Anna Waggener Guest Post + Giveaway
Welcome to Anna Waggener. Anna is the February Author in the Spotlight here on Booksnob. Anna has written an entertaining Young Adult book called Grim. Read on to learn how Anna finds a space and time to write.
Guest Post
As I write this blog post, I’m sitting on my living room
couch. There’s a stack of magazines on one end of the coffee table and a box of
chocolates on the other. There’s a bag overflowing with recycling near the
front door and clothes strewn about haphazardly, because it’s winter in
Minnesota and there are never enough chairs, let alone enough hooks on the coat
rack, to hold the number of coats, hats, gloves that an Oklahoma girl requires
in such weather.
In the beloved book On
Writing, Stephen King talks about the necessity of having a writing space
where one can shut the door. Unfortunately, I live in a space with an open
floor plan; a place where this advice is virtually impossible unless I go into
the bathroom and sit in the tub, computer balanced precariously on my two
knees. I believe what Stephen King says, because I’ve been lucky enough to have
such a place in the past—but since leaving home for college, I have simply not
had a door that I could shut.
For a very long time, I tried to carve out a writing space
in the student center or library of my college. I found that I could write
essays just about everywhere—on the bed in my shared dorm room, at a table
surrounded by friends also hard at work, in one of the coffee shops near
campus—but there were few places that I could find inspiration for creative
writing. I’d catch a snippet of an idea on the bus, or a line of dialog would
follow me out of sleep, looping through my head as I got ready for a morning
class. After finishing homework for the night, I’d sit down and stare at my
screen, and nothing would come. Then I’d turn off my computer and go in search
of friends.
I did not give up writing, or give up on writing. I just became very bad at pursuing it. I’d been so used
to inspiration striking when it would come that I didn’t want to push or prod
it. It’ll come, I thought. It’ll come.
It wasn’t until the summer after my freshman year that I
realized how important consistency was for my writing. During my internship at
Scholastic, I came into the office, sat down, and wrote every day. After flying
back to Oklahoma, I stayed with my grandmother for three weeks. Every afternoon
while she napped, I would open up my computer and clatter-clack away. Every
night after I’d gotten ready for sleep, I would sit up in bed and write for
another few hours. By the end of my stay, I’d finished a very rough draft of a
very long book.
Since then, I’ve sought out ways to build a writing space
for myself. I’ve learned that while I can scribble notes or descriptions or
scraps of dialog in other places, consistency does matter when I want to get into the real work of drawing out
character and storyline. Today, at this stage of my life and in this apartment,
my writing space is four square feet of couch with my laptop open in my lap.
When I sit here with my laptop, I know what I am here to do.
This space is just as open as every other part of my
apartment, but I’ve carved out a kind of quiet. When I sit here after a long
day at work, I am often tired, oftener hungry. And yet when I pause to let my
day go still, let the coats and socks and recycling disappear, the space finds
a way of taking over. I find my four walls and my door.
Thanks Anna!
If you would like to win a copy of Anna's book Grim click here: Grim Giveaway
