anywhere – at my kitchen counter, on an airplane, outside while my kiddos play – ultimately I write faster and better here:

I also highly recommend designated writing hours. Some of you talk about getting up early to write, which is awesome. Some of you are night people, so do it then. It’s figuring out what works best for you. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t or won’t write at other times of the day, just that these are the hours you’ve specifically carved out so your writing doesn’t get shuffled into the background of everyday life.

I have to quote something else from Stephen King about writing hours, because I just can’t resist, and there’s no way I can say it better:

Don’t wait for the muse … Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic.