Tam Eastley’s Writing Space
In order to write, I need a playlist, a timer, and my desk.
I write best in the mornings before work. By the evening I’m normally too braindead. Two friends recently told me that they can write until 2am and I wish I could do that, it sounds so
cool, so magical, but I’m definitely a morning person. Which is strange to admit. I never thought I would be but writing has brought it out in me.
I get up at 6am, do hand-written morning pages by the window, and then I move to my desk, to my computer, and try to focus. I set a timer for an hour. I figure: if I can do an hour a day,
that’s good. Sometimes I’m on a roll and I manage to do more. Sometimes I see that I have 10 minutes left and I haven’t done anything and I panic but that will spur me on to write for 20
minutes straight. Whatever I write in that span of time is normally pretty good because I’m too worried about time to go back and edit obsessively which often just causes me to get stuck on a single sentence/word/comma.
My playlists have very few requirements: it must be something chill and it cannot have lyrics. Lately I’ve been listening to Grandbrothers and Felix Rösch. If I’m feeling crazy I’ll take a chance on whatever Spotify suggests but the second someone starts singing or talking, I’m done. I’m distracted. Ideally I like to not notice what I’m listening to although if I really like a song I’ll stop and push the like button but then somehow I end up on Instagram.
My writing desk is in Berlin where I’ve lived for the last 16 years. It is also my work desk where I do my day job but I try not to think about that. For a while I wouldn’t write at my day job desk because I wanted to keep those parts of my life strictly separate but my day job desk has an external monitor that my work sent me and it’s better for my back/neck etc… You’d think my day job desk would have a bunch of day job stuff on it but truth be told it’s stacked with novels that inspire me (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel to name a few), and books that help me (Save The Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody and Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg). Sometimes there are also post-it notes splattered to the monitor that say things like “no editing!”, or “FOCUS”, or more recently “apartment as metaphor???”.
I’ve tried to write in cafés but I just can’t. I end up people watching and even though I have my headphones in, the second I hear someone speaking English I start to eavesdrop. I have visions of myself writing by the canal and watching the tourist boats go by (even in my writing daydreams I’m apparently not writing) but in reality the sun is always too bright, my computer dies, or I start wondering where the closest bathroom is. I get hungry or thirsty or my foot falls asleep or I-don’t-like-the-look-of-that-cloud.
I feel like I’ve read somewhere that it’s a good practice to write in other places for inspiration purposes, a literal new perspective, but whenever I try I just end up thinking about how I’d rather be at my desk. Which is fine I guess. I like my desk. I like my timer. I like my playlists. I suppose it’s the writing that’s meant to take me other places anyhow.
Tam Eastley (she/her) is a Canadian writer and web developer based in Berlin, Germany. She is working on her second novel and her work has appeared in publications such as Berlin Flash Fiction, Fusion Fragment, and The Wild Word. In 2023 she participated in The Stinging Fly’s summer school fiction workshop. She can be found online here: tamwrites.space.