This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Today we are having a poke around Wendy Wallace's Writing Room. Wendy's most recent novel, The Painted Bridge, got an exceptional review from Debs and Cesca!
My Writing Room by Wendy Wallace
I’ve written in all sorts of places in my life – bedsits, libraries, cafes… I’ve probably sat there with a notebook or, in recent years, a laptop. But my favourite and usual place now for writing is at home, in the small room that is my study.
My sons have left home and the house is quieter than it used to be. I do have a desk and a desktop computer, on the other side of the room, but for working on the novel I like sitting on this old couch, which was once my grandmother’s. I have my laptop on my lap and – often – my feet up. Something about being at a desk says ‘work’ to me, whereas in writing fiction although as we all know it definitely is hard work – there needs to be an element of play too.
The big sheets of paper on the wall are my plan of the three sections of the new book, made before I started writing it. I’ve got pictures stuck all over the wall opposite, that relate to my characters.
I use other people’s books a lot to help me along. One shelf of this bookcase is given over to general reference books, one to books on how to write, a couple to reference books related to the Victorians and the subjects I’m exploring. And one is reserved for my own books. I wrote two non-fiction books before The Painted Bridge and have copies of them in hardback, in large print, and translated into Japanese and Italian and Portuguese. I love the fact that the same book can appear in different packages and languages.
Superstitiously, I kept some empty space on that shelf while I was writing The Painted Bridge, as part of keeping faith that it would one day appear in book form. That space is now filled and I need to clear some more, for Magic for the Living, the novel I’m working on now, and of which that block of paper is a print out.
I write on the laptop but like to print out everything periodically, to get a different sense of it off the page. One of the best things I did for my writing was to get a laser printer on e-Bay. It has saved a fortune in ink.
Wendy Wallace is on Facebook at wendywallaceauthor
Her site is at wendywallace.co.uk
On Twitter, she’s @slangular