I’ve written entire drafts in hotel lobbies or on the bare floor of a storage room, anywhere I could find a quiet moment. After every writing session, any notebooks, research books, painstakingly arranged notecards, etc. would all have to be bundled up, and hauled out again next session. It’s a struggle many writers know well.
Five books later, we moved into our new house, and when I pad around my study, I feel like Charlie in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I’m a hopelessly visual writer (as well as a very distracted one), and it’s been a gamechanger to have somewhere I can shrug off the busyness of daily life, and step fully into the world inside my head. I went for a dark academic style, with the books, artwork, and color scheme that feel most calming and inspiring to me.
I painted the room a delightfully moody green—dark, to some, perfect to me. I have a black velvet chair that makes me feel like a Disney villain—or an author—and during the winter, my electric fireplace keeps my coldblooded self warm. The sumptuously plush rug has been indispensable for the periodic spells of lying on the floor in a plot crisis (more often than you think). My L-shaped desk is usually half-buried under 24.6 research books on one side but keeps my laptop and monitor uncluttered on the other. Memory and Thought, my two crow bookends, artfully hold my writing craft books in place.
I’m a big fan of using notecards to plot, and back in one of our tiny apartments, I had notecards tacked onto the laundry door for months. Now, the scheming happens on a large magnetic blackboard. When I outline my Save the Cat story beats, everything goes onto the blackboard, where I can glance up at it anytime I start to lose sight of where I’m going.
Our library is downstairs, but these bookcases house books by friends and acquaintances, my special editions, and my ‘inspiration’ shelf, which holds any books whose prose I should very much like to adopt. Any time I get stuck in my own writing, I’ll pull out Spells for Forgetting or The Likeness or The Raven Boys and thumb through some of my annotations. I’ve always been a bit of a magpie, too, collecting shiny bits and baubles and the occasional bones, and they season my bookshelves.
We’ve come a long way from defacing laundry room doors, but the truth is, you don’t need a fancy office or a villain chair, or even a nice plush rug; I can attest that any reasonably clean floor will do. It takes courage and grit to start wherever you are, to carve out the time and space to create something as silly and wonderful as art—even if it’s on the floor in an empty room, or at the bottom of a closet with a pencil and paper. Never underestimate a small beginning; it just might be a great one.
When not reading or writing, Ande Pliego can usually be found dabbling in art, scheming up her next trip, or making constant expeditions to the library. Born in Florida, raised in France, and having left footprints all over the globe, Ande is settled in the Pacific Northwest with her craftsman husband and little son. You Are Fatally Invited is her debut novel.
