This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
As a schoolteacher with a small child, I started off with nowhere to write. A patch of floor in the living-room, my laptop on my knee, or on the table before breakfast, were the closest things I ever had to a room of my own. But as my books achieved success, I started to long for a shed.
By then I’d moved to a larger house; my daughter was older and space was no longer a problem. And yet I found myself getting more and more easily distracted; by the phone; the fridge; my surroundings; the fact that people would walk in and out of rooms in which I was working, or relatives would “just drop in for a chat,” thereby disrupting the whole day. The creative process is difficult for non-writers to understand: most of the time it looks as if you’re really not doing anything much. It’s hard for writers to explain that one short interruption can sometimes mean it takes an hour to get back into the writing zone – that is, if you get back at all.
And so my husband built me a shed at the top of the garden: on the footprint of a previous, ruined structure. It’s rather a posh shed; made of reclaimed York stone and green oak for the rafters. There’s electric light; a tiled floor (with underfloor heating) and a row of windows along the eastern side (I get SAD in winter, and I need as much sunlight as I can get.) It also smells wonderful (that’s the oak), and that’s where I work when I’m at home. There’s a desk, a chair, a small bookcase and a little cupboard in which I keep the kettle, mugs and tea-making things (tea is a necessity). It’s just far enough away from the house for me feel that I’ve escaped, and the path is just muddy enough to discourage potential intruders. 
I had intended the inside to be as monastic as possible. Over the years, however, I have accumulated all sorts of things; a giant root; an armchair; many cushions, candles and biscuit-tins; a kite suspended from the ceiling; artwork; the Runemarks-inspired character figures made for me by Wendy Froud. I also have an internet radio, perpetually set to a station that plays ambient sounds; birdsong; water; wind; the sound of ocean waves on the beach. This is where I work best, and I go there early each morning, watch the sun come up, feed the birds (and sometimes, the cat) and try to see what happens next.
I think that psychologically, it’s important for writers to have a designated workspace. It’s not so much that we can’t work on kitchen tables and in front rooms, but it helps us all to treat the process as a job, with office hours, so that when we’ve finished work for the day, we can go back to our families, rest and enjoy being off-duty some of the time. It’s also much easier to get into the writing zone if there’s a physical place to go – a symbolic commute that takes you out of home-space and into work-space. Some people use their local café. Mine is my shed; only a minute’s walk from the house, but far enough to distance me from the kind of distractions I want to avoid. It’s also interesting to note how differently people react when they’re told that you are “at work” rather than writing at the kitchen table. Writers, especially women writers, are often under pressure to make do with less-than-perfect working conditions. Especially with women, there’s a tendency for others to think of your work as a little hobby, rather than a real job. But a book is not a cake; women should have something better than a kitchen table on which to work. Men too, of course; but most male writers don’t experience the same kind of prejudice. My shed is solid evidence that my writing is a Proper Job, not a nice little hobby.
When I joined Twitter a few years ago, I started to tweet about the shed. It evolved a personality; magical shape-changing powers; it generated stories which I would have written otherwise. Nowadays I always begin with a description of the shed (or the Shed, as it has become); where it is today, what it’s doing, and many of my followers comment on these little postcards from writerspace, which have become part of the ritual of my day. Sometimes I suspect that the Shed has more followers than I do. That’s okay. It deserves them. I wouldn’t be where I am without it…
Doctor Who: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller by Joanne Harris is out now.