You know when you were in school and you had a test in class and you made an impenetrable wall of pencil cases and stationary across the table and then draped yourself over the desk like the dying heroine in a Shakespearean tragedy so that no one around you would be able to copy your answers? Well, that’s how I write.
(And if you didn’t build the wall of pencil cases, chances are someone was copying off you. Constant vigilance!)
I hate people being able to see what I’m writing. If someone comes into the room when I’m sat in front of my computer I open a game of spider solitaire and I don’t close it until they’ve gone. If I want to scribble an idea in a notebook I do it as quickly as possible in my most illegible handwriting so that no one around me has a chance to decipher what it says.
When I was snowboarding the other week I told the girl who was teaching me that I studied creative writing and she got very excited and said that I’d have to tell her a story. I then went out of my way to start conversations about completely random things every time we were on a ski lift so that she wouldn’t remember and ask, because I had no idea what to say. I have to write it down and then read it back before anyone is allowed to hear it.
If you want to talk about ideas, great, I’m in. I can think out loud, but I can’t write out loud. I can talk about what I’m going to write for hours, but when it comes to actually writing it down, go away, I’m doing it on my own. Preferably in a locked room without any windows.
I love the idea of writing with other people, bouncing ideas around the room and jumping in to each other’s paragraphs, speaking dialogue to each other and finishing each other’s sentences. But I think if I tried it I’d end up rocking backwards and forwards by myself in the corner. If it’s not ready, I can’t share it. If you can read what I’m writing, I’m moving my page. It’s no ones but mine until it’s finished, even if finished is just to the end of the sentence.
How about you? Locked room with no windows and doors or group of people huddled around a laptop together? Anyone else hate to have people leaning over their shoulder? Anyone welcome it?
Limebird Writers 