While it’s necessary to have money, as a writer you don’t have to have a room of your own to write, but it helps! I recently converted a spare bedroom into my “writing room”, and it provides the space where I can go when I need to plot my stories, type drafts and revisions of works-in-progress, and meet on a Zoom with other writers. In a way, it’s become my “home office” as well as the guest room.
Since I sometimes like to listen to music while I write, I have an I-pod, a 33 rpm record player, downloads on my laptop and my phone. I’ve created playlists, too, for certain stories that I’m working on. Sometimes the music is background noise. I have a Mr. Coffee mug warmer which helps a lot when I need a cup o’ Joe to keep on keepin’ on. By the way, according to an article by Brooke Nelson in Reader’s Digest, dated November 24, 2022, the phrase cup of Joe might have its basis in linguistics. “Joe” is the simplified form of the word “jamoke,” which began as a nickname for coffee in the 19th century, a portmanteau of the coffee beans “Java,” and “mocha.” Therefore, “cup of jamoke” may have become shortened to a “cup of Joe.”
I’m a pencil and pen connoisseur and have included Blackwing pencils, dainty looking Vera Bradley pencils, gel pens of assorted colors, purple Pentel RSVP pens which are my favorites, and Bic Ball 3 in jade and blue. While I do most of my writing, as I am doing now, on my laptop, I enjoy using colorful pens and pencils for note taking, line editing, and filling out forms for writing. As for notebooks, there are so many types that I’ve used from those black and white composition books like the ones which I used in elementary school to ingrained, leather bound notebooks. I have notebooks with subject dividers for various tasks including journals, writing projects, writing workshops, research, and much more. Having been a teacher for over two decades, I had to be fairly organized and notebooks became a must. As a writer, even with the computer and the apps on my phone, I like to have notebooks.
These are tools which are useful for writing and for being in the room of my own, but the work must be done. Like a lot of other writers, my laptop is my most important tool. I knew a few writers when I started out writing more seriously who refused to type up their drafts and wrote long-hand. My first book, Wildflowers, is one which I wrote long-hand in a yellow 3-ring binder while commuting to my job as a copywriter for J.C. Penney in New York City. I wrote furiously as the bus meandered through the interstate traffic, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and deposited its passengers at the Port Authority Terminal of Manhattan. Those were before the invention of personal computers, even before the cell phones, so I am dating myself. Had it not been, though, for those notebooks and pens or pencils, I wouldn’t have had my earliest material for that book.
As for a room of one’s own as Virginia Woolf suggested in her book, A Room of One’s Own, it’s not necessary. I wrote on a bus, in a coffee shop, dictated on a tape recorder while driving my car, during my lunchtime breaks at work, even on long walks through parks. Once again, it’s the idea that to be a writer, one must write wherever and whenever one can.
So, where do you write? Do you need a “room of one’s own”? Comments are welcome.
