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| My desk this morning. One of them. The current one. |
Desk geology #1:
The picture shows the desk I'm using now. It's in the largest, currently empty, bedroom in the house, most recently occupied by our friend Nadescha who has swapped writing here for writing in Antarctica: here's her fantastic blog.
The book on the left is the latest edition of The Complete Dinosaur, which is helping with Microfacts: Dinosaurs. Silent Spring is for my biography of Rachel Carson. Buried deeper are at least two more dino books, a theatre programme for spring, four contractual copies of a revision guide that came in last week, and a copy of a children's thesaurus I wrote for Ladybird some time ago and actually had cause to use recently.
That probably goes down to the Jurassic layer of desk-geology. Those are the actual fossils. The layers of sedimentary desk-rock in between are made of various pieces of paper, including the tax reminder for my car and probably a lost parking ticket, an expenses claim form from the university for a talk I did, an invite to an ALCS event at the House of Commons and the foreign-payment slip from the bank for a payment by a US magazine. And a letter from the Inland Revenue asking me to consult on Brexit and small businesses (bit late). Then there are stickers of various kinds, pens, cables and connectors, a USB microscope, various bits of print-out and the beautiful diary Mary Hoffman gave me for Christmas.
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| EB White, photo by Jill Krementz |
On the other hand...
Desk geology #2
This is E.B. White writing in HIS office.
He has tissues, an ashtray, a pen and some manuscript pages. His rubbish bin is an empty barrel, and empty is a significant word here. The bin is entirely cosmetic. What could he possibly have to throw away? You can be pretty sure those MS pages are in an archive somewhere, and if he threw his cigarettes in a wooden bin his office wouldn't last long. He has no curtains and just a hard wooden bench to sit on. The landscape beyond is equally sparse, in that it's just open sea. It hasn't even furnished him with a seagull or a whale. I love his office, by the way. He is Marie Kondo's nightmare. Nothing to do here — move along.
And yet....
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| John Mortimer, but he's not in; photo by Eamonn McCabe |
Desk geology #3
This is John Mortimer's office. There's hope for me yet. It's the Burgess Shale of desk geology. And I won't begin to try to go through it.
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| Angela Carter |
Desk geology #4
Angela Carter maybe beats him?
And she looks so happy!
She is my heroine. Even if she did once steal my date, some time around 1982.
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| Maya Angelou |
Joint winners for either sparsity or so much mess they were forced out of their rooms altogether are Maya Angelou and Francoise Sagan, who were both photographed writing on the floor. Well, Sagan is posing on the floor. Not sure it counts. Angelou wins.
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| Francoise Sagan |
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| Virginia Woolf |
There's not much geology to be done in Virginia Woolf's room of her own at Monk's House.
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| Charles Darwin |
But someone has carefully preserved and presumably regularly dusted the clutter on Darwin's desk at Down House.
He keeps his wine glasses ON HIS DESK. This is a time-saving trick that had never occurred to me.
OK, this is my real office. Most prominent here as is my mother's sewing box (it was quite possibly her mother's before that), which is there because MB's World Book Day costume needing elastic at the last minute. So there is a little bit of literary activity in there. Note the useful alphabet chart on the wall. A writer's tools should always be to hand...
Where do you write? Mess or tidy space? Is there a difference, do you think, between messy-environment and tidy-environment writers? Is it possible to change from being one to being the other?
Anne Rooney
Coming soon: Arcturus, 2019
7 comments:
Messy (SO messy!) but I yearn after tidiness. I wonder if the tidy ones ever wish they could be messy? Doesn't seem likely.
This was a very cheering post, Anne - and I do wonder if the really tidy ones actually tidied it specially before allowing it to be photographed! I periodically tidy my study, but it very quickly becomes a mess again. I thought it was just me, so it's lovely to know I'm not alone! Many thanks.
I change from untidy to tidy roughly once every two weeks. Or maybe it's once a month. I keep piling things up until I can't find anything any more then I have fun wasting a morning by putting everything away again. That picture of E B White is wonderful. I'm ashamed to say I knew nothing about Jill Krementz but now I do. Thanks, Anne!
My desk is overflowing with paper and open dictionaries, cards and pens, gluesticks and tape, three balls of wool and a jar of double ended knitting needles, pens and pencils, two address and some knitting wire...there's more. It is time I tidied up - again. Sigh.
Oh yes! I am gloriously messy and then, every now and again, I do a clear up. it takes most of a day before the floor is clear and I can see the colour of my desk again, but usually this is in the space between projects and makes me feel so good, for a while. Soon it is back to comfortably messy.
Have to say that when I need to get a solid block of writing (fiction) I retreat to my shed and there I only have the laptop and the smallest amount of papers that I feel I have to take with me, so that desk/writing space is normally tidy and there is less procrastination, too, I find!
But I can't seem to do this with non fiction, there is much more mess, and often two screens beside each other.
Love this post, Ann!
I can keep control of the desk, almost, but the rest of my workroom drives me to frustration. So many files, categories of books, piles of papers, puppets & toys for storytimes & school visits, art material, interesting/sentimental objects & curios, sofa/occasionalcat-bed, all the IT stuff and tv screen - and maybe a large basket of ironing.
Thanks for this Anne. Now I feel just a little smug as I look at my version of untidy. My husband closes his eyes to it, says I wouldn't be allowed to leave it that way if I worked in his office. Fortunately, for him and me, I don't.
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