A Room of One's Own

Being free to wander in the mind while sitting still

Reading time: c. 8 minutes

The Virginia Woolf book of the same title, published nearly a century ago, outlines the material necessities for a female artist to work. Woolf wrote not just about the need for a lockable room, separate from others, but about the financial imperatives required to use it. She wrote about the perils of the pram in the hallway and the drain of motherhood upon attention. She wrote of the institutions, such as universities, from which women were largely excluded. She established a manifesto for the woman writer. And fair play to her. Woolf rightly became one of the champions of modernist fiction, a great innovator of the novel form. Through the Hogarth Press, she introduced great ideas, both male and female, into English cultural life.

In the century since Woolf’s essay, things have changed. There is the much-heralded and debatable ‘crisis of masculinity’, the redefinition of male roles in the light of feminism. This is perhaps as true in publishing as anywhere. Men are now rarer figures in the publishing world. I listened with interest this week to BBC’s Antisocial, a programme about the decline of male writers in publishing.

No complaints here from me, let alone whining. If the redress of the publishing balance has swung for a time in favour of women, as a man, I’d be naïve not to recognise that I still exist in a world of patriarchal privilege. Good on women writers if they find themselves both the dominant consumers and producers of literary writing. Male voices will endure. We live, moreover, in a world where it has never been easier to publish. It is, admittedly, a world where the proliferation of such voices, unedited and unrefined, makes it more difficult to make writing pay. So be it. I reconciled myself long ago to the fact that writing is a passion project, not a means to make a living.

Woolf’s essay raises another important material question, relevant to both genders. Where is that room of one’s own? How does it come to be? What, ideally, does a writer need to function?

Would Woolf, these days, have written ‘A Laptop of One’s Own’? That is what most aspiring writers need, along with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

I’ve been that poseur who sometimes breaks out my laptop and notebook in cafés for a change of scene, happy to blank out the ambient noise but to work amidst the bustle of daily life. There is a performative element to this. See me, the aspirant artist seems to say, creating. Marvel at my sensitivity. Look on my works - or look at me creating them - and swoon. For some, it’s a form of flirtation. For others, it’s no pose but a vital need. Libraries, similarly, remain places where people can go, be warm, entertained and productive. I love the hum of such places.

But often, when I am at my most driven, I want, like Greta Garbo, to be alone. Yes, I suppose that is possible in any nook you find with a laptop. A mobile phone means instant access to the internet. Such a transient capacity is helpful when travelling. But, like many, I crave the security of stasis.

That is where the study, office, studio or workspace comes in. Call it what you will. Mine’s a study because that’s what I find myself doing mostly, studying the words and thoughts of others as much as writing my own. There’s a sense of being the perpetual student, of not coming to an endpoint, a graduation. To be a perennial learner, to have what in Zen they call ‘beginner’s mind’ is inherent to the attitude of a good writer.

A study conjures old-fashioned images. I think leather chairs, Persian rugs, oak panelling. That’s not my study. It is clean, airy, light, perched high. I have plants by windows that, for months on end, are open. I look out over fields to the sea. What it has, most importantly, is a door that I can close. Beyond that, it has the same desk that I have used for the last 22 years, ink-stained and mug-circled, big enough to keep my pens and journals and to perch my beloved MacBook. And, behind that desk, there are shelves, full both of my own journals and the books of those I love and who provide fuel for research and inspiration. There is a single rocking chair where I read. There is a kerosene lamp for those nostalgic times when I want the lights turned low. There are my zafu and zabuton. This is my Zendo too, the place where I meditate each day.

Do I dream of a better place? Of course. Who doesn’t? Michael Pollan’s excellent book A Place of My Own outlines the dream many of us have, to design and construct a place particular to our writing needs. Pollan plans and builds a writing cabin on the outskirts of his New England property, from collaborating with the architect to physical construction alongside a skilled craftsman.

It would be easy to theorise that there is a corollary between literary construction and physical building. In both, people discuss craft. Conversely, for me, there’s an insecure self-justification lurking behind the wish to build. I was raised by a hyper-masculine man who looked with scorn upon the arts. He built sheds, serviced his own car, and raised gardens. Part of me - needy, insecure, lacking in self-esteem - wishes to ‘prove’ something through the construction of my own shelter, to justify my artistic wishes in building the place in which to do them. Owning that desire, acknowledging its neurosis, is important. Still, the urge lingers.

