Writing is by nature a lonely and singular endeavor, with concentration and focus vital for success. Finding the proper environment to generate the creative juices and encourage creativity is essential, but it isn’t a one-size-fits-all undertaking. Every writer needs his or her own favorite writing dojo, hideaway, or fortress of solitude, and finding that private universe of creativity may be all that separates you from your masterpiece.
Robert Harrill was a writer, a storyteller, and a philosopher, but he achieved legend as the “Fort Fisher Hermit.” From 1956 to his death in 1972, he lived in an abandoned World War II ammunition bunker (pictured above), in the marshes of Fort Fisher, North Carolina. He had gone there to escape society and work on his treatise to common sense, entitled, “A Tyrant in Every Home.” Though he died before the book was published, thousands of people visited his humble hermitage over the years to hear his lectures and experience a modern day Thoreau in the flesh.
Harrill’s commitment to finding a creative space was extreme, to be sure, but it isn’t necessary to sequester oneself in a concrete hovel to achieve inspiration.
Some writers don’t even leave the house. Jane Austen required only a simple, window-side table and chair, and Chautauqua’s own Summer Hammond spies on her muse from her “writing nook” overlooking the garden below. Home offices need not be simple, however, as evidenced by George Bernard Shaw’s rotating hut that allowed him to have the sun at his back all day.
Working a real job is ordinarily a detriment to creativity, but not always. William Faulkner created As I Lay Dying while working the night shift at an electrical plant. Luckily for him and us, the plant didn’t explode from his neglect, occupied as he was by sending the Bundren family on their macabre odyssey.
Libraries are the easiest and most obvious choice for a writing space, surrounded by stacks of books either serving as inspiration or mocking you for your failure. Not everyone enjoys the taunting tomes and the sterile, goading silence found there though, which brings us to coffee shops.
The image of a writer hunkered over a burgeoning novel and a steaming cappuccino is nearly as cliché as that same writer standing in a pub the night before. Whether drawn by tradition, people watching, or just the caffeine, such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Elliot, and Ernest Hemingway crafted their legends while sipping java in a street café’s window seat. J.K. Rowling famously constructed her first Harry Potter novel in the back of an Edinburgh coffee shop with her baby napping beside her in a stroller. In current times the lure of free Wi-Fi is undoubtedly another irresistible attraction for cash-strapped scribes.
Like The Hermit, some writers venture farther afield, to the writer’s cabin, or hut, or campsite. Henry David Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond set the standard for writers seeking the peace and quiet of nature. David Gessner maintains a hut in the trees just beyond his backyard where he disappears to seek inspiration in nature. Many a cowboy ballad or hunting story has been composed by the glow of a campfire or woodstove, and without his failed venture into the Yukon, freezing nearly to death and afflicted with scurvy, Jack London may never have become a writer at all.
The opposite end of the spectrum from writing outdoors is the unfortunate experience of creating art while incarcerated. Marquis de Sade, Nelson Mandela, O. Henry, and Adolph Hitler all had nothing but time while doing time to write their most memorable works. Martin Luther King’s Letters From Birmingham City Jail was written, obviously, in jail. This is not to suggest that getting tossed into prison will assure creation of The Great American Novel, but there are tougher paths to literary achievement.
War. George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia is an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls comes from his personal notes while serving as an ambulance driver during World War I. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien brings his experiences in Vietnam to life with a level of detail that could only be achieved by one who lived it, and then wrote it.
As you go looking for your writer’s Shangri La, remember that the most important place to which writers can disappear is their own mind. Your story isn’t in a library, café, cabin, or prison cell, it is in you. Good luck finding your own fortress of solitude.
–Don Stutts
Image by Don Stutts