I have a terrible confession to make

Nope.

 

Excellent.

Do you need quiet to work?

I do.

 

I prefer but don't need quiet. I did some of my best work in a raucous newsroom or arena back in the day.

 

For the most part - or, moreso, white noise.

I can get on a roll and tune things out, but I definitely prefer quiet to get moving. I'll struggle to concentrate when the secretaries/paralegals are chatty in the office, for example. And at home, if I hear the kids giving my wife a hard time about anything, my instinct is to help, so it can be difficult to write there.

The coffee house just buzzes with too much activity for me. I've always been a library guy. In college and law school I studied pretty exclusively at the library. That's not abnormal, but I was pretty committed to it.

 

Yay! Welcome back.

I'd work in a library if ours was a little more... cool? Dramatic? It's kind of very 90s.

I think the dream is a small out-of-home office, like Robert Caro's. I just can't bring myself to spring for the rent when I can also write at home or a coffee shop or wherever.

The 500-Words-A-Day Club (membership ranks so far: me) is working, though. Quotas and discipline. Treat it like a job. Only way for me to get this shit done.

 

Isn't it a job?

 

Of course it is - but it's also a job you can do in your pajamas. Or a job you can do in fits and starts - 100 words here, wait a week, 825 words there, wait ten days, write another 2200 words. I think TF means to treat it like a 9 - 5 job, like Mr. Caro, a brilliant clock-puncher who produces a steady workflow and who dresses in a suit every day to go work alone in a room where no one will see him.

Like Cran, I can still produce words most anyplace if I absolutely have to. But at this age, I'd rather not be writing on the plane or in the press box or in the passenger seat of the rental car.

And I've never been good in the coffee shop. Too much buzz and hum.

Like Mr. Whitman, over the long haul, if I leave the home office I prefer the library. That enforced silence and the gravity of all those other books and writers and ideas.

I also need a big table sometimes to lay the work out.

 

This is exactly what I mean. I think magazines, say, you can get away with "crunch" weeks, big writing jags followed by, what for me, was sometimes weeks of inactivity. Books, screenplays, I think you have to treat them differently. I have several things on the go, but my next hard deadline, as we sit here, is Dec. 1. But it's a deadline for 100,000 words. Kind of have to be smart about that.

The other thing about a daily quota is, it makes the task seem much more manageable. 100,000 words is a lot of fucking words. 500 words a day? That's no problem. I can do that, polished, in a couple of hours. That doesn't seem nearly so bad.

 

Do you go to the main branch of the NYPL? Such a beautiful building, and reading room, though I haven't seen it since the renovation.

Nice thread about the room, and it's services:

 

Yeah, if that were my library, I'd work in it.

 

You need a couple of coffee shops you can rotate through during the week.

 

I live in a one-coffee-shop town.