This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
My writing room is wherever I can plonk my trusted laptop. It could be the corner of the sofa, the dining room table, the bedroom, the car, the park…
I get roughly an hour each morning in which to write before I go to work. I come home from dropping the kids off to school and then, ignoring the cleaning, the washing up and the laundry, push aside the lump of books and cardigans and bags and once, even my daughter’s hamster who was hiding amongst the cushions having managed to escape the confines of her ball, and sit myself down on the (barely) tidy sofa to write. I try and resist the pull of social networking sites and try to focus on my word-count for the day. I try. Some days are better than others.
I began writing my first novel, Monsoon Memories, on an old desktop which sat in the corner of our dining room, overlooking the garden. I quite liked that spot. I would sit myself down in front of the computer with a huge cup of tea and stare at the patchy grass abused by footballs and the fraying goalpost, which tends to be rotated religiously to different sections of the garden. I would spy on the antics of the magpies and stare at the hole in the fence. I don’t think I got much writing done.Then the desktop broke (thank heavens) and we bought a laptop. My writing took off – now that I was no longer ruminating on what was going on in the garden and focusing on my book instead.
The laptop is handy because, especially when I am in the middle of a novel, my characters decide to speak to me at the oddest times. I wake in the night sometimes, with the perfect resolution to the plot problem I have been puzzling over for the past week. There are times though, when, in the clean bright light of morning, I cannot make any sense of the jumble of words I have jotted down bleary eyed in the middle of the night.
I write in the car while waiting for the kids to finish their various activities of an evening. On sunny days, I squat on a patch of grass outside where my kids are having their clubs and write there. I have written in cafes and on airplanes. I have got sand on the monitor and spilt tea on the keyboard. (The Caps Lock key tends to be temperamental and I suspect it is due to this particular mishap.)
One day, I tell my kids and husband, I am going to have a room of my own, with bookshelves masquerading as walls and with a door I can lock, with my notes and plot ideas scattered around, a room where there is organised chaos, a room which is mine. But I suspect, and I think they know this too, that I wouldn’t get any writing done as I would miss the noise and the chaos, the tinny simulated cheers of FIFA my son is playing, the running commentary my daughter is giving about the house she is building on Minecraft, my husband’s sudden bursts of laughter at the programme he is watching, and the annoying noise the hamster makes as she sharpens her teeth on her water bottle. I think I would be desperately lonely in a writing room which was totally mine and which I didn’t share with my family.
The Forgotten Daughter by Renita D'Silva is out now.