Rooms of Their Own, page 1
Rooms of Their Own
Where Great Writers Write
Alex Johnson
Illustrations by James Oses
Contents
Introduction
Isabel Allende
Maya Angelou
Margaret Atwood
W.H. Auden
Jane Austen
James Baldwin
Honoré de Balzac
Ray Bradbury
The Brontës
Anton Chekhov
Agatha Christie
Colette
Roald Dahl
Charles Dickens
Emily Dickinson
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ian Fleming
Thomas Hardy
Ernest Hemingway
Victor Hugo
Samuel Johnson
Judith Kerr
Stephen King
Rudyard Kipling
D.H. Lawrence
Astrid Lindgren
Jack London
Hilary Mantel
Margaret Mitchell
Michel de Montaigne
Haruki Murakami
George Orwell
Sylvia Plath
Beatrix Potter
Marcel Proust
J.K. Rowling
Vita Sackville-West
George Bernard Shaw
Zadie Smith
Danielle Steel
Gertrude Stein
John Steinbeck
Dylan Thomas
Mark Twain
Kurt Vonnegut
Edith Wharton
E.B. White
P.G. Wodehouse
Virginia Woolf
William Wordsworth
Visitor information
Index
Picture credits
Introduction
‘Writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people, making the table, the chair, the curtain, the carpet into their own image.’
Virginia Woolf, Great Men’s Houses (1911)
Writers like ceremonies. Freshly sharpening a box of pencils every morning. Slurping a vast amount of coffee throughout the day. Or, in Gertrude Stein’s case (see here), tracking down a docile cow for inspiration. But perhaps the most important of all is the commute, the ritual of going to a special place to write.
During lockdown, a lot of people discovered that what they really needed was a distinct space in which to work. Or, as Virginia Woolf famously put it in a lecture in 1929, ‘a room of one’s own’. For writers, somewhere private, quiet-ish and comfortable is particularly important.
These are fascinating spaces and we flock to see where Thomas Hardy created Tess of the d’Urbervilles and where J.K. Rowling conjured up Harry Potter. Indeed, literary tourism has a history stretching back 200 years, and writers themselves are also intrigued by other writers’ rooms. Alfred Lord Tennyson visited Goethe’s home in Weimar, Germany, in 1865, and was fascinated by the German writer’s ‘sacred study’. As Hallam Tennyson revealed in his 1897 biography of his Poet Laureate father:
One cannot explain in words the awe and sadness with which this low dark room filled A. The study is narrow, and in proportion long. In the middle was a table with a cushion on it where Goethe would lean his arms, and a chair with a cushion where he sometimes sat, but his habit was to pace up and down and dictate to his secretary. On one side of the room was a bookcase about two-thirds up the wall, with boxes for his manuscripts. There were also visiting cards, strung like bills together, and Goethe’s old, empty, wine bottles, in which the wine had left patterns like frost patterns. On the other side of the room was a calendar of things that had struck him in newspapers.
As Tennyson found, there is something fascinating to be experienced in the room where it happened, the views a favoured writer looked out on, the chairs they rested in, the atmosphere they created that in turn helped them create. These places offer the curious traveller more than just a peek into their owners’ interior design tastes, they offer a biographical behind-the-scenes insight into what was deeply significant for them in their most personal space. Elsewhere in the same essay quoted at the start of this introduction, Virginia Woolf suggests that homes and their rooms make a significant impact on their owners’ personalities, and that an hour in a house can be more revealing than a row of biographies.
Visiting these properties give us the opportunity to be a part of these writers’ lives, take a look at the books on their shelves, relax at the familiar amount of clutter on their desks. If it’s interesting to take a close look at a friend’s house, how much more so is sitting on the chair in the room where James Bond came alive. These objects and spaces were witnesses to something truly remarkable. You can wander through a writer’s past as well as their space, and get a feeling about how they operated in the real world, and empathize with their messy desks or annoyingly creaky doors. We can get close to their minds, closer to understanding how their rooms and habits influenced their work. I remember the first time I stood outside George Bernard Shaw’s revolving garden hut, and felt that I had somehow entered his extraordinary writing story (and I still feel the same every time I return each year).
It’s not just private residences that provide perfect writing spaces. Libraries have been the thinking and researching spaces of writers for centuries. Chetham’s in Manchester still reverently looks after the desk and alcove where Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx worked together in 1845, and Marx’s daughter Eleanor made the first English translation of Madame Bovary during her visits to the British Museum Reading Room. Although not so many books are actually written in libraries, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is among them.
