Mark Twain’s Writing Refuge

In the summer of 1874, Mark Twain arrived at Quarry Farm and found something that had not been there the year before. His sister-in-law Susan Crane and her husband Theodore had had a small octagonal study built for him on top of a hill, separate from the house and overlooking the Chemung River valley.

It was not large. Inside, there was barely enough room for a table, a sofa and a few chairs, but it had something the house could not offer him in quite the same way: a place intended for writing.

Twain and his family spent much of their summers at Quarry Farm, near Elmira in New York State. The house belonged to Susan and Theodore Crane and was surrounded by a working farm, relatives, children and the ordinary activity of an inhabited home. The new study stood about a hundred metres away. Close enough to remain part of that life and far enough away to be outside it for a few hours.

For years, Twain crossed that distance to work. He would usually arrive at the study in the morning and could remain there until well into the afternoon. Afterwards, he returned to the house, and on some evenings he read to the family what he had written during the day.

Some of the works that would come to define his career emerged from that small building. There he wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as working on Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and many other texts.

It is difficult to separate those works from the place in which they were written. Not because there was anything extraordinary about the study that could turn someone into a writer, but precisely because it did something much simpler. When Twain walked the path from the house and entered it, he had arrived at a place where writing was the main activity.

More than a century later, building an octagonal study on top of a hill remains a rather impractical solution for most of us. But the need it addressed has not disappeared. We still need somewhere where writing can be separated, for a few hours, from everything happening around it.

The difference is that today an important part of what we want to separate ourselves from travels with us. We can close a door and still have email, the browser, messages, work and practically anything else the computer can do right in front of us. Changing rooms is no longer always enough.

WordPlanet™ starts from the idea that this place can also be built inside the computer. It does not try to replace a hut among the trees or a view across a valley. It does something much smaller: it establishes a boundary inside the same machine and leaves, on the other side for a while, everything you do not need in order to write.

Mark Twain walked a hundred metres to reach his study. Today that distance can be much shorter. Sometimes all it takes is entering WordPlanet™ for everything else to remain on the other side of the door.