The new book Chaucer’s Tale by Paul Strohm describes the cramped, noisy, smelly place in which Chaucer wrote, which got us thinking about the particular environmental preferences we all have for getting serious writing done. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Writing Environments”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. I’ve always had a particular fascination with writer’s spaces, that is, where physically people figure out they can do their best writing. And I’ve been thinking about that in particular because of a book I’m reading about Chaucer. It’s called Chaucer’s Tale, and it’s by Paul Strom, who was the Tolkien professor of English language and literature at Oxford University. He writes about the years in London that Chaucer spent living at Aldgate, which is the main eastern gate to the walled city of London. And he’s figured out from architectural plans and a lot of extrapolating pretty much what Chaucer’s writing quarters looked like. And it’s pretty amazing because he’s living in this place that’s only about 16 by 14 feet. The walls are five feet thick and the only natural light would come from two or three or four arrow slits that go through the wall. He also talks about the fact that it’s over this really busy London thoroughfare. It’s within hundreds of feet of three different churches. So you’ve got the church bells bong, bong, bonging all the time. And it’s right over what is called Hound’s Ditch, which is an extension of a sewer.
And you can imagine why it was called Hound’s Ditch. A lot of people took dead dogs there. And so they had rotting garbage and sewage. And I’m just trying to think, my gosh, can you imagine trying to write in a space like that? I mean, compared to that, I feel like the princess and the pea.
I wonder if it suited him because the rent was cheap.
Oh, he got to live there for free because he was a government bureaucrat at the time. Maybe he needed the chaos to inspire him. I remember living in New York City and feeling that until later, much later, the chaos of the city just kind of kept topping off my batteries, so to speak, filling me with electrical charge that I could generate into creative ideas.
Well, I understand that. But I just found that fascinating because I never thought about where he might have actually had to sit and write some of his early stuff. It’s really fascinating.
And then that made me wonder, Grant, do you, when you’re doing your serious writing, do you put in earbuds? Do you?
Oh, yeah. I block out as much noise as I can. I buy those heavy-duty construction earplugs, the one that goes in the ear canal.
Oh, you use earplugs.
Yeah, the phone ones that expand block almost all of the noise. I can’t listen to music. I get distracted by it. It takes me away from the task. And I like to be surrounded by heavy things like bookshelves and furniture. Like, I don’t mind small spaces at all. But the writing doesn’t happen in a coffee shop. Nothing good happens in a coffee shop for me. The noise is too much. The banging of the utensils on the counter, people chatting. I just can’t do that.
That’s interesting. I forced myself, of course, in newsrooms to write with a lot of chaos going around me. But now I usually put in the earbuds and I put in sort of zone out music. It can’t have lyrics. It cannot have lyrics because somehow that messes me up.
So some kind of droning or something?
You know, just sort of groove salad kind of.
Oh, yeah, groove salad. Sure, I know that. Yeah, just kind of spacey.
There is a great collection of photographs on the internet that shows the writing spaces of well-known modern authors. And it’s interesting how often they need a window to see a beautiful vista or the garden, perhaps, or the creek or the mountains. But they’re always surrounded by books, which kind of seems like a necessary part, right? You want something to turn to for inspiration or just to feel the company of great authors by having them at your elbow.
Yeah, Kindle just doesn’t do it, right?
No, it doesn’t, right? No, I like seeing the names pop out at me from the spines.
Well, there’s a question that we want to ask you. How do you write? When you sit down for your serious tasks, maybe it’s bill paying, maybe it’s taxes once a year, maybe it’s the novel that you’re working on. Where do you sit and what do you need to make it happen? Do you sit like Chaucer near a sewer in a church or several churches? Let us know, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. Or let us know on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.
