Strength in numbers
Forget the stereotype of the solitary author and let your creativity flourish in the company of like-minded writers, urges novelist Clare Empson
Kylie Haulk on Unsplash
Most of us prefer to write without a surround sound of office noise. But being alone, day in day out can be a lonely business. Finding the ‘right’ writing companions and a shared office can give you the best of both worlds.
There is a hackneyed image of the writer hunched over a typewriter in a booklined study or freezing in a garret in the pale grey sludge of dawn. Silence and solitude, the image says, are the necessary accoutrements of the committed author. Having recently rented an office with two other writers where we meet day in, day out to bash out our novels, pausing to make tea and procrastinate in five-minute bursts I’m beginning to think the exact opposite is true.
I first started trying to write novels, albeit in a rather haphazard, lackadaisical way, around twenty years ago. Back then it was all about waking up early before work for a few hours at the kitchen table. Even when I started to take my writing more seriously it was just me and my laptop, snatched solo weekends when my husband took the kids away or those savage early starts before the rest of the house woke up. This is how my first novel was written with many stop starts over a period of nine years.
But a few months ago I received an intriguing email titled ‘A Room of Our Own’. It was from one of the mums at my son’s school.