I’m getting a divorce from myself. Trust me, it’s a happy tale, and is the only way forward from here.
It’s along story, but I’ll try not to trigger your inner TL,DR alarms. It all boils down to a simple observation – I need a different kind of space for exploration and creativity than I do for editing / revising / publishing. When I try to write completely from a digital starting point, I end up playing games, surfing, or just staring at a blank monitor. I’ve not had a really good creative thought in my head in months, which in writer’s terms is nearly a lifetime of being stranded on a desert island with nothing to read.
For the past few ages, I’ve haunted coffeeshops, restaurants, or any place that wouldn’t kick me out. I would spread some stuff out on the table, have some java and start playing with ideas. Or I just watch people for character nuances I can use later. However, there are usually enough distractions to keep me from really zoning in on any particular ideas. When I’m wrestling with the early seeds of an idea, the fertile ground I need is a flat space where I can spread out. I’ve known this since childhood when I took over entire corners of the living room floors with papers. I end up doing charts, maps, doodles, and linking ideas in huge dashes or lines zotted bits of color. When I get enough of the idea dashed around, then I can move to a more digital format and start sculpting the words into something a little more coherent.
So how did I divorce myself?
I bought a desk at a consignment shop a few years ago (Goodwill? Maybe.) and glossed it up – a nice happy red. The Red Desk was going to be the centerpiece of my home office – the downstairs edition. For less than $50 (for desk, paint and hardware) I had a writer’s zone in the middle of everything. Sadly, it was in the way. It sucked up far too much floorspace for the amount of use it invoked. I dragged it upstairs and shoved it into a corner of my office where it quietly and patiently waited for something to do. I wanted to use it, but hey – everything is digital now, right? What can it do that my Mac can’t do? It collected the flotsam that should have been tossed.
I spent this past weekend hauling out bags of accumulated trash, painting the backside of the desk a chocolatey brown, and rotated it so that I could actually have a view out my window. It is stocked up now with forgotten colored pencils, highlighters, markers, graph paper, a small candle holder; and all of the accouterments that help me scrawl the bits that keep floating around my head into some sort of less-than-vague thoughts.
The newly purposed red desk
I still use the digital side of my office for committing the story into the inevitably larger chunks of 1s and 0s, editing, reviewing, posting, commenting, audio books and audio mixing, and publishing. The id goes over to the red desk to play, and the ego gets behind the monitor and fixes the poor beast’s grammar and improves on the ideas. There’s a dotted yellow line down the middle of the room in my mind – as clear as if I had painted one on the floor.
The great divide
Why two desks in one small room? What is the measurable benefit? Well I’ve decided the story I’m been trying to tell is really a modern/futuristic thriller, not a high fantasy slugfest, and an entire Pandora’s box of possibilities is already ajar. I have a new set of characters, a setting that is appropriately disconcerting, and the making of a plot that I can actually manage.
Getting reorganized isn’t a bitch. It is both a luxury and a requirement.
