Published Thursday, May 01, 2008 1:55 PM
Updated Thursday, May 01, 2008 1:55 PM

 

How do I write thee?

Let me count the ways.

Agatha Christie said all she needed was a small table. It could be carved mahogany in an elegant drawing room or she was up for using a rough board thrown over a saw horse during a Baghdad dig. Dame Agatha wrote in both those situations, being an English country lady as well as the wife of an archeologist. One of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s favorite refuges was Sun Valley, Idaho, where he wrote in the mornings and hunted and fished in the afternoons.

Erma Bombeck wrote in the bathroom. She began her writing career in the only room in the house with a lock on it, and thus the only one which gave her some privacy from her three young children. A fellow scribe I know writes on Mondays. Her friends and family don’t call or come by unless it’s an emergency. Tuesday through Sunday she lives the rest of her life. Mondays she writes.

Another author friend writes first in longhand, and then transcribes it to a computer. Some people write successfully on a strict schedule of so many pages or so many hours per day. Others ply their art and craft in a more slapdash method. The routine has to suit the writer.

Anyone who has ever written in a newsroom can write anywhere I suspect, even while crossing the River Styx. A newsroom is open and noisy with phones ringing, people calling – often shouting – to each other, visitors stopping by, and all the while hard news is breaking, information is changing and deadlines are looming. I wrote in that situation for a dozen years, which was the best training in the world. (Although I came to the newsroom from being an at-home mother of four boisterous children while moving all over creation to keep up with my Air Force husband, so the atmosphere transition for me wasn’t all that great!)

Nowadays I make notes anywhere, while watching TV, at a restaurant, in a movie, in the middle of the night when I wake up with an idea (I have a pen that lights up), at the grocery store or sometimes at a stop light. But now when I write, I write in my very own study. Ah, heaven. I found I can write alone, but probably because of my background, not often in silence. I like to write to Bach. His clean, crisp and forceful compositions clear the air and my head, and I seem able to think better to his Fugue in D Minor or Brandenburg Concerto.

The writing life to me is exciting and challenging, such as when I get to meet and interview new people and hear fresh ideas. It can be maddening and frustrating, particularly if I get stuck, or mess up or like when I first encountered censorship. This happened when my dad abruptly ceased publication of my neighborhood newspaper when, at age nine, I printed verbatim (and correctly spelled, I might add) what our next door neighbors yelled at each other during one “domestic disagreement.”

One thing I can definitely say about it, writing may be lots of things, but it is never, ever dull.