What are your best conditions for writing?

[Louanne Learning]

I came across this quote today:

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”

― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

What are your best conditions for writing?

 

[CatrionaGrace]

Any place that doesn't include mechanical noise or piped in music, particularly any form of jazz.

 

[Louanne Learning]

I can only write in my office, at the desktop. I do tend to write more in the winter? Having a drink increases my concentration!

I need quiet. I am easily distracted. But I have been known to go down many a rabbit internet hole!

 

[GlitterRain]

I need relative quiet. I need to be alone, or at least alone in the sense of not knowing anyone else with me in a public place. If I’m around someone I know, they would need to be doing their own quiet thing, something where it is mutual that we would not want to distract each other.

Sometimes I find traveling to write in a public place makes for a productive session. I like to drive and can easily zone out a little to think about my writing while doing so, which helps build up the impending session.

Historically, I feel like I am more of a night writer, but at this point, I’m not really sure because I have to live at night, being night shift. As a side note, I’m really hoping to be done with night shift soon; it has pretty well damaged me.

Music before a writing session tends to help, as well, although it has also hindered me in the sense that I just end up listening to music for way longer than I wanted to. I cannot write to music with lyrics at all. Won’t even try.

 

[Night Herald]

My optimal conditions would look something like this:

It's past midnight, autumn or winter for preference. It's dark and quiet and not very warm. I'm in the living room of my mom's house, one of my two childhood homes; it's a comfortable and welcoming space. I have my coffee, a few beers cooling in the fridge for if my fancy tilts thataway, and my nicotine pouches (I used to smoke while writing, I don't anymore). That one lamp above the window has to be on, for the particular ambience that it gives, and ideally there's a cat sleeping somewhere nearby. I've got my noise-cancelling headphones on, usually with something soft and ambient playing. My social batteries will be drained, not to an unpleasant extent, but just enough so that it feels lovely to be alone and not one bit lonely. I've got an unbroken stretch of time ahead of me in which there's nothing to do but write.

That said, I don't need much from my external circumstances to arrive at the right headspace. Just some peace and quiet will do.