My Three Offices

I am writing this column on a laptop computer in my new office, out in the barn behind my house. I am out here because, for some reason, I find myself unable to write in my home office, even though it is exactly the kind I dreamed about when I was an impecunious graduate student.

My home office is a large room with an unobstructed view of the surrounding farmland. The walls are lined with custom-made bookshelves crammed with everything I could need for my current projects. I have a top-of-the-line computer, a huge desk, and a comfortable Aeron chair. I have spared no expense or difficulty in creating the perfect place to write.

And, yet, here I am in the barn.

There are birds swooping around in the rafters, and I can smell a hundred years of former occupants: horses, cows, and, probably, pigs.

I could work in my office at the college, which, while considerably smaller than my home office, is no less beautiful or convenient. It is vastly superior to my old office in “The Worst Building on the Campus,” and it is the perfect stage for meeting my students -- all antique oak, stained glass, hardbound books, and soft black leather. But I find myself unable to write there either -- at least not anything beyond administrative items.

During the academic year, students are often wandering around, and, at our college, they think nothing of coming in, sitting down, and starting a conversation about nothing in particular: “How’s it going, professor?” And then we’ll talk for an hour.

Similarly, some of my colleagues troll the hallways, looking for someone to chat with. Of course, I am usually all too delighted to talk with anyone when I am in the middle of writing something difficult. Sometimes I’ll get up and wander the halls, trying to insinuate myself into my colleagues’ offices, returning the favor of interrupting their work.

It is not much different at home. My office is next to the family room, where my three daughters -- ages 7, 5, and 3 -- are usually playing. Every few minutes, one of them will peer at me through the glass panes of the French doors. Sometimes they make plaintive noises, hoping I will come out of my office. Lately, my 3-year-old demands to be spun to the point of dizziness on my office chair at least five times a day. For some reason, I find myself unable to turn her away, even with terrible deadlines looming.

Another more common distraction at home and at work is the availability of the Internet. I am a regular reader of at least 30 blogs and more than a dozen newspapers. And I am constantly browsing for new book recommendations on Amazon.com and searching for books on sale at several other sites like Daedalus, Labyrinth, and Edward R. Hamilton. That feels like the moral equivalent of work, even though it is really procrastination.

All of those activities, combined with my addiction to e-mail, means that I receive a continuous flow of custom-tailored information that is almost always more interesting to me than what I am writing.

I suppose another reason that I cannot write at home or at work is that I invariably end up talking to myself as I write. That is not because I am insane, though I fear that is what others will think. It is because I want to hear how my words sound. I am not a silent reader of other writers, either; I like to read particularly good passages out loud to reinforce my memory and appreciate the author’s craft. Whatever the merits of such behaviors, I don’t feel comfortable doing that within earshot of any living being, with the possible exception of uncomprehending animals.

So for all its lack of amenities, my third office in the barn offers fewer temptations to avoid writing. I have no Internet connection, and there’s no one here to speak to besides myself. So far, my productivity has improved significantly, even though my desk is a door on two sawhorses, and I am sitting on a box.

That seems just a little eccentric, so it is reassuring to recall that my work habits are not all that unusual among many more-talented authors. Some of their domestic lives are chronicled in a beautiful book published jointly by the Library of America and the Vendome Press: American Writers at Home (2004) with text by J.D. McClatchy and photographs by Erica Lennard.

Louisa May Alcott, for example, wrote Little Women seated at a small board attached to her bedroom wall by brackets. She had a nice view out the window of Orchard House in Concord, Mass., but there was apparently nothing else -- no distracting superfluities -- to keep her from writing her classic novel at the furious pace of a chapter a day.

In the same small town in a house called the Old Manse, Nathaniel Hawthorne also wrote in his bedroom on a small wooden slab facing the wall next to the fireplace. His wife, Sophia, was forbidden from entering the small room while he was writing. A similar law governed the Melville household in Pittsfield, Mass., though the author of Moby-Dick occupied the largest room in the house in pursuit of his mighty theme.

Mark Twain preferred to work in the attic of his mansion in Hartford, Conn. The room included a billiard table, where he would knock the balls together as he puzzled out the twists and turns of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is an elegant, Victorian den -- though less elaborately decorated than the rest of the house -- and it was probably remote enough from the siren songs of his playful daughters.

Ernest Hemingway’s compound in Key West, Fla., included a carriage house that he converted into a writer’s studio, full of macho accents. He worked there nearly every morning, when it was cool and his mind was clear, leaving the rest of the day free for cultivating experiences, so to speak.

Perhaps the writer whose habits, I imagine, most resemble my own is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Tired of Greenwich Village, she bought an abandoned dairy farm in the Berkshires named Steepletop. The house was extensive and lovely, but she preferred to work in an austere cabin on the property. It contained little besides a table, a chair, and a woodstove. It must have been a refuge from her otherwise crowded life.

So, you see, here in my barn, I am not without literary role models. But there is always trouble on the horizon.

The greatest threat to my new office -- and my current productivity -- is the desire to turn it into a “writer’s studio.” More and more, when the keys of my laptop stop clicking, an unbidden thought enters my head: “You know, it might be better if you installed some bookshelves, got the birds out of here, bought a proper desk, and set up some wireless method of accessing the Internet.” Sometimes I get up, fetch the tape measure, and start making plans.

In moments like those, another voice sometimes saves me: It’s Henry David Thoreau, who accomplished his best work while living in a tiny cabin at Walden Pond. A lady friend once gave him a doormat, but he gave it back, saying, “It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

Unfortunately, the joys of planning and furnishing a new office are always greater -- more illuminated by dreams of future accomplishment -- than anything that actually might be done in it. It is always easier to build than to write.

Now that I have thoroughly overcompensated for the mandatory asceticism of my graduate-school years, I have found that the best office for writing is one that offers no realistic possibility of improvement and nothing to get between me and one of the things I fear most: the blank screen that must be filled.

Mercifully, that task has been accomplished for today.