I haven’t done a writing shed post in a while. Yesterday Lit Hub featured novelist Molly Prentiss‘s shed. A taste:
When we’d decided to purchase a one-room house, we hadn’t considered that we’d be stuck inside of it, without access to the outside world or other humans, for entire seasons, with our then 2-year-old daughter. We hadn’t known the specific kind of claustrophobia that came out of such insularity, about the physical craving we’d feel for space. My garden shed was the only space that was entirely mine, and it became my sanctuary. There was much to grieve—so much had been shed—but in that little room I found shards of sanity among the shards of light.
The shed had everything I needed in a writing space: a desk, my books, and quiet. Oh, the quiet. It was a quiet I did not know I needed, did not understand I’d been craving. In the city, I had grown used to working surrounded by sound; I gravitated toward busy cafes or communal studios; I liked feeling like I was part of the living, chattering world, even if I was somewhere else in my mind.
But I did know that my most focused writing and thinking happened when I left the fast-paced city behind and went away—to writing residencies in the Adirondacks or Vermont, or self-imposed retreats in Rhode Island or Santa Cruz. From within the quiet of these escapes came a certain clarity. I found some version of it in the shed.
Read the entire piece here.
Once a famous-ish historian came to give a talk about his new book. He described with great honesty the difficulties he had writing it, and how several times he almost abandoned the project for lack of a sense of how to organuze it, interpret the data, etc. What was key, he told us, was moving to France for a year. He lived in a small isolated cottage in Normandy, and the peace, quiet, and beauty of the area was what he needed to complete it–without doing that, he said, he’d never have gotten it done.
The PhD students struggling with their dissertations did not find his writing tips particualrly useful.
Must be nice!