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Written by Sally Hinchcliffe
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 16:06 |
 I have to admit to a complete fascination with the Guardian's Writers Rooms series - the first thing I turn to on a Saturday morning. After a while, though, one book-lined study and carefully assembled collection of fetish objects begins to blend into another. All writers seem to write surrounded by books, with tottering piles of paper at their feet, on desks or tables with interesting back stories, and in rooms from which the modern world seems to have been excised - although a grudgingly admitted-to computer may sit at a side table like a poor relation in a Victorian novel, the only distraction a window or an importuning cat. Oh dear. Yet more evidence that I am not a proper writer. I actually do have a desk - and at one point I even had a room - but at the moment I write in the kitchen, where it is warmest. All I really need to write I find is my laptop, a printout of the latest draft - furiously annotated and coffee stained - and a working temperature of at least 18 deg C.
In a sense, my laptop is my room, the internet is my book-lined shelf - and source of distraction. I dislike writing on anyone else's computer and I am protective of my own, hovering over anyone who dares to use it in case they disturb my carefully arranged set up. My desktop is my desk - with two or three chapters always open, a separate document open for notes to myself as they occur to me, a solitaire game on the go (for those five minute pauses for reflection to refresh the imagination) and my browser open to email in case anyone should care to distract me. At times when I really need to concentrate - to shut my virtual door and just hammer out some words - I fire up Q10 which transforms my computer into a typewriter (complete with sound effects) and keeps the rest of the world at bay.
I'm in the kitchen now, although as the weather warms I'll probably move to the sofa in the sitting room, or the spare bedroom, or anywhere else where I can sit comfortably and type away. And the laptop will come with me, as comfortable and familiar as any room.
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