And might some of the magic rub off? Brilliant people tackled the same challenges that face us, and if writers within these walls (or in D.H. Lawrence’s case, under these trees – see here) can develop successful creative ceremonies, perhaps we can adopt some to aid our own creativity? Though perhaps not those of German poet Friedrich von Schiller, who believed he could only write well when he could smell rotting apples, so kept a selection in his desk drawer.
So are there any truths universally acknowledged that we can learn from the places where great writers write? Although every writer has their own particular foibles and requirements, three elements appear especially important.
Firstly, whether it’s a hut, a bedroom, a library or a car, writers like to establish a writing space that is at least partially protected from interruptions (although E.B. White also pointed out that there are always distractions because life is full of distractions – see here). Some, like Jonathan Franzen, simply remove all internet connections; others, like Maya Angelou (see here), get right away from their homes to anonymous writing ‘safe houses’ – in her case, undisclosed hotels.
This brings us on to the next point: the importance of making the best of what’s available to you. Anthony Trollope produced most of Barchester Towers on the train during his work commute, writing in pencil on a home-made lapdesk, which he said he found just as convenient as a traditional one. A writing shed might be your ultimate retreat, but Louisa May Alcott managed to produce Little Women on a small but functional drop-down shelf her father knocked up in her bedroom.
Finally, wherever you write, try and do it in the morning. Even those writers who had a reputation for late late nights, and were by no stretch of the imagination ‘morning people’, often made sure they got in their daily session before lunch.
This is a book about all these people and all these rooms. Rooms that tell stories.
Isabel Allende
Making a date with a book
Writing studio, San Rafael, California
Allende’s ‘sacred space’ where she starts writing new novels on 8 January.
Isabel Allende (1942–) produced her first book – The House of the Spirits – on a typewriter in the kitchen of her flat in Caracas, to where she had fled following the military coup in her home country of Chile. She wrote mostly late in the evenings after working during the day and after cooking dinner. Subsequent books were written in a repurposed closet, coffee shops and in cars, but in 2001 she built a new home in San Rafael, California, overlooking San Franciso Bay. In the back garden she also built herself her casita (little house), which was initially planned as a pool house with its own bathroom, before it became her full-time writing studio for her next dozen books until her divorce and the sale of the property in 2016.
The casita was mainly a writing room, and nobody was allowed in, not even to clean – she described it as her ‘sacred’ space, and her 30-second commute to work as a journey to another world. Throughout her writing sessions, she kept interruptions to a minimum, since there was no phone or internet installed, to ensure a silent atmosphere for concentration, which she has likened to meditating. One exception to her ‘no visitors’ rule was its use as the regular meeting place for Allende’s long-standing all-female prayer group, the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder, who have met fortnightly for decades for confidential discussion and mutual support.
It was also filled with meaningful objects, among them boxes of beads. Allende is a keen jewellery maker and uses beading to fend off tiredness and to clear her mind when writing or if she finds the words have temporarily stopped flowing. Elsewhere were the two rag dolls she made for her daughter Paula while she was pregnant with her, and whose tragically early death she chronicled in the 1994 memoir of the same name. One of Paula’s white baby shoes was also always on display, as was a photograph of her signing
The number of books in the room was fairly restrained: dictionaries on the desk and a first edition of each of her books on her bookshelves, including one in every language in which it has been printed. There were also the collected works of Chilean poet and politican Pablo Neruda and a copy of Shakespeare’s works in Spanish, a present from her grandfather.
Allende starts every new novel on 8 January, what she calls her ‘sacred day’, after the letter she wrote on that day to her dying grandfather evolved into The House of the Spirits (she kept the typewriter she used to write it on her desk as a momento though she now writes with a computer). On this day, she makes an early start, and after walking her dogs and making time for meditation, she has a cup of tea. She burns sage and candles to ask Paula’s spirit and other ancestral muses to help her with the new book and gets underway (the previous day she cleans everything unconnected to the new book out of sight and donates all the books she has used to research the previous book to a charity in order to provide a clean palette for the new work).
As she progresses, she is at her desk every day except Sunday from 8.30 a.m. – after she has walked the dog, exercised and meditated – and writes until 7 p.m. with an afternoon break for a walk. This routine continues until she has completed her first draft, usually around May.
New Year’s writing resolutions
Just like everybody else, writers make their own January promises to themselves to do better in the coming twelve months. Indeed, Samuel Pepys started his famous diary on 1 January 1660, which looks suspiciously like a New Year’s resolution in itself – he used to write out what he called his ‘vows’ in a smaller book and take them with him as an encouragement. Though he did well with the diary, he was not so successful with other vows, including this one from 31 December 1661: ‘I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine.’
In 1753, Samuel Johnson also promised himself in his annual New Year’s prayer ‘to keep a journal’, in addition to his normal self-flagellatory remarks about how poorly he felt he had behaved in the previous twelve months.
