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Ten Perfect Places to Write

Roald Dahl famously wrote in a little hut at the bottom of his garden – one you can now visit at the Roald Dahl Museum in Dahl’s home village of Great Missenden. “It certainly hasn’t been cleaned for five years,” he told the BBC of his shed in 1982, although he added a caveat: a goat had got in and he had swept up the poo.

Dahl sat in his hut, in a chair, swathed in a sleeping bag in winter, sharpened six pencils, took out a yellow American legal pad shipped over from New York, set his flask of tea at his elbow and began to write. He’d write from 10.30 to 12, stop for a gin and tonic, lunch and a bar of chocolate in that order, then write for another two hours in the afternoon.

A quarter of my waking life I’m completely immersed in a dotty world of fantasy.

– Roald Dahl

A little hut at the bottom of the garden

It’s the dream of many writers to have a shed at the bottom of the garden, like Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat. Although Joanne’s is actually rather grand and made of stone with a slate floor and green oak gables.

Shahrukh Husain works out of a shed, grandly-titled a ‘garden studio’ when it was sold to her:

It’s like a studio because it has windows, glass doors and shelves; it’s got the internet, heating and lighting, and it really does feel like a little cottage in the forest, especially in summer when plants grow over it, and the stems from a wonderful rose bush fall across the front making it look quite picturesque.

In the basement

Roald Dahl couldn’t have worked in his cellar because it was where he kept several thousand bottles of wine, but for Julian Turner, the basement is just the place to write.

It is a wonderful place in which to sit and think. There is a cellar window, which is usually mucky, but through which beams of light come in if the day’s sunny, filtered by fronds of ferns, which have grown up randomly in the well in front of the window. There is a stove which I light it in winter. In the gloom of that underground room, pools of light from the lamps act as little worlds or micro environments in which the imagination can exist.

In a hotel

Maya Angelou used to set off at 6.30am – to a hotel.

I keep a hotel room in which I do my work—a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon. If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvellous.

 

– From an interview with Claudia Tate in 1983, reprinted in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals.

In bed

When Maya Angelou was in her hotel room, she’d ask the staff not to change the sheets because she didn’t sleep in the bed.

To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses.

At 11 she’d have a small glass of sherry as she reclined.

Helena Drysdale also likes to write in bed, having exhausted all other options:

I’m like Goldilocks – I have tried every room in my house, the first one was too big, and the next one was too small. Then the next room was too dark and the one after that was too light. So I have now decided that my favourite place is my bed. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is I reach for my laptop, open it up, and carry on writing. I’m joined by my cat and my dog and sometimes a daughter and sometimes a husband. It’s very bad for my back, neck and shoulders, but it seems very warm and cosy and somehow private.

Meanwhile, Deborah Bosley says:

I have scribbled in notebooks while swinging in a hammock in the garden, recorded overheard snippets of conversations on the backs of envelopes on trains, and sat on bleak, windswept shingle beaches along the English South Coast with a pocket book and pencil, feeling cold and waiting for great thoughts to descend.

In the office

“I’m lucky enough to have my own office,” Mick Jackson says. “In the past I’ve worked in libraries and other places, but I like getting out of the house, I like getting up, having my breakfast, getting my bag and leaving my house behind. I’ve got a big desk, with all my bits of paper and my pencils laid out and I know which draft I’m working on and what I’ve got to work on next. Ideally, I would get there quite early, at 7 in the morning.”

In a cafe

When one thinks of writers in cafés, the image that might come to mind is vaguely Parisian – the writer with an espresso looking dreamily across the sidewalk – or perhaps it’s hipster: scrubbed tables and spider plants, millennials bent over laptops.

But what Alyson Hallett likes is something far more prosaic:

I like going to the café in my local supermarket. It’s really down to earth: I’ll have a cup of tea, and sometimes a scone. And I’ll sit in the café and edit, surrounded by people with their shopping, and children and old people – all walks of life. I don’t particularly like working somewhere very trendy because there’s too much to look at and listen to. I like to go somewhere with a Formica table that’s basic and cheap.

