Writing in organisations

Years ago I stayed with a writer and his wife in Hamburg. I always remember the writer removing himself from the breakfast table as soon as he had eaten. Off he went, to cloister himself in his study and write. At the time, I found it mildly ridiculous or sad. 

But recent events in my own life have encouraged me to revise my opinions about what it means to be a writer. 

Over the summer in France, I wasn't getting as much written as I had imagined. What held me back? “Too many visitors” is part of the answer. These were friends I was glad to see, whom I had encouraged to visit either to do some writing themselves or to join us in enjoying house, garden, good food, walks and swims in the river. The trouble was we invited too many people. The result was nearly two months of uninterrupted social life and hardly any time or space for writing. 

I should explain that the rooms our guests inhabit happen also to be our writing spaces. In effect, both of us were shut out of our studies for most of the summer. Not a great idea.

My husband, Jean, had felt the tension between visitors and space much sooner than I. He had been quietly expressing his concerns for some time, but for some reason I hadn't wanted to act on them until recently.
 
The absurdity of the situation started to reveal itself to me in August when I found myself googling “garden sheds” (or “abris de jardin”), in a slightly crazed attempt to solve the problem. Jean, meanwhile, had no option but to set himself up in the bedroom at a small table uncomfortably close to the hand basin. 

By summer’s end, I was emailing friends back in the UK saying that I had spent more time in France changing bed linen than writing. 

What had motivated me to create this situation?, I asked myself. What assumptions and values were lurking in the background? This is what I realised: all my adult life, I have believed that friends and conversations were paramount, more important in a way than work or the many other things that I “ought” to be doing at any given moment. Perhaps my desire to have people around ultimately went back to the house I grew up in. I was proud of having four interesting and different siblings, and my mother was an exceptionally relaxed and hospitable hostess. I remember many gatherings, discussions and laughter wherever she lived. 

But nowadays I am struck more and more often by how short life is. I want to devote a good chunk of it to writing and publishing. 

Last weekend, we happened to visit Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s home (Monk’s House) near Lewes in Sussex. Seeing the wooden writing hut in the garden with its sweeping views of the South Downs brought home to me how vital space is for writers. A room of one’s own, no less. 

Related reading

Website of Virginia Woolf’s house in Sussex: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/monks-house/

BBC item about George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/158193.stm

“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.” (A room of one’s own by Virginia Woolf, Penguin Classics, p.78) 

A room of one’s own came out in 1928, but the phrase “interruptions there will always be” rings truer today than ever. For me, typical interruptions range from small (emailing, phone calls, food...) to much larger (the need to earn a living by writing for other people). So, what form of writing suits our interrupted lives today, I wonder? 

From books to blogs
If you are willing to read on, let me trace the evolution of my thinking about bookwriting versus blogging. Back in 2010, at the end of a long, intense period of book writing, I said to myself I would not embark on another book for some time. Despite this, after the book came out in 2011, the feeling of wanting to publish another one refused to go away. 

The trouble was, I simply could not (or was unwilling to) make the time to write a whole book in one go. In 2013, I at least managed to write and publish one substantial article. This was satisfying but seemed rather a small achievement over a whole year. I had intended to continue writing other pieces over the supposedly quiet summer months, but I was constantly (and pleasantly) interrupted by visitors, gardening and client work. With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that getting one thorough article out in a 12-month period isn’t bad going.

Since then I have been rethinking what form of writing best suits life today. I can’t simply declare myself a full-time book author, as I need to continue earning my living. However, I do usually manage to keep one day a week – Friday – free for my own writing and publishing. But even that gets eroded by the usual interruptions.  

Given all these difficulties, I am wondering if (though some people I know are dismissive of it) blogging could be the right form for me for the time being. It has two kinds of advantage for the writer: first, ease of writing and publishing; and second, the potential for numerous short pieces to accumulate into a decent body of work – that elusive book – on a chosen subject.

The ease of writing stems from the fact that a blog post is something I can draft in a morning. I might then sit on it for a while before coming back to review and edit it, but the form fits my time constraints perfectly. Also, since I am writing for public consumption, I feel inclined to craft the pieces carefully. I can also modify, expand or withdraw them whenever I want. 

The inspiration for each of my posts comes from noticing what strikes me in my daily reading and conversations. I then reflect on it by writing, drawing on my deeper knowledge of the role of writing in society, so that each post has some depth and is not just a superficial piece of journalism or self-promotion. Sometimes I use a method called “dreamwriting” to get a very rough draft written quickly. This involves taking pen and paper, and spending 10, 20 or 30 minutes hand-writing whatever comes to mind about a chosen topic. In my experience, this can create spontaneous, readable writing; and when writing in a flow without stopping to edit, unexpected insights often emerge.

