Shedless still I prattle: N M Browne

 The image of the writer tends to be that of the solitary genius. Maybe George Bernard Shaw springs to mind in his shed that moved to follow the sun? 

   These embodied stereotypes are often male, hard drinking, melancholic and usually gifted in ways that sets them apart from lesser mortals: excuses are made for horrible behaviour, faults are fondly reframed as idiosyncrasies.

  As a female writer, who is not a solitary genius, or indeed a genius at all, I am prone to wondering (usually when I should be writing) if this stereotype holds me back. My red wine intake is perhaps a little too high but I’m generally an optimistic soul and my idiosyncrasies are all reframed as faults. 

  When we write it is just us and the words on the page, but I don’t know if that makes the experience unique or even that solitary. We are often not alone in person. Writers I know write in coffee shops, on kitchen tables around the detritus of family life, on packed trains and in little slivers of time squeezed between other paid work and the business of caring for other people. 

      Maybe it is harder to be a genius under these circumstances. It is certainly harder to be forgiven for even moderate tantrums. We have to write and think fast to be creative in these gaps of time, in the cracks between doing other things. 

     These days it is even hard to be solitary in your own head: everyone’s a critic. Every website wants to advise you, universities want to teach you, everyone is on the creative writing act, invading not just your writing space but the quietness in your head.

    There is an upside. There is no writing problem that a whole array of people aren’t all too ready to help you solve. It is great to have friends and mentors, critique groups or informal support groups, reading groups and lets-get-drunk-and-moan-about-our-books groups, but the downside is the risk of importing all this chatter into the silence that we all need. It is easy to be so busy being a very un-solitary modern writer that the actual words- on-the-page-writing and the engaged, engrossing cover to cover reading  barely occurs at all. 

   I don’t envy these great men their writing sheds or even their genius (or not much) I do envy them the great privilege of in-their-own- head solitude. Without that mental space none of us can create: it’s the blank screen on which our imaginations project our own weird, unique ideas, our own private portals to other worlds. I’d rather have that than a shed – even one that follows the sun.