I write in an old-school paneled study in the middle of a large farmhouse in rural Iowa. I have pine floors, a big cherry desk, and a small window. The room is cluttered with papers and books and gifts from friends.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.
I write in two very different places: my desk in Palo Alto, California, is piled high with myriad jumbled books and papers whose stratigraphy is a challenge. Summers in Bozeman, Montana, I write in a spare space, surrounded by interesting rocks and fossils instead of books, on an old oak table with nothing but my laptop.
I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don't want to forget. I tend to grab whatever's to hand and just get the thing down before it's lost. It's not what you would call a streamlined system.
I wrote a lot in study hall to while away the hours.
My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs' Home of books.
I prefer a cluttered workspace.
Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I've hung bird feeders... for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.
I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.
My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.