From The Literary Hub:
Hemingway wrote in cafes, nursing a marc, and later at a stand-up desk surrounded by polydactyl cats. Melville used an upstairs study in Pittsfield with a view of Mt. Greylock, which in winter looks very much like a white whale. Virginia Woolf had a room of her own and Edith Wharton was said to write in bed. Few things are as treasured by writers as privacy, that place where you can tune out the world and live in the alternate one on your page. I found it in one of the most public places imaginable, crowded with tour groups and class visits, a must stop in the guide books. For over twenty years I have been writing in the New York Public Library—eight novels and a ninth underway—and I can’t imagine working anywhere else.
The main Reading Room—rightly, a tourist destination—with its ambient noise of chairs scraping and laptops clicking and book delivery bins clattering at the call desk is about as far as one could get from the silent, hermetically sealed workroom writers are supposed to crave. The trick is to make your own privacy—a pen, a yellow legal pad, and your own cone of personal space and you’re there. And since everyone else at the long open tables wants privacy too, invisible boundary lines are drawn, a kabuki-like civility reigns, eyes averted. It’s true that occasionally you find yourself sitting opposite someone in a heavy overcoat (at the height of summer) writing in a notebook in block capitals about Jesus, but since he’s already somewhere private, he’s usually as polite as the others. And then of course the sheer grandeur of the place invites respect—the vast room (said to be the largest in America) with its painted ceiling, shafts of light pouring through the high windows, the polished wood and rows of lamps. It may not be the quiet room that Woolf demanded, but I think it’s the most beautiful office in New York. After years of writing there, I was lucky enough to get a seat in one of the research rooms (set aside for scholars and writers) where crowds are not an issue and the private work space a rare privilege, but from time to time I still wander up to the Reading Room just to have a look.
After which, thanks to the transformation of Bryant Park, just behind, I can eat lunch under the linden trees and watch half of midtown walk by, one of the few places in New York where you can have this kind of European experience. Writers love to complain about their work—the isolation, the elusive right word, etc.—but it’s hard to feel desperate on a nice day in Bryant Park.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
I like the comment about making your own privacy. But if he’d ever been to our local library, I suspect he’d feel differently. They have two tables (with no chairs sometimes), three little study nooks, and the main space is open to the Children’s area, which I hate because the kidlets don’t have volume control. I miss the library in my hometown, where the kids books were in a separate room entirely, with a door that SHUT. Oh, and for some reason related to design, the front door of the place is built like a funnel, and it ECHOS noise.
I’ll take my back corner table at a coffee shop, a good pair of earbuds, and screaming metal music in my ears any day. To each their own I guess. 🙂
The closest branch of my library is designed in a similar way. They do have a couple of rooms you can reserve for an hour at a time, but that’s not really enough if you go there for a writing day. (It did work for a NaNoWriMo write-in, though, since no one else had reserved the room after our time and we were allowed to stay another hour.)
While the NY Public Library may still have the quiet of old-fashioned libraries, my library allows talking and has story hours in that shared space, etc. To accommodate those of us who like quiet in our libraries, they have scheduled quiet hours, so if you can make your schedule fit those, it might work.
Anyway, I’m one of those who likes writing in total silence and isolation, so my home office works best for me.
I enjoy writing at the local library. They have nice cold A/C which is nice in the Florida summer!
Well, for the author there isn’t. I wrote 1400 words Saturday morning while waiting to have my Jeep’s frame assessed and people came and went to the main desk (within earshot) talking about their car problems.
I can write anywhere. The only thing I can’t do is listen to music with words while writing. That always distracts me completely.
Meryl,
What strikes me is the contrast between your and his productivity.
His books are quite long but only eight in over twenty years doesn’t suggest that the library is a very productive place to write. I think that you’d out produce him even if you only wrote on Saturday mornings.
I’m on my fifth book in five years, which is slow compared with many indies. But I want to try to get it up to one book every six months. We shall see how that goes. It’s hard when you have a full-time job. Writing is the second full-time job.
Being anywhere where there’s people around always distracts me way too much. Unless I’m able to put my earbuds in and listen to some music (either wordless or something with words that I’ve listened to a million times) and face a wall or something so people aren’t constantly going in and out of my peripheral vision. Actually, even if I’m somewhere without a lot of people, if it’s not totally silent, I still get distracted by the sounds (which is where the earbuds are helpful; I want to get noise cancelling earbuds one of these days to see if that alone would do the trick).
There is No Better Place to Write than in your own mind.