Some writers were very specific. In January 1931, Virginia Woolf promised herself ‘to make a good job of The Waves’ and, more generally, ‘sometimes to read, sometimes not to read’, which is one everybody can keep. In 1986, Stephen King, smarting from criticisms about his latest novel (which ran to more than 1,100 pages), said he made his first New Year’s resolution in a decade. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘write anything bigger than your own head.’
Christopher Isherwood noted down many resolutions in his diaries, mostly encouraging himself to work faster and be less idle. But writers are only human and not all resolutions are kept despite the best intentions. On 1 January 1852, poet Robert Browning resolved to write a poem a day. He only lasted until 4 January.
Writing is, of course, not always uppermost in writers’ minds as the new year changes. In 1905, P.G. Wodehouse’s resolution was to learn to play the banjo.
Maya Angelou
Inspiration in a hotel room
Various hotels, including those in Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Comfort without distraction was the key to Angelou’s writing routine.
One of the most comfortable ways of avoiding the distractions of home life when writing is to check into a hotel.
Ernest Hemingway found Room 551 in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana sufficiently inspiring to write parts of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Death in the Afternoon, and the room has since become a tiny museum in his honour. As the Savoy hotel in London’s writer-in-residence in 2002, Fay Weldon was given a £350-a-night room in which to put pen to paper. And a Who’s Who of writers chose the Chelsea Hotel in New York, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Arthur C. Clarke, who produced the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in Room 1008.
Maya Angelou’s (1928–2014) working routine was to wake early and head to a hotel room near her home, which she rented by the month. She chose fairly spartan surroundings: small rooms with nothing more than a bed and perhaps a basin and with the hotel paintings removed. The only things she brought with her from home were a bottle of sherry for occasional nips (usually at elevenses), a deck of cards, a copy of the King James Bible and a dictionary, sometimes a thesaurus and crossword puzzles. Work started around 6.30 a.m.
Angelou kept the identity of these hotels a secret and relied upon loyal hotel staff to keep interruptions to a minimum (they came in only to empty the wastebasket and change the sheets) and feign ignorance when people asked if she were in the building. Her home in later years was Winston-Salem in North Carolina, and she probably used the city’s Historic Brookstown Inn and Kimpton Cardinal Hotel.
In the hotel room, she would lie on the bed to write in longhand on yellow legal pads, returning home to work in the afternoon for a break and a shower. Here she would edit in the early evening using a typewriter, latterly a 1980s Adler Meteor 12.
Margaret Atwood
Who needs a writing room anyway?
Anywhere
Atwood is as happy writing in a plane – or a coffee shop – as at a desk.
Not all writers require a specific writing room in which to work, or have agonizingly precise daily writing routines. Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood (1939–), author of The Testaments and Oryx and Crake, is among those who take quite a relaxed approach to the nuts and bolts of their writing process.
For a start, she does not write every day. Nor does she go through a series of rituals beforehand. And when she feels the writing has come to a stop, she simply goes and does something else to clear her mind, especially if it is something repetitive and entirely unconnected to writing. Although Atwood has no set routine, she writes in longhand first, then transcribes a couple of dozen pages on her computer (in her early days as a novelist she used a typewriter) before returning to pen and paper. She calls this technique her ‘rolling barrage’ approach, a reference to an artillery tactic used during the First World War. This was how she wrote her modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale, using a large rented German manual typewriter, while she was living in West Berlin for a year in 1984, before the Wall came down.
She does not write every day. Nor does she go through a series of rituals beforehand. And when she feels the writing has come to a stop, she simply goes and does something else to clear her mind.
Her daily wordcount goal is in the 1,000–2,000 ballpark, working on a new work for a couple of hours a day at the beginning, but gradually increasing the hours as she reaches the end. In her twenties, when she had various part-time jobs, she often wrote at night, but as she became more successful, she moved to writing in the morning and then from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. while her daughter was at school.
Like other busy writers who work on the move, Atwood finds it possible to work in varied locations, from hotel rooms and coffee shops to aeroplanes. ‘I don’t really have a writing space,’ she says, although she prefers a window wherever possible and does have a study where she often works. Here, she has a couple of computers: on one desk, one with an internet connection (she likes Twitter, though she restricts her use to about ten minutes a day to prevent her being overly distracted – see Zadie Smith); and another on a second desk, which is deliberately not hooked up to the web. Atwood is certainly no technophobe, however, and came up with the idea of the first remote document-signing device, the Long Pen, in 2004.
As well as using her desks, she also writes lying down or in a semi-crouching position. One thing she doesn’t do is write with music in the background.
