When we bought our house a few years ago, the primary selling point for me was the home office. It featured a wall of built-in bookshelves and another with windows overlooking a small woods. This was a place, I thought, where a writer could get some serious work done.
But I haven’t used the space for writing nearly as much as I thought I would. Long before we moved in, I had become accustomed to writing in coffee shops. They always seemed to provide me with just the right level of distraction to be productive. When I needed a break from words, I could people-watch or order something to drink, but I couldn’t sabotage my writing time by suddenly deciding to paint the shed, do all the laundry, or clean my office.
I wrote my last two books, and many of my Chronicle columns, at two different coffee shops near my home. I loved the ritual of finding a table, ordering a drink, checking social media until it arrived, and then shutting down everything except my Word document and getting to work. I came to associate those cafes with prolific writing: I could always jog my brain into action if I planted myself at a coffeehouse table.
Until the pandemic.
Suddenly my home office became the place where I had to not only write but also complete every other professional obligation. I taught from my home office. I used it to deliver dozens of virtual presentations on my latest book. I answered emails there, scrolled through social media, read manuscripts for a journal and book series. I worked on a book project and wrote these columns.
But for the first time in my life, the writing came slowly and painfully. Many essays have been written about how writing productivity suffered during the pandemic, and that was certainly the case with me. I finished a book manuscript the month before the pandemic hit, and then spent almost the next full year tinkering with ideas and proposals but not actually writing any books.
In the meantime, detritus piled up in my home office. The different obligations of my professional life used to be spread across different spaces. I kept my teaching materials — textbooks and tech tools — in my campus office. I had a travel briefcase with everything I needed to give teaching presentations or workshops on other campuses. All of that stuff slowly crowded into my home office.
While the pandemic slowed down my book writing, it accelerated my book buying. Newly purchased books arrived on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. They wriggled their way into every empty space in the room, like the sinister sprouting bulbs in Theodore Roethke’s poem “Root Cellar.”
One of those books, purchased on a whim, was Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, by Helen Sword, a professor of humanities at the University of Auckland. It’s a book that I had seen praised by other academics, and it deserves its accolades. Sword interviewed more than 100 academic writers (and surveyed 1,000 more) to learn about their writing practices. The variety described in her book was enlightening and inspiring. (Read a Scholars Talk Writing interview with Sword herself here.)
I’ve always felt slightly guilty about not being the kind of writer who gets up every morning at 4 a.m. to write, or who locks the door and pounds out 2,000 words a day in splendid isolation. I just don’t write like that, and it turns out very few of us do. Less than 15 percent of the writers Sword interviewed have a daily writing routine — and yet they’ve all managed to write and publish successfully. I count myself among them.
But the chapter that really knocked sense into my head — and helped me realize why I was having such trouble writing during the pandemic — was the one entitled “The Power of Place.”
Much of Sword’s book consists of quotes from her interview subjects, who, in this chapter, speak very deliberately and insightfully about how they discovered — or created — spaces that triggered productive writing. There is no consistency in their choices — people write everywhere. But the stories testify to the connection between place and writing productivity.
At some point while reading that chapter, I smacked my hand to my forehead and yelled out “Aha!” In that moment, I realized that I had become separated from my productive writing spaces, and that the separation had been plaguing me all year.
Even when I had managed to get writing done in recent months, I had found it less enjoyable and absorbing than when I was at my coffee shops. It took a herculean effort for me, working from home day after day, to get into my writing zone — and I couldn’t seem to stay there long.
In fact, just a month before reading Sword’s book, I had started taking my laptop out of my office and into the dining room and writing there instead. But soon enough, the laptop was joined by books and papers, and the dining-room table began to resemble my messy office. My wife is the kind of person who likes order in the house, and this did not sit well with her.
“Why are you working out here where everyone can disturb you,” she asked me one morning, a modicum of frustration in her voice, “when you have that beautiful office in there where you can work in peace?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
And at the time, I didn’t. But it became clear after reading Sword’s book: I had been searching for a new space that I could dedicate to writing because my home office just wasn’t cutting it. Some part of me already seemed to know that — even if I couldn’t articulate it to my wife in the moment.
Sword’s book reminded me that our brains exist in bodies, and the intellectual work we do can be deeply influenced by, and tied to, the spaces our bodies occupy. I can remember exactly where I was when I read some of the most important books and articles of my life. Likewise, I can remember many of the places where I had insights that led to my best pieces of writing. When I return to those spaces, the ideas I had there come flooding back, and sometimes expand and deepen.
So, too, with writing. If you have written fruitfully in a particular place, your brain will associate that happy place with productivity. So when you find yourself stuck, what your brain and body might need is to reclaim your productive place or find a new one that is purely for writing and separate from other work and life obligations. It might be a space that worked for you before the pandemic — one that was taken from you but that you can now reoccupy.
If you didn’t have such a place in pre-pandemic days, now might be the time to create one. The location can be anywhere. What matters is that you set aside this spot for writing and build up an association in your mind between this space and fertile writing. Every time you plant yourself there, your brain gets the message: time to write.
On a sunny Thursday in June of 2021, my wife told me she’d be gone all morning to golf with a friend. The teenagers still living in my house were all asleep. I packed up my laptop and a couple of books, and headed to one of my coffee shops. I ordered my green tea and found a table. A couple of dozen people were scattered around the room, and a regular stream of customers came in and went out the door.
I pulled out my laptop, prepared to jump on the Wi-Fi, and then decided against it. I opened up my document and began working in the usual way, alternating periods of intense concentration on my work with breaks for dreamy people-watching and sips of green tea. The words piled up. By the time I packed up and walked out just after noon, I had written 1,500 words — one of my most productive days in recent memory.
When you are blocked in your writing, or feeling unproductive, you might chastise yourself for laziness, question the worth of your project, or wonder whether you have lost your talent and your drive. But what if the problem is not you or your project? What if the problem is the writing environment that you’ve created — or neglected to create? What if all you need is an opportunity to designate a writing space away from email, social media, household chores, child care, and the like?
The coffee shops are open, my friends. But so are the pubs, park benches, backyard tables, and unused corners in your home. Get up and claim one for your writing — and see if that simple act can help you recapture your writing productivity.
