Write Place, Write Time

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you -- it will come out of that wall.
- Anton Chekhov

Tobias Carroll

Something I’ve learned in the last few years: when I want to sit down and write, it helps to have a window nearby. My desktop computer dwells in my office, the one room in my apartment without any windows, and for far too long I’d wondered why I was more prone to distraction in that particular space than anywhere else. A month or so ago, the desktop tower I’d used for the previous five years called it a day; I replaced with with a Mac mini, and used the occasion to reorganize my office slightly. (What I haven’t done yet is to raise the posters — a print of Jay Ryan’s cover artwork for Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution and a poster from a 2006 His Name Is Alive/Oxford Collapse/Lavender Diamond show — on the wall behind the desk. You may have noticed that, ultimately, this serves as a fantastically longwinded explanation of the actual angle on the desktop.) 

                   

For a while, I tried to forego writing at home altogether, instead bringing something electronic — first a PDA with attached keyboard, later a laptop — to a bar or coffee shop nearby. After a while, these arrangements stopped working as well as I’d have liked: I ended up short on cash and either too jittery or too tipsy to write anything of note.  

                 

Not long after that, I got a small laptop and decided to bring it out into my living room; that’s worked well for me so far. It helps, if nothing else, to have sight of the sky and the clouds in it. Sometimes the view from the window will work its way into the piece I’m writing, as it did in “An Apolitical Song.” Generally my office is where I’ll end up doing my editing; it’s not always an ideal arrangement, but it’s worked out well enough so far.  

The project I’ve been working on recently, though, has required more planning than anything else I’ve worked on. As I’m currently conceiving it, I’m going to need to sketch out a shared history for the three primary main characters — including former bandmates, families, classmates — as well as a small town near the Pennsylvania border in northwestern New Jersey. I keep a Moleskin notebook around, but more recently I picked up a half-dozen Field Notes notebooks so that I could keep things project-specific. All of which means, ultimately, that I’m beginning to head back into coffee shops and bars, sketching out words and maps and timelines whenever the urge takes me, and watching the light’s progression.  

Tobias Carroll lives in Brooklyn and writes damn near everywhere. His fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, featherproof’s “Light Reading” series, Metazen, 3:AM, Word Riot, Storychord, and more. He makes his home online at The Scowl, and contributes regularly to Vol. 1 Brooklyn. 

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