What’s more, blogging and dreamwriting enable me to write about a subject I feel I almost know too well. Because I wrote a whole thesis on this topic – the role of writing in society – sometimes I feel almost paralysed when I try to write about it now. I can’t just toss out some casual observations without thinking of all the relevant context, history and scholarship. So paradoxically I find it easier to write shorter pieces.  I suppose this is not very different to what many have done in the past, namely to use previously published articles, talks and essays and compile them into a book.

The beauty of accumulating shorter pieces is that there is no need for a big plan; instead, one’s thinking can evolve naturally over time until the pieces come together into a bigger picture. To this end, a blog allows one to assign “categories” to each post, and each category automatically appears in a list on the right hand side of the page. This list grows with time, providing a flavour of the themes emerging and how these might be combined into a larger publication. 

I was astonished to notice today that, with only 12 posts and about 20 categories on my blog, I can already glimpse the book that is emerging. This is a great relief, as I had been beginning to feel that time was running out – I want to publish that book before I get old…

Epilogue: internet revolution - help or hindrance?
As I was writing this, I kept asking myself, how are we being changed by all the new technologies – web, email, apps, and so on? So I reached out for John Naughton’s readable book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, which provides a well-researched history of the internet, comparing our position today with the very early days of the printing revolution. We cannot know yet what will emerge from the internet revolution, but it does seem that many people are finding it harder than ever to read a long text; and at the same time “cultural units” are tending to get smaller and smaller – tracks instead of albums, headlines and summaries instead of full reports, news feeds instead of newspapers. 

So, going back to Virginia Woolf’s theme of “adapting writing to the body”, it seems the internet has created new impetus for writers to adapt their writing to the reader’s needs. In my view, it also provides writers with new forms that might suit their needs. To borrow Naughton’s words, we are now free to combine text (and other forms) in new and surprising ways. The internet is a huge distraction, as author Will Self and others have highlighted recently, but it’s also an unprecedented opportunity for writers.

Related reading
Virginia Woolf.  A room of one’s own. Penguin Classics, 2000 (first published 1928)

John Naughton.  From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the internet. London: Quercus, 2012

Nicholas Carr. The shallows. London: Atlantic Books, 2010

In the first scene of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway goes into a warm, clean and friendly café on the Place St Michel in Paris. When he arrives, he orders a café au lait, gets out his notebook and pencil, and begins to write. He notices a girl “with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek”. He wonders about putting her in the story he is writing, decides against and just carries on writing. In his story, some people are drinking and this prompts him to ask the waiter for some rum.  As he writes, he loses himself in the story. After finishing it, he orders a dozen oysters and a carafe of white wine.

There is so much in that short description about the nature of writing and the needs of the writer. It also shows how the fictional world can be interwoven with the space in which the writer chooses to work.

For Hemingway, Paris was the ideal place to work in the 1920s. You could live cheaply; cafés served inexpensive food and drink and you could use them to escape your cold room and to watch people; and often you spoke to a friend or fellow writer who happened to appear that morning. An idealised picture perhaps, but still one that inspires me at least.

I find myself wondering if and where we can find similar conditions for writing today? London and Paris are far too expensive for most. And anyway I am not aware of cafés that writers frequent in the way they did then. I did belong to a members’ club in Soho for many years but it was cold in winter and seemed increasingly frequented by noisy lunchers.

The rhythm of a writer's day 
The daily routine of other writers fascinates me too. For example, how do they get started? If Hemingway couldn’t get going, he would say to himself: “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” and he would go on from there. There was always a simple sentence that he knew or had seen or had heard someone say:

“If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”

I recognise so well the danger of weighing down your writing by starting with a long preamble. Cut it out and the remaining words are stronger and more alive.

And when is the right moment to stop writing? In another scene, Hemingway is working in a room on the top floor of a hotel in the rue Cardinale Lemoine. He always works until he has something done, and always stops when he knows what’s going to happen next. That way he can “be sure of going on the next day”.

It was also important to Hemingway not to think about what he was writing until the next day. That way his subconscious would be working on it, and at the same time he would be “listening to other people and noticing”. So he finishes the writing day by putting his notebook in the drawer of his table. And after working well, he feels free to walk anywhere in Paris.

“Space” means so much more than physical room. To write, we do need physical space, but we also need metaphorical space for thinking, and social space for talking to others. Some of us also enjoy sensuous space. The sounds I hear in my "writing space" in France are country sounds – birds, wind in the trees, church bells; what I see are old stone buildings and gardens with fig trees, roses and lavender; and when I walk down the lane towards the church, I can touch and smell the sage, thyme and rosemary growing on top of the stone wall. It’s as good as, but different from, Paris in the 1920s.

Related reading: 

A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (The Restored Edition, Arrow Books, 2011)

Sensuous Geographies, by Paul Rodaway (Routledge, 1994)