The Space of Writing

Like many other writers who consider the whole act of creation to have an almost mystical dimension, I am completely convinced that my writing is profoundly affected by the conditions under which it is produced. This is not to say that I have settled upon a perfect context, but that I am persuaded that such a context might exist, if only I could find it. It always seems to me that every great writer is noteworthy in this respect. Think of Proust, writing from his bed, in his cork-lined room at night, finally safe from the asthma-inducing dust and pollen of the Parisian streets. Or Trollope, rising at dawn every day to put in the three highly-productive hours of writing that produced his immense oeuvre before heading off to his day job. Colette's early writing career was even more ritualistic; her husband, the owner of a kind of publishing factory where young writers churned out dozens of works to which he then put his own name, used to lock her in her room for hours at a time, only allowing her out when the requisite number of pages had been written. A brutal initiation, perhaps, but it meant that she was capable throughout her career of producing copy to deadline no matter what the circumstances. Balzac has probably the most outrageously extravagant tale, however. Fuelled on coffee, he would work for 8 hours through the night, writing at a tremendous speed, in order to have the day free for revision and for the rest of his life.

It's not so surprising that the space of writing – the space of extraordinary vulnerability, of reckless emotional expenditure and painfully sought inspiration – should need to correspond to some very particular physical space in which it can occur. I often think that the insides of our heads are reflected in the way we fill the space around us. Certainly we mould external space to soothe our aesthetic and sensual reactions: 'everything round invites a caress', for instance, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, who wrote The Poetics of Space, and who spent much of his career recognising that our experience of space is much more complex that it may seem. The space of writing is probably most romantically represented in the fantasy that Jean-Paul Sartre's mother fed him when he felt discouraged; a room of his own, peace, space, quiet. 'All I could see,' Sartre wrote, 'was a pool of light on my table : in the middle of a room drowned in shadow, curtains drawn, I was leaning over an exercise book bound in black cloth.' Seclusion, darkness and a pool of light; the perfect imagery for the golden well of creativity that lurks hidden at the heart of the unknowable human soul.

It is undeniably so that space holds its own ghosts and demons, not to mention the distinct imprint of the person who most regularly inhabits it. When Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard embarked on their passionate but ultimately destructive affair, they spent a period of several weeks together in Spain. They rented a tiny flat and spent the mornings writing, face to face across a table so small that their typewriters almost touched. One morning, they decided to swap places and write a few pages of each other's book. 'Normally, I'd sit groaning and biting my nails, staring into space, and Kingsley would think for a moment, and then, suddenly charged up, would tap away at a steady rate, sometimes laughing out loud at his characters. So now while I was laughing and typing away, he was groaning and staring into space.' Howard also recalled that only one person ever noticed what they had done.

Which probably goes to show that despite all romanticised preconceptions, the human will to creativity is probably far more resilient and robust than we dare to believe. Last summer, when I had my half-book to write and an anxiety-inducing deadline, I set up my laptop on the kitchen table and simply forced myself to keep typing. I had my 10-year old son home for the school holidays at the time, and somehow I managed to maintain a steady-ish flow of chitchat with him as he played around me. I wrote 40,000 words in just over seven weeks. It nearly killed me. But then who am I to moan? Think of the soldiers in the two world wars, penning their heart-breaking verses in the trenches and on the muddy, cratered fields of Flanders. Or the young Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, who managed to write an extraordinary journal testifying to her love of God as she worked in the transit camp for prisoners at Westerbork, and awaited death at Auschwitz.

I suppose in the end the important thing is not to confuse the context of writing and its ornamentation with the act itself. Colette tells the tale of her father's desk with its toothsome tools of the trade which she long coveted; virgin blotting paper, pens with nibs 'no thicker than a blackbird's quill', bronze ink pots, watermarked paper, a stamping machine, and her most desired possession: green sealing wax flecked with gold. When her father died, and his study was dismantled, Colette came across a set of large, beautifully bound notebooks that were intended to be the sum of his writings. When she opened them up all she found was a dedication 'To Sido…' his wife, Colette's mother. The pages themselves were entirely blank. Better, I think, to use a chewed biro or a slow-moving, elderly PC to good result, than to have a beautiful context and a blank page.