My Writing Work Space

by Amalia Dillin

When writers talk about their work space, most of the time, they talk about their desks, their offices, their computers and their bookshelves. Do they keep these areas tidy and neat, or are they messy? What do they keep in that space for inspiration? Et cetera, et cetera. And that’s entirely reasonable. Writers need a space to sit and write, ultimately, and usually a room and space set apart from the rest of one’s daily life is conducive to productivity. But for me, the set up is a little bit different.

Summer

For starters, I don’t have a desk. (Well. I do. But it’s too high for a laptop to be used comfortably, so I gave up trying to use it as a workspace.) I don’t work in any one place in the house. Sometimes I sit at the kitchen table with a view of the birdfeeder and the back yard.

Spring

Sometimes, on nice days, I sit on the 3 season porch, with “The View” from the house which reaches, on the clearest days, all the way to the mountains of Vermont. Sometimes I work at the dining room table, which allows me to stare out through the porch again, or I work in the living room, from the comfort of the sofa or a recliner, with the front door and the windows open wide and the birds and chipmunks and various wildlife only a glance away.

Fall

Perhaps by now you’ve noticed the common theme to my work spaces: the yard and “The View” and the looking outside. Which is a little bit strange, maybe, because I pretty much hate bugs, and I’m not much of an outdoorswoman in the grand scheme of things. But man, being able to look out the window while I’m working at night, and see the moon shining down on me, or the rainbow of changing leaves rippling in the wind…

Winter

There is nothing more inspiring, more fostering of my creativity than that. In fact, some pieces of the landscape here have wormed their way into my books almost directly. The immense, perfectly shaped Catalpa tree in the yard, for instance, became a template for my Tree of Knowledge in my Fate of the Gods trilogy. My characters take walks through woods that look just like mine in one of the novellas I’m working on, currently, complete with fallen pine-tree, and a vine that’s naturally twisted and twined to form a perfect bench.

So, what does my workspace look like?

Well, if you ask me, it looks pretty darn beautiful.

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