Then there is the business of solitude. One of the essential purposes of the room of one’s own is to have a place in which to be alone or, as I have come to think of it when writing fiction, to live with the voices in my head. To return to Virginia Woolf, she was childless. That leaves a good deal more time to occupy that room of one’s own once you’ve found, paid for or made it. Cyril Connolly’s famous maxim is that “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” The Paris Review article in the link explores how fully that is a gendered statement, of whether parenthood for women more than men is the death knell of artistic ambition.

For me, it has not been. We bottle-fed our daughters. That meant that I took my turn of late nights and early mornings. They were mercifully good sleepers early. It did, however, mean that if I ever wanted to get into that room, it had to be early, before anyone woke up. Gone were my artistic pretensions of being a night owl, scratching away at my magnum opus while the world slept. Instead, I often rose, a product of those bottle feeds, before dawn, before the rest of the world was at their desks and sending emails.

Technology may have rendered the need for a permanent room of one’s own moot. However, if the laptop has become a liberator, along with the mobile phone, it has also become a shackle. For most writers, their artistic output is not their major source of income. That means work of other sorts. And, as we have mostly found to our detriment, that means that the work no longer stops at the 9am-5pm boundaries that used to pertain. Having a laptop and a mobile might mean occasionally working from home. It also means being reachable at all hours.

My idealised ‘room of one’s own’ comes severed from a mobile phone connection, a temporal release from the distraction of work’s demands. That’s only achieved by distance from a signal or a Faraday cage.

I, like many, am captivated by the idea of isolation, finding a temporary refuge from work in a place free of distraction, surrounded by nature. Much as walking for me loosens my thoughts, allowing me to perambulate and notice the world, being in nature, far from distraction in statis also helps. In Wordsworth’s famous 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, people remember the first section readily, that poetry is poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ without recalling the second part of that quotation, that ‘it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. The room of one’s own is the place where that original thought is distilled and refined, shaped into an artistic form through which it can connect with others.

That refuge, at present, is a cabin of the mind. I, like many, drool over the cabins presented in Cabin Porn, curator of shelters, often in the sort of isolated locale without a mobile signal where you can live free of the email’s incessant pinging. I know I am not alone in such fantasies. One of my great literary heroes, Kevin Barry - with his own writing shed in a converted Garda barracks in south Co. Sligo - turned me on to the work of Martijn Doolaard.

Doolaard has taken the leap. A freelance graphic designer, he’s also an adventurer, completing two epic cycle rides that he has previously documented. When he wanted to settle, it was somewhere in nature. He took matters into his own hands. The continued presence of a mobile signal where he chose enables freelance work. He works just enough to fund his project, converting two dilapidated alpine barns into habitable dwellings. His YouTube channel is one of the best examples of ‘slow television’ that I have seen. He gives a weekly document of his renovation efforts. Alongside them, he paints, writes, designs and works at his own pace. He has managed digital distraction and is, slowly and beautifully, creating a life and a way of working for himself in the Italian mountains.

Such a lesson leads me to various conclusions.

• Technology now means that this ‘room’ of one’s own is a mindset, a spaciousness, a temporal space as much as a physical one.

• Technology is non-dual. It is both liberating and potentially distracting. It’s all in how we use it. I need to be better at using it as a tool rather than being controlled by others’ use of it. I have found Cal Newport’s work, particularly Digital Minimalism, especially useful in managing this balance.

• Technology can mean we make that creative ‘room’ wherever we are. But we need the temporal ‘room’ away from work in which to create.

• That room must also be intellectual. I need somewhere static where I can keep the tools of my trade, the books that inspire me and to which I can refer. I prefer the analogue book, much as the e-reader is convenient for travel. I need my books around me.

• That ‘room’ - physical, temporal, intellectual - needs to be free of distraction. For some, that may be achieved through noise-cancelling headphones and ambient tunes. I need quiet, the only sounds natural. Silencing the notifications is vital.

• I think best while moving, at least in terms of tuning out the conscious mind and letting the unconscious mind go. But when I come to distil and refine those thoughts, it has to be somewhere still, quiet and calm.

Have I found that place? I’ve got a place. It’s where I’m writing this. Is it perfect? No. But as Churchill would have it, ‘perfection is the enemy of progress’. It is sufficient, far more so than for many who produce great work, and for that I am grateful.