A Desk, A Noisy Classroom and the Cinema Hall

Writing is a funny thing. You may write about world peace, or about harmony or getting along with one another but you may be writing it in the middle of a war, or in a busy cafe. Roald Dahl wrote about murderous giants and horrid witches from a quaint little yellow hut by his house.

They say home is where the heart is. Going by that, I guess its fair to say that we write best where our heart really is. It could be a little hut by the house, like it was for Roald Dahl, or it could be our desk. It could be a bench in the park or our bed. It depends. Sometimes I can’t write in the same place all the time. I need a change of scenery. Some fresh air and different sounds. Different kinds of sensory stimulation. That’s what I need sometimes. I need some sort of stimulation to get me going and keep me clacking away on the keys. It doesn’t matter if I’m typing half-rubbish – I can always weed that out later – the important thing sometimes is to keep writing.

One sort of stimulation for me is music. Like most of us, I prefer different kinds of music for different situations, moods and needs. While I’m writing I usually go for instrumentals. That way there’s no words in the music that get in the way of the words in my head. There’s a lot of old-school instrumentals that are really soothing, and they do the job no doubt, but even modern fast-paced soundtracks are extremely effective. There’s Brian Tyler’s Into Eternity from Thor 2, the main theme of GoT, all of Steve Jablonsky’s amazing works in the first three films of The Transformers movie franchise, Michael Giacchino’s Enterprising Young Men from the new Star Trek franchise, Hans Zimmer’s Like a Dog Chasing Cars from The Dark Knight, and many more (comment if you want more, I’ve got loads :D).

But what if your writer’s heart isn’t in any singular place but in writing itself? Well, then you’re like me. I’m that sort of person, that if I get an idea to write, an impulse of even a minor plot device that I just feel I want to use in a story, I’ll start writing it.

I often write on my desk because I’m home when I get ideas and my laptop is lying on my desk and I’m too lazy to carry it elsewhere. When I’m not home, however, and I don’t have the laptop close by, I use my note-taking apps or even Microsoft Word, on my phone.

Once last year I was sitting in this really boring Hindi lecture at college and I was doodling Iron Man’s armor, and Captain America’s shield and The Flash, when I got an insane idea for a story. So I whipped out my Hindi notebook and I just started writing. Another time, I was watching a movie, it was a really cheesy Hindi one. I don’t even remember the name, except that Ranbir Kapoor was in it. And I wasn’t really into it; I’d gone to watch it with a bunch of friends and we were all cracking up at how silly it was and then I got one of those out-of-the-blue ideas to write again. I didn’t have a phone then so I took one of my friend’s phones and I started typing in one of the note-taking apps he had and thought I’d email it to myself or something. Hilariously, in a hurry, I didn’t save it properly so I lost about 1500 worth of story material.

Again, I can’t always write anywhere I feel like. There’s a lot of times that I force myself to sit down and just write, because I haven’t written in a while. Sometimes when the gap between writing sessions increases, it just gets harder to squeeze out some material. I guess the place where we write can really influence our writing. The ambiance, the disturbances, or lack thereof, can all reflect in our writing.

In the end, though, I believe it doesn’t matter if we write in your office, or on the toilet, in college or in the train. What matters that we write.

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Those were my thoughts on writing and the places where we write best. Where do you write best?

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