Writing Room Ideas: The Story Behind a Vision Board

At the moment, my writing space is chaotic. It's situated in a Florida room that feels very Florida: one wall is a bank of French doors and paned windows that gather all of the morning, afternoon and early evening heat. The space is tiled and has a (single) A/C vent that tries its very hardest to keep it cool (but doesn't). If it was a body, its outstretched arms would be the kitchen and garage. 

It looks like a before picture, and it's looked that way all throughout the pandemic. Truth be told, even with Zoom pressure, it looks more like a before than ever.

I can make it look "nicer" on Zoom with a panicked juggler's shift of its contents: wheeling a clumsy Amazon Basics white board over a bit to the north to hide a nuclear explosion of LEGOs; a pre-meeting toss of my child's life-size sea turtle floor pillow into a southwesterly off-camera corner; a forearm sweep of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon ephemera off a table into a Trader Joe's bag and quick swap with the family cat's planter of wheatgrass that (when fresh and not shriveled and dying) can sort of pass for decorative, from a webcam distance. 

It's a room in transition, and it never got properly Zoomified during the pandemic--no home décor glam squad--because, well, it had too much work to do, it's on an austerity budget, and it had just two weeks' warning before being thrown into action as a makeshift college classroom, second-grade classroom, playroom, and dissertation-writing space (supposedly). 

It did get a pair of curtains hung as a makeshift Zoom privacy door between itself and the kitchen. But it never really got a break. 

(Did any of us?)

My dream is a single-purpose room. 

Maybe a hut, disconnected from the body of the house, with A/C, running water. A single bed. Just to lie down. Do a little reading. 

Add a lap pool within four or five steps and it's a total fantasy.

I stayed in this Key West house as a child--just once, a long time ago, in that little white shed-looking outbuilding under the tree--and it was magical. Ever since, this house has been my platonic ideal of a writer's house, and writer's hut.

A rush of dream adages, however trite, come to mind: One can dream, dreams are the stuff life is made of, hold fast to dreams. 

Maybe this Japanese proverb is more apropos: 

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.  

Sitting in my hot and humble multipurpose Florida room, I swivel in my desk chair. 

There, languishing in a jumble on the floor is a lonely toy piano, a ukulele, a chest covered in peeling Super Mario stickers, and a seagrass basket sagging with a rubber T-rex, an octopus bath toy, a blue plastic baseball bat, a nylon butterfly net, a plush hobby horse that never gets ridden, a Pikachu mask. Behind that, a semi-abandoned doll house, Doctor Eggman inexplicably languishing in its dusty rooftop pool. 

I swivel back to my desktop screen. 

There, a Writing Room vision board. 

Ah, single-purpose writer's rooms! For a single purpose. 

Huts, attic rooms, side rooms, basement rooms. Whatever you care to call them. Rooms with wooden doors, doors that fully close without the help of industrial binder clips. 

Rooms stuffed with books, with singleminded chaos. Hard copies of manuscripts, an open thesaurus. A cup of coffee and a stereo. An uncased CD. Piles of research. 

Then again, Emily Dickinson had her tiny bedroom table:

And Jane Austen had her tiny bedroom table, too:

Those rickety little desks side tables worked out pretty well, right? 

In my former, pre-pandemic life, I got to marvel at those side tables up close. (I can verify that they're really, really small--even tinier, as much-celebrated things tend to be, in person.)

The work gets done where it will, when it needs to. 

I've written story drafts at the kitchen table, in the car with a sleeping baby. On trains and in planes. Sketches at the beach. Sentences and scrids of images on the backs of receipts, at the stoplight. 

So maybe a vision board is just a vision board. A writer's visual aspirations, while the real work gets done in the swelter of the Florida Zoom room. 

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. 

I wonder what implicit space is there, then, between the daydream and the nightmare. Is it action? That real work itself? I'm not sure. I'm still trying to figure it all out. 

Where do you tend to write best? Can you write anywhere or do you have a single trusted spot? What surprising or unusual places have you gotten work done?