Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's avatar

Here are some other comments I received on where people write.

I do best on trains or planes i think…being fully suspended, away from distractions

and with the desire to decompress…

Like you and most other scribblers, I write all the time in my head, but this is where I assemble it. Although I don’t write in coffee shops, I do fuel up with strong Java. I also operate using the advice of William Stafford, “If you get stuck, lower your standards, and keep writing.”

Airplanes and hotels, sort of walled off from real life.

A friend wrote that Ernest Hemingway wrote in coffee shops.

For me it is all about the draft. The shitty first one with buzz all around be that a cafe, a library or anything else. All following drafts, or, whenever I know what I am doing and where to go, I need it quiet and quiet can be, coffee or tea or ginger ale depending on the season and definitely candlelight even when sunlight is flooding in.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. -Virginia Woolf, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Just wanted to say that I enjoyed your photos of where you write, since we must be neighbors, I love that tulip special park.

Expand full comment
H C PALMER's avatar

Would you please write about word choices. Including choices for your young readers fiction? Do you think differently about word choices/sentence structure now than 15-20 years ago?

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts