Much about the way I write has changed considerably over the years.  When I was a teenager, I often wrote with my friends (several of whom also enjoyed writing), and we wrote anytime, anywhere.  I wrote stories during free time in class, at lunch, during pickleball tournaments, and at home after school.  Often in the summers, I’d stay up half the night working on a story.  Whether with music and conversation or without, in the living room or my bedroom, my ideas flowed freely.

In my twenties, it was much the same.  I had a small office space, but it shared room with my washer, dryer, deep freeze, and litterboxes.  With four cats and one litterbox, you can bet it wasn’t long before I needed to take a little writing break, so back to the living room I went.

My twenties actually saw the greatest upheaval to my writing habits.  After I got divorced, I had a whole apartment all to myself.  But where did I do most of my writing?  In my living room.  Of course, I waited till Bubbles had gone to bed, but I spent many a night burning the midnight oil in the comfort of my mother’s old recliner.

When Seymour and I moved in together, I continued to write in the living room, primarily because it was what I’d always done.  But when we bought our first house together, we carved out space to have an office, and I had dreams of writing away in it.

The problem was that we had to share said office space, and it was a walk-through room (i.e., you had to walk through it to get to the living room from every other part of the house).  I had great hopes of making a writing space out of our balcony one day, but that never happened.  Now we’re in yet another house, complete with my own office that I don’t have to share, so you’d think I’d do all my writing in there, right?

Wrong.

I still love to write in the living room.  I love my office, with its locking door and fantastic view, but the recliner in our living room is much more comfortable than my sinky desk chair and not-yet-climate-controlled, slanty-floored office.  The trouble with the living room is that, well, my family lives in it.  After years of distractions and trying to do a thousand things at once, my ability to multitask is shot.  I can focus on one thing at a time, and sometimes not even that.

Now when I’m working on something that doesn’t require internet access (and even sometimes when it does), I take it to my bedroom.  It has a deadbolt.  It affords me an escape from the dull roar that I call background noise.  It’s fantastic. 🙂

The one thing about my writing habits that hasn’t changed in all these years is my penchant for pencil and paper.  I love writing stories by hand.  I started writing that way because I didn’t have a computer at home and writing in pen drove me crazy.  I like nice, clean copy, so having a bunch of scribble marks on the page where my brain went faster than my hand made me a little nuts.  With pencil?  I can erase.

That saved me a fortune in medication right there. 😀

Words flow better when I have a pencil in my hands, especially if it’s a Pentel Quicker Clicker .5mm.  I’ve tried other pencils, but none of them have stolen my heart like my good ol’ Quicker Clicker.  Though I use Evernote to keep track of story notes and ideas now instead of the covers of my notebooks, my trusty pencil and a sheaf of papers are never far from my side.

With them, I can write anything, anywhere. 🙂

What about you – where (and how) do you write?

Have an idea for something you’d like me to write about in a future post?  Head on over to my contact page and drop me a line!

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