Places to Write

In Laugharne, overlooking the Taf estuary, Dylan Thomas worked in a small shed that had once been a garage. From there, he looked out over the water and the hills of Wales while writing poems and part of Under Milk Wood. Years later, Roald Dahl visited the place and returned home with an idea. He wanted a space removed from domestic life and eventually found it in the garden of his home in Great Missenden, where he had a small hut built and wrote for decades, sitting in the same chair and surrounded by the objects he had collected over the years.

Every day, Virginia Woolf crossed the garden at Monk’s House to retreat to a small building where she spent hours writing and where, on some summer nights, she even slept. Neil Gaiman also found a place to write in a wooden gazebo among the trees in his garden. He liked walking the distance from the house because it gave him the feeling of going to work and, once there, he followed a particularly simple rule: he could write or he could do nothing, but he could not find some other way to entertain himself. If the only alternatives are writing or sitting there doing nothing, eventually writing becomes considerably more interesting.

A hotel room can serve exactly the same purpose. Maya Angelou used them to work away from the demands of everyday life, turning them for a few hours into her own writing space. Decades later, J. K. Rowling retreated to the Balmoral in Edinburgh to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. On 11 January 2007, she completed the manuscript in room 552 and marked the occasion by writing on a bust of Hermes before she left.

A hut overlooking an estuary, another in a garden, a small building separate from the house or a hotel room all answer a similar need. It is not necessarily about finding silence, or even being completely alone, but about having a place to go with a particular purpose, where the possibilities narrow and writing can occupy all the space available.

There is a certain paradox in the fact that the tool we use to write today is almost exactly the opposite. The modern computer brings together on a single screen the manuscript and much of the rest of our lives: email, the browser, messages, news, work, music, shopping and an almost limitless amount of information are never more than a few gestures away. We have never had such an extraordinary tool for writing and, at the same time, we have never tried to write while surrounded by so many possibilities for doing something else.

Not every writer can build a hut at the bottom of the garden; nor does every writer have a garden in which to build one. Renting a hotel room every time we want to spend a few hours with a manuscript hardly seems reasonable either. Perhaps neither is necessary. What mattered about those refuges was not their four walls, the view from the window or the distance separating them from the house, but the boundary they created between writing and everything else.

WordPlanet™ brings that same idea to the place where we write today. The computer does not need to stop being a machine capable of doing almost anything; it only needs a space within it where all those possibilities stop demanding our attention and writing can return to the centre.

You don't need a hut, a garden or room 552 of a hotel. You just need, for a while, your computer to stop offering you a thousand other places to go.