The Bookseller.com

2nd September 2010

Ben Johncock is a freelance writer working on his first novel.

(Unpublished) writers' rooms

26.06.09

As an unpublished author, I naturally assume that all published authors have stupendous desks. Vast slabs of expensive wood (oak maybe, cherry pine) bespoke made to their fickle, exacting standards.

I imagine them in cosy, idiosyncratic studies surrounded by endless shelves of books, a filing cabinet filled with exotic contracts, an armchair for reading (and resting between creative bouts), stacks of CDs, old LPs, a TV for ‘research' and a wall - an entire wall! - devoted to Post-Its, photos, slips and scraps. Notes outlining a new novel. Look at Will Self!  Look at Martin Amis!

Never mind the advance or the deal or the rights, what really signifies one's burgeoning career as a Very Successful Novelist is having a study.

However, far from being an artistic sanctuary, a place to nurture a greater sense of oneself, one's thoughts, a study is nothing more than a cloaked scheme, an intellectual deception; a marital bamboozlement.

The author is actually regressing!  Back, back; back to the bedroom of their youth. Their things, their stuff!  On the walls, on the shelves, all around.  Is that an old Nintendo Entertainment System in the cupboard?  The books, the posters, the DVDs, the music.  I'm afraid you've been unmasked:  "My study" is just a pontification for "my room."

Please forgive my spasm of jealousy, I'm currently cramped behind the TV in the living room on a desk the size of an electron. Next to me is the dining room table and washing is hanging up all around.  My pants are not the most inspirational sight. Would Steinbeck have written The Grapes of Wrath if all he could see was his underwear? 'm not sure.

The desk itself was no easy find. More time and work went into finding one this small than the trio of blind Venetian monks put into hand-finishing Martin Amis's desktop. Big desks were plentiful, hulking monsters, larger than the flat itself.  So were hideous computer desks, with dozens of compartments for equally hideous PC equipment, and no room to put your legs. Who needs a separate shelf for a keyboard? Who has a tower? As a smug Mac user, I waved them all away with disdain.

Sub-atomic workspaces proved hard to find, but find one we did. Swedish by design, it came as a sprawling workstation, like a wooden version of the consoles at Jodrell Bank.  I removed everything that didn't look like a desk, leaving me a perfect oblong of light, smooth wood (wood in the way that Turkey Twizzlers are turkey) and a single drawer.  With the help of my father-in-law, I added an extra shelf and a cupboard door, fashioned from one of the leftover parts and a handle we found in his garage.  I'll be honest, he did most of the skilled labour; I was more of a creative consultant.

Back in the flat, the bugger doesn't fit against either wall (plugs and curtain pulley, respectively) and if I move backwards any more than fifteen inches or rotate any further than sixty degrees I become tangled and hypoxic in a terrible mass of SCART leads, but it's not bad considering the space restrictions.

A rented flat means that Blu Tack is classified as a dangerous substance and outlawed by Mrs JC. Instead I've got an aluminum board to Stick Things Onto, including:  Proclamations from Kurt Vonnegut ("Start as close to the end as possible!", "Be a sadist!"), stern advice from Strunk and White ("Omit needless words") and admonishments from Stephen King ("The adverb is not your friend!").  I also have inspirational items to keep me going when THE DARKNESS sets in - a business card from a literary scout I met at the London Book Fair, a couple of good emails from good agents who said good things about previous not-so-good novels.  And above them, framed and mounted, a piece by Boot in The Fine Organ taking the pizzle out of me.

The thing I love most though is the rapidly growing pile of books that are stacking up all around. I like to breath them in, the smells, the words, as though researching my new novel by osmosis. I like sitting at my desk, staring at their spines and dirty, cream-coloured tops.

I look around and all is good with my little world. Then I think of Martin Amis, hermetically sealed in his custom-made writing cube at the end of his garden.  The television thunders on behind me. The telephone rings.  Mrs JC gets up to answer it and says, "Don't worry honey, when we get our own place, you can have a study." A smile creeps across my face and I return to my screen, jump on eBay and start the search for Nintendo Entertainment Systems.

Editor's Note: Feel free to add images of your writers' room to our Flickr pool