Last week was so incredibly productive. I had to take my laptop and write in my bed, since my office somehow seemed too overwhelming, too formal, too demanding.
So I wrote in my bed. It was a simple measure I could take to feel safer. I don’t know. Am I alone in this?
It makes me think of Virginia Woolf, of A Room of One’s Own, of how I, at 18, was so idealistic about writing that I wrote not one but two research papers meant to disprove Woolf’s claims, and how, a decade later, I would wonder, Maybe she was right.
Man, writing is hard. I saw this posted on social media today. I felt it.
I’m not complaining. Or I’m trying not to, at least. I have a calling on my life, and I am rising to it. No, my writing life isn’t easy, but it is sacred.
JACKIE LEA SOMMERS 
Yay this is what I want to hear. I’ve been incredibly unproductive writing wise this week, but hopefully that will turn back around soon!
Short assignments, as Anne Lamott would say!!! I believe in you SO MUCH.
Hard but sacred.
So very true.
❤
Which claims did you try to disprove?
Well, it’s been many years now, but if I recall right, she was saying that women need to have money (symbolized as a room of one’s own) and an “incandescent mind” (free of worries) in order to write well. We obviously know that to not be entirely true … even Woolf herself certainly didn’t have an incandescent mind! But she pretty visciously goes after Charlotte Bronte, so I picked apart that chapter, showing all the wrong logic, and then extrapolated to indicate that her entire thesis was wrong.
(Wow, so maybe I do remember a lot of it, ha!)
That said, now, at 35, I think I better understand what she meant. When my mind is clouded with worries about finances and any number of other anxieties, I am definitely not at the top of my writing game.
Thoughts?
That sounds about right. I would argue that the literal room of one’s own is important–as in space free from household duties to create. I remember when I first got a separate office and the ability to literally shut out the rest of the world, it was such a shift in how my world typically works that I truly understood what that meant. Especially since men are able to have someone else be in charge of things so they can have space to create/work.
And the other anxieties ties into what I learned doing The Artist’s Way and Julia Cameron’s insistence on morning pages for clearing out brain clutter so you (we) can focus on our actual creative endeavors. Which, like you, I probably would have thought was a load when I was younger haha. Ah, age certainly can bring about wisdom, huh?
Oh absolutely! I was just barely 18 and still enamoured by the idea of an artist having a tragic life. Now, at 35, I’d like a room of one’s own (ha!) and a nap. 🙂
Naps are everything. Yes. Hahaha.
Just a thought while reading this post: writers and readers are transducers; writers change feelings into words; readers change the words back into feelings. Thanks for the reminder to infuse writing with the sacred.