This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Sam Binnie is the author of The Wedding Diaries. You can read our full interview with Sam here.
My Writing Room by Sam Binnie
My writing room is, as with so many, actually my writing sofa. Currently, I spend vast swathes of time when I should be writing there actually just googling properties and mortgages, trying desperately to calculate how we can get the four of us out of this beautiful but minuscule flat and into a house with an office. I daydream about desks and filing cabinets, paperweights and office chairs; I pick the pictures I'd have up on the wall, the complicated keypad security system on the door which would keep the children out and me in, and the bookcase on which I would display my hundreds of bestselling novels ("The spunky heroine meets someone… Something happens.. And then at the end it's all OK. Can you type that up?" – me, to my 'assistant' in a few years). Got to have a dream.
In the meantime, I write on this sofa. It's bloody murder on my back, but only when I get up, so while I'm frantically typing away I don't really notice that I'm working with a knee over one arm of the chair and the other bent backwards under my laptop. I like to work in bursts of two or the hours, once or twice a day, so at the moment it hasn't quite crippled me. I'm near enough to my books to look to them for inspiration or names, and the windows opposite have the most fantastic view over the whole of London, which is also a wonderful mind-clearer.
Sitting here also means that no one can see what I'm doing on my computer, but if someone does rumble me looking at clothes/shoes/recipes/houses when I meant to be working, I can just say, "But it's RESEARCH!" Fortunately the three books in the series I'm working on are full of all those things I'm interested in – homeware, feminism and food – so really that research line is, mostly, true.