Susan Elliot Wright says,

I’m at my most productive on writing retreats, but they’re expensive, so the next best thing is my local coffee shop, where there are always others bashing away on laptops. If I go early, the staff are happy for me to spend the morning there with just one large coffee. I don’t connect to Wifi and I switch off mobile data, and soon, the gentle hum of conversation, the background music and the hiss of the coffee machine combine to help create the ‘bubble’ I need to be in if I’m going to write productively.

At the dining table

“In theory, the perfect place to write is wherever you happen to find yourself,” Deborah Bosley says. In practise though, Deborah almost always writes in the same place:

I have to write in the same chair in exactly the same spot at the head of the dining table. There are more comfortable chairs and tidier, more serene rooms in which I could write, but the dining table is long and I can scatter the papers and books of my half-completed projects across its surface. Opposite me is a large mirror and in it I can see the reflection of the entire garden, a broad sweep of green with a mulberry tree in the centre. If I look up quickly, it’s just a blur of restful green. But there are other, more prosaic reasons that this is my optimum spot for writing. It is only fifteen short steps to the kitchen where I go to make the endless cups of coffee which punctuate my day.

In a library

Writers often love to go to libraries, absorbing the books and the quiet buzz of other writers as they work.  Jane Draycott thinks of libraries as public spaces to “do apparently nothing” and in which she can be anonymous. She adds, “Because I’m in Oxford quite often, and I’m lucky enough to be able to go and use the Bodleian Library, sometimes I go and sit in under the portraits of the great writers as a way of making myself write as best as I can.”

William Palmer does the same, sitting beneath a portrait of Samuel Pepys as “a way of stopping myself being lazy and complacent about those first drafts or the quality of what I’m producing.”

In a cricket pavilion

During lockdown, Teresa Heapy found it almost impossible to work at home and, of course, she couldn’t go to a café or a library. Luckily, Annie Davy – founder of Flo’s, the Place in the Park, a community hub in Oxford – offered her an alternative space.

In the centre of Florence Park, at the back of Flo’s Place in the Park, is an old bowling pavilion.

The pavilion was a large, rather unloved room with changing rooms off it. I had to roll up a big metal blind to get in. But it was empty. And it was like magic. I fell into that pavilion with the intense relief of diving into sleep after a broken night with a newborn baby.

I didn’t hesitate — I just sat down and wrote. Stuff poured out. Having written nothing for three months, I wrote a novel for young readers, a picture book and a premise for a series. It was like a dam had been broken. I wrote a poem about Flo’s to say thank you to Annie. I wrote through the baking-hot summer and into the autumn, each time feeling that sense of sweet release as I rolled up the metal blind.

– Teresa Heapy

In a castle

Quite a few RLF Fellows say that a castle is the perfect place to write. The castle in question is Hawthornden, where the Hawthornden Foundation run an international residential program for writers.

“This is the place I go back to in my head, whenever I need to: when a yapping dog has woken me at first light, and my neighbour’s obsessive throat-clearing and endless sawing is getting on my nerves, when other people’s zoom calls are intruding in my thoughts, when another knock and another delivery have pulled me from my laptop yet again. . .” writes Lydia Syson.

These are the times I return myself in my imagination to a modest top-floor room called ‘Evelyn’, reached by a winding stone staircase and a book-lined landing. The door shut behind me, I sit on a slightly rickety chair, cushions arranged to get me to the right height for a small, scrubbed pine table in front of a dormer window, framed by faded green brocade curtains on folding brass rods.

As I look out, a whirl of snow obscures the dark and misty pines beyond, and white flakes begin to settle in the topmost stones and crevices of the oldest part of the castle — a rusticated, mostly ruined wing, warm pink, rising above a lawned courtyard. Yes, I am in a castle. Behind me there’s a high and narrow bed, with a counterpane that reminds me of visiting my granny’s friends’ houses in my childhood, and I have a heater pulled up close and a hot water bottle tucked under my jersey. There’s a lively wind howling in the chimney, but I find it quite companionable. Other than that…silence.

– Lydia Syson

Lydia initially worried about the lack of footpaths around Hawthornden Castle and getting “cabin-fever”. But Scotland has the right to roam, and as she says, “The perfect place to write isn’t only also the perfect place to read, it’s the perfect place to wander and explore and gather your ideas.”

This article originally appeared on our Substack channel.

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