A Place to Write

Michael Pollan needed a place to write. Instead of looking for a spare room in the house, he decided to build one.

In the mid-1990s, he had left New York and moved with his family to a house in northwestern Connecticut. He was beginning a new stage in his career as a writer, working from home and wanting a space separate from domestic life. The idea gradually took a very concrete form: a small wooden building among the trees, far enough from the house to feel as though he had gone somewhere else.

There was, however, one complication. Pollan did not simply want to have that space. He wanted to build it with his own hands.

The architect Charles Myer helped him design it, and over the course of approximately two and a half years Pollan learned how to build the structure that would eventually become his place of work. It was a single-room building, conceived as a place to read, write and let the mind wander. A desk, books and the tools he needed for his work occupied a space with one very specific purpose.

The process eventually became A Place of My Own, a book about building that small house, but also about a much more difficult question: what turns a space into a place of your own?

Distance was part of the answer.

The family home was still close by. Pollan did not need to travel miles away or disappear for days at a time. It was enough to leave the house, cross part of his property and enter his writing refuge. In doing so, he had established a physical boundary between two activities that might otherwise have taken place in exactly the same space.

Inside that small building was his computer. There was also a telephone, a printer, a stereo and other tools typical of a 1990s office. It was not a technological retreat or an attempt to return to an earlier way of writing. It was a modern workspace to which something had been added that the computer itself could not provide: separation, a place of his own.

Years later, when he was asked what someone who could not build a refuge of their own might do, Pollan suggested something much simpler. A different lamp could be enough to create a small circle of light within an office and turn that area into a space of one’s own.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about his hut. The trees of Connecticut were not necessary. Nor was spending two and a half years building it. Nor even having another room. What mattered was being able to establish a boundary and recognise that, by crossing it, a different activity had begun.

For a long time, those boundaries were physical. A door, a study at the bottom of the garden, a hotel room or a desk lit in a particular way could signal that it was time to write.

Today, much of that boundary has to exist inside the computer itself. The same screen we write on also contains our email, browser, messages and practically anything else we might want to do. We cannot always cross a garden to get away from them. But we can still build a place of our own. Only now, it can fit inside the screen.

WordPlanet™ creates a space inside the computer, separate from everyday life, for doing just one thing: writing. It has no walls, no door to close, and there is no garden to cross to reach it. When you enter WordPlanet™, everything else stays outside for a while: all that remains is the text, the keyboard and Your World of Words. A place where the possibilities narrow again and writing can occupy all the available space.

WordPlanet™ is another way to build a place of your own.