the spaces we write in

plus a brief editing lesson, and a teensy little rant

I recently started reading a book called Writing Places by William Zinsser. This isn't an endorsement yet; I'm less than fifty pages in. But I've read (and loved) a few other books by Zinsser, including On Writing Well, which – if you've ever asked me about writing but you wanted to procrastinate first research a little – you already know about, because it's the book I've told you to get.¹

So this book also seemed super promising.

But then I read the first sentence, which begins like this:

Of all the places where I've done my writing, none was more unusual than the office–

Wait, wait, wait.

Really? This man has been writing professionally since the forties, and this book was published in 2009. So he's telling me that in sixty years of doing this, the most unusual place he's ever written in was still an office?

Alright, so he finishes the sentence with "...that had a fire pole." Well, shrug. That’s it? I don't care if the room had dancing clowns or a saber tooth tiger with purple stripes or a posse of drunk hyenas; it was still an OFFICE.

As soon as that word appears in the sentence, he has ruined his chance to impress any writer who is also a mother.

I can't claim any of his prestige as an author and I've only been writing professionally for less than ten years. But I have written a significant amount from a bedroom floor, typing one-handed while breastfeeding a baby as three little girls played tea party all around me. I have written in the dentist's lobby and in hospital waiting rooms. I have written on the grass in my front yard and in Bulgarian hotel rooms and on flights over the Atlantic and in my friend's car while it was idling.

But mostly I've written on the couch, because until five years ago anything that could be remotely called an "office" was a luxury far out of reach. We needed bedrooms and groceries, instead.

And also this one, which I unabashedly shared on social media in 2015 with its caption:

Transparent humanity post: In case you are feeling like you have to do it all - nope, you don't. You only have to do what He calls you to today, in this minute, in this hour. Not anything else. And if that means leaving four loads of laundry on the couch that the kids use to make ramps for their Lego cars while you get some paperwork done, so be it. xoxo

I'm not saying I'm better than Zinsser, or more dedicated. I'm saying that we are different kinds of people living in very different cultures.

That point is driven home when I read further, because in chapter five he admits he has never worked at night or on the weekends (again — he is not a mother). And then he has the audacity to list books like Anne of Green Gables and Girl of the Limberlost as “glorious junk” and “once famous titles.” (What?! Sacrilege!) So if we hadn’t already gotten off on the wrong foot, that would have done it.

He was renting a space to write in, and that befuddles me because...can't you write anywhere? (This is how coffee shops famously emerged as mobile office space.) Yes, he admits a few pages later, you can – and yet he continued to pay for office space…which is a literary achievement in itself because there have been many months as a writer when I wouldn't have been able to afford the daily $4.50 latte fee for a few hours at a cafe table, even if I wanted to. (But I'm a homebody, so I don't.)

I don't deny that an office can have quirks. My current office has two giant indoor citrus trees and usually at least one cat I have to fight with for enough personal space to be able to reach my laptop. But when it comes to identifying the extremity of weirdness in writing spaces, anything that could be commonly referred to as "office" is disqualified...fire pole or not.

Please don’t tell Bingley I shared this photo. It’s his own fault; I told him to look at me and he howled for attention instead.

So I have no idea why he began the book that way, because eventually he goes on to mention some truly interesting and unusual places he’s written in.

I also have no idea why some of his writing seems so much more bloated than normal. In On Writing Well he spends two chapters on simplicity and clutter, preaching the need to make things concise and remove unnecessary words. But in this book I keep noticing sections where he probably should have taken his own advice, like this sentence on page 40. See if you can spot what should be trimmed:

Developers hadn’t yet plowed up the potato fields to build immense homes for beautiful people and not-so-beautiful people of enormous wealth.

Editing is largely a matter of style and personal preference, and sometimes we want to repeat something for rhythm or emphasis. But if you take out the extra “people” in that sentence, you get this: “Developers hadn’t yet plowed up the potato fields to build immense homes for beautiful and not-so-beautiful people of enormous wealth” — which says the same thing without having a distracting speed bump of repetition while he makes his dig at those wealthy homeowners.

Here’s another, two sentences later:

The house we bought was on a street called Potunk Lane, within walking distance of Main Street. It was a shingled house that had seen many additions…

Do you hear it? Street, street. House, house. You could rearrange it dozens of ways to make it more concise, and here’s one: “The shingled house we bought was on Potunk Lane, within walking distance of Main Street. It had seen many additions…” That takes 27 words down to 20, keeps all the meaning, doesn’t change the style, and allows the reader to move on quickly to the next point.

These are easy mistakes to make. I go back all the time to old writings (and new posts) and trim extra words I missed before hitting the publish button, and there’s no doubt that I’ll look at this post later and find some things to change here, too.

But the space we write in isn’t just a room or location — it’s also the space we take up on the paper (or screen). And that means it’s also the time a reader offers us when they read those words. We want to respect that attention and space by not presuming to use more of it than we need to get our point across.

So that concludes my rant at Zinsser, and I’ll let you know how the rest of the book turns out. ;) But hey, want to see the books I loved last year, and do endorse? This is from my personal blog and it has some that I think you'll love.

fave books of 2023

Hope you find some new favorites there! And I'd love to hear the strangest place you've ever written, too.

From the couch again (because my office time was over hours ago),

Shannon

1. Along with The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, of course. OF COURSE.