A Room of One's Own

When I was sixteen I read a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I had always written stories but this book inspired me in ways I haven't been inspired since. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who wants to be a writer. Goldberg does not offer a lot of technical tips but her book provides the spark to get you to put pen to paper. At sixteen that spark was enough to get me serious about writing. 

And at sixteen I found a place of my own, both literally and figuratively. Writing is solitary work. I began to spend large quantities of time alone and those stories were my own launching pad. But I also found a literal place. Down in my parent's basement there is a room we call my dad's room. It is a small room tucked away in one of the corners where there are file cabinets no one has looked in and cobwebs so thick that you can't see through them. A lot of dad's stuff goes down there to be forgotten. Or the spiders carry them off. Seriously I think they're that big. 

I had always been scared of the basement but now I found reason to be down there. There was the desk down there. I set up an old typewriter on the desk and pulled up an old suitcase as a chair. And I wrote. I would sit balanced on that suitcase for hours working away. I wrote 120 pages of my first novel attempt down there on that typewriter. That work ethic followed me to college where I wrote constantly, filling notebook after notebook, often with just little poems and stories. And a second novel attempt.

After meeting Jeff, I wrote quite a bit less. In fact, with the exception of a stint working with a writing partner I pretty much stopped doing any real writing at all. The writing partner was good for me. He was motivation to keep churning out pages. I wanted to make sure I always had something new to bring to our weekly meetings. But after my writing partner left for a new city, my third novel attempt died. And I turned to reading rather than writing. 

But these past couple weeks I have been writing again. My notebooks go with me to work and are filled mostly with poems. I am attempting to write a poem a day. They are short but keep the creative juices flowing. Plus I can finish them in a sitting, something that makes me feel like I'm making progress.  

And now I have a room of my own again. This time it's a back bedroom. A while ago we had converted it into a library/guest room. All my books are now in one place. And today we added a desk. This is now my room. It is my place to go and write. To read and relax. And maybe actually get back to hard-core writing again. Or at least try my fourth novel attempt. As Virginia Woolf said everyone needs a room of one's own.