Creative Steps

Would doing what Hemmingway did help you achieve more in your creative life?

One man thought so.

It turns out that author William Elliot Hazelgrove has managed to live out, to what some may be, a literary fantasy: he writes his novels in Ernst Hemmingway’s attic.

It was a serendipitous thing, born of luck, ability and perhaps an element of writer’s block. Hazelgrove was trying to find inspiration in a coffee shop having abandoned his attempts to write in his own home given the recent arrival of his new baby. It wasn’t working and he gave up, disheartened.

On the way home he passed the white Victorian house in which Hemmingway was born in 1899. He entered the house and asked the elderly lady who had turned the old house into a museum if it would be possible for him to find a place to write inside the house.

At first she was reluctant, but perhaps remembering that Hemmingway once described the suburb as “a village of broad lawns and narrow minds”, she succumbed.

Hazelgrove’s strange ‘ritual of ascending stairs to a musty old attic’ was born.

Perhaps we should all consider the impact that our workspace has on our creative output and perhaps we should also think of how we use rituals and routines to achieve more of what we want in our creative life.

Here are his own thoughts from his website.

“It is a complicated thing where one chooses to write. I have written in store rooms, basements, bedrooms, attics, spaces over garages, cottages, buttonhole apartments and just about every coffee house in America. Maybe criteria would be as simple as a place where one can be lost and no one will notice the man in the corner scribbling or typing or reading or just staring into blank space. There is nothing holy about one space over another but there must be some sort of anonymity of the sort that allows the writer to become whoever he or she wants for that time.

“While I write in other places as well — I do have an office over a garage that I share with the exhaust and the occasional field mouse — the attic is a touchstone, a place where one gets a glimmer of another time, maybe a simpler time, I don’t know. But certainly, once I am there and settled into my stiff-backed chair and I hear the squirrels chattering in the eaves and stare at the church in the distanced over the rooftops — I am very far away, at least for an hour or two.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 6:01 am and is filed under Case Studies, Curio, coaching concepts. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.