Not in seminars

In T. Coraghessan Boyle’s wonderful tragicomic novel East is East, there is a description of a writer’s colony in the woods that struck me as fairy-tale perfect. Each attendee has his or her own little cabin where he or she supposedly spends the day writing. At noon, a waiter from the main lodge brings these fledgling Hemingways and Cathers a box lunch and puts it on the front stoop of the cottage. Very quietly puts it on the stoop, so as not to disturb the creative trance of the cabin’s occupant. One room of each cabin is the writing room. In the other is a cot for that all-important afternoon nap . . . or, perhaps, for a revivifying bounce with one of the other attendees.

. . .

To me, this sounded like an absolutely enchanted writing environment. I especially liked the part about having your lunch left at the front door, deposited there as quietly as the tooth fairy deposits a quarter under a kid’s pillow. I imagine it appealed because it’s so far from my own experience, where the creative flow is apt to be stopped at any moment by a message from my wife that the toilet is plugged up and would I try to fix it, or a call from the office telling me that I’m in imminent danger of blowing yet another dental appointment. At times like that I’m sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right understanding people, I just know I could be penning my masterpiece.

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

                                                                                           

                                                                       Stephen King, On Writing