At a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this year, three distinguished authors discussed their work. After about 45 minutes of talk of craft and inspiration, the panel was opened up to questions from the audience. One by one the readers and writers (you are either or both if you hold a ticket to this panel) stood up from creaking UCLA lecture hall seats to inquire about character development or how to query an agent. Toward the end, a twenty-something man popped up from his seat and, in a tone of pure desperation, asked the three fiction writers where they did their writing.
Author of Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun
“I do most of my writing in my home office, at my unbelievably messy desk. It’s by far my favorite place to write–my cats and my music are there, and it’s a very peaceful room. I live in Brooklyn and work at a university in Manhattan, and I get off work in the mid-afternoon. Often if I have theatre tickets or some other plans that require me to be in Manhattan that evening, I’ll linger at work for a few hours. When that happens, I go to the library at the university where I work and write there for a while. Often, very often, I’ll find myself writing in the subway. I spend two hours a day on the F train, five days a week, and I always carry a notebook with me.”
author of Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night
“Usually it’s trains where I get the most writing done–I wish I could get a residency from Amtrak on a sleeper car, or an office booth in a cafe car. I recently had a residency at a colony in Florida, where I had two days of writing 17 pages a day, and it would have continued if I hadn’t had to leave. I think anonymity and displacement help me no matter where I am–I need to feel like I’ve vanished and no one can find me.”
author of Dani Noir and Imaginary Girls
“I live in a tiny apartment in New York and can sometimes be found writing first thing in the mornings at a cafe, if I can find a good table, but I don’t stay there for long. There are the crowds. The noise. I can’t control the music on the stereo. The real place where I get most of my writing done is called the Writers Room. Billed as an urban writers’ colony in New York City, it’s a place for writers of all genres to go for space, quiet, and uninterrupted time to work. At various desks in the giant loft space of the Writers Room, I’ve written, no exaggeration, thousands of pages. When you pay for an ‘office space’ like this and have a dedicated place to go, one filled with other working writers typing up their own pages, it makes you all the more motivated to do your own work.”