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Peter Norman’s Writing Space

By Peter Norman

This is the desk where I write and edit these days. It’s a very comfortable setup, but it’s temporary: I’m house-sitting, and neither the space nor the furniture is mine.

An explanation in case these two details look odd: the fat blue book with grey stripes on it is a long-serving Canadian Oxford Dictionary, now held together with duct tape; the weird desktop image is a still of Tommy Wiseau in his incomparable debut movie, The Room.

Three Things I Can’t Write Without:

I can’t think of anything I absolutely need in order to write. It’s obviously a huge help to have a laptop or pen/paper, but in a pinch a poem can be composed by memory. I can write with silence or noise, in public or private, on a moving plane/train/bus or in the stillness and seclusion of a devoted workspace like this one.

So here, instead, are three things I prefer in order to write:

1. Control over my sonic environment. I may choose music or cafe babble or city hubbub, but ideally any selection of tunes is my own and the verbal space isn’t hijacked by a particularly intrusive/distracting conversation.

2. A computer. Faster than writing by hand. And I do like to edit off a clean laser printout.

3. Certainty that this writing is the best use of my time right now. If I’m just using it to procrastinate something else (whether a pressing non-writing task or a writing task that’s less immediately attractive), that background guilt is a problem. But if I’ve set aside time specifically to write, and I know that I’ve scheduled other important things so that they’ll happen in their own good time, that gives me the clarity of mind to get into “the zone.”

Peter Norman writing space

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