Shaw’s writing hut, at Shaw’s Corner near Welwyn, England
In seminary I showed my dad a sermon I wrote and he said, “If I could, I would buy you a little house where you could just write.” Besides the huge “amen” that was to the sermon in question, it was also welcome affirmation from my engineer dad. I don’t know if every writer wants a little writing studio/shack/loft/house/garden shed but I do. I can’t remember a time before wanting it. So to hear my dad buy into that dreamy scenario and wish he could help make it happen was a blessing.
My version of the writing studio fantasy also involves “doing nothing else but writing.” Or at least it used to. I’ve had that notion for so long I don’t actually know what I’d do if it were suddenly possible. Recently I’ve been making the shift from dreaming about how it could be to working it out like it is now. I started this blog earlier in the year as a place for regular writing. I’ve been pushing myself to submit more pieces elsewhere. I spent a week at the Collegeville Institute and made another writing retreat with a pastor-writer friend.
None of this has brought fortune or fame. I purposely don’t spend much time on Google Analytics checking my blog traffic because I already know how to waste time that could be writing time. What it has brought is another inch of confidence and the pleasure of practice. I’m not waiting it out until conditions are “perfect.” I’m not pitting my “day job” (to which I am also called and which overlaps and interweaves with my writing) against my writing, real or fantasized.
With unlimited time and money, maybe I would write novels. Who knows? But in the time and space I have and can set aside, I’m writing something. I’m spending less time concocting the seductive fantasy and much more time in the unsexy but solid routine of putting words together. I take it back. That is actually kind of sexy. As Annie Dillard says, you have to give yourself over to “your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you” (“Living Like Weasels” in Teaching a Stone to Talk). That’s about as sexy as it gets. And spiritual.
When I have a designated writing studio it may have another wing for my pottery studio. It will have a cozy chair and a clean desk. There will be natural light. Maybe it will be on a giant Lazy Susan like George Bernard Shaw’s, so it can rotate with the sun throughout the day. (I still fantasize a little.)
But mostly it will be what it already is now: me writing regularly, without fanfare, taking pleasure in long-term obedience to the practice, wherever it takes me.
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