How I Write…Alone (preferably lying to a librarian)
People love to talk about their writing rituals: the coffee shop with the good light, the writing group that meets every Tuesday and reads pages out loud to each other, or the retreat in Ojai with the communal breakfast table.
None of that works for me. I need to be alone. Not “alone with my laptop at a busy café, earbuds in, pretending the world doesn’t exist” alone. Actually alone. If I know a human being might glance at my screen, I freeze. I start writing the kind of careful, forgettable words you’d show a stranger, instead of the truth.
These days that mostly means my desk in my home office with the door closed. But when I first started writing this book, before I trusted myself enough to believe I’d finish it, I didn’t have that setup yet. I had the Rose Garden Library.
The library had a meeting room. Three modular walls and one wall of glass looking out into the stacks, technically soundproof, officially reserved for groups of two or more. Of course, I am one person. This was a problem I solved by putting my phone on a stand, pulling up a blank Zoom call, and reserving the room as “team meeting.” Nobody checked. Well, once, a librarian did ask where my other person was. “She didn’t show,” I said, with the straight face of a mom who’s told two teenage boys there were no more snacks left, when she knew where a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos was hidden.
I loved that room in a way that probably says something about me. Nobody could see what I was typing. But I could see anyone coming, straight through that glass wall, in plenty of time to alt-tab to my desktop. If someone had asked me to design my ideal writing space from scratch, I’m not sure I could have done better.
When the meeting room was booked, I ended up in what the library called the Quiet Room, a shared space for maybe ten people reading or working in silence. I’d walk in, go straight to the desk in the farthest corner, and turn it a hundred and eighty degrees so my back was against the wall and I was facing out to the room. A few people looked up when I did this. I can’t say I blame them. It’s a strange thing to watch a grown woman rearrange library furniture like she’s casing the place. But I could not write a single honest sentence knowing someone might be reading over my shoulder. I’d rather have ten strangers think I was odd than have one of them see a rough draft of me trying to figure out how to write about my own life. And I was willing to rearrange library furniture to make sure of it.
I don’t reserve fake meetings anymore. But I’ll always have a soft spot for that glass-walled room, and for whichever librarian decided not to ask too many follow-up questions.
Photo: By Bbfd - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35953829