Recharging Your Writing: For a Change of Pace, Change Your Place

I don’t know what causes the condition, but way too often my mind turns to mush when I sit down in my office to write. I start contemplating everything from the meaning of life to the best place to get a haircut to the significance of a worldwide shortage of duct tape.

To escape the intrusive thoughts, I rise, migrate to the family room  and face worse dangers–the television and comfy couch. 

Craving and desperate for escape, I scramble up the stairs to the kitchen where there is nothing. Nothing but a treasure trove of delicious treats somewhere (if I can find where my wife hid them). Beyond the sliding doors is the city park. The radio sits on a bookcase daring me to turn on something that fully exhibits the high-definition bass of compact speakers.

I could hide in the living room, slipping into the quiet of noise-canceling headphones, but there’s another couch…

There is hope, however. Pack up the laptop, thesaurus, and notebooks and head away from the house entirely. 

It usually works, if for no other reason than the new geography shakes the cobwebs that dam the brain, allowing the words to flow. Complete with glaring misspellings and empty-headed redundancies like “simultaneously at the same time” (as if events can happen simultaneously at different times).

The main question is "Where to go?" There are the obvious choices of the local library, the nearest Starbucks, and the oft-mentioned McDonald’s. They all have the advantage of flat surfaces and free wi-fi for the computer , but familiarity can induce boredom and sleep as quickly as a nearby couch can. 

For something completely different here are some suggestions:

Away!

Do you have a vehicle or a gullible friend who can drive you out of town? Perhaps a rich benefactor with an underused Gulf Stream airplane? Use them. You don’t have to go far. Maybe simply the next town. Perhaps alongside a river. Possibly Argentina. Okay, maybe that's too far.

If you live in the country, venture to the nearest suburb. If you live in the suburbs, brave the traffic downtown. If you live in the city, bolt for the country. 

If a radical geographical shift is out of the question, try something simpler. Rather than a corner table in a quiet restaurant, plant yourself on one of the benches just inside the doors of a Walmart. Instead of Starbucks, try Caribou. Hate McDonald's? Try Schlotzsky's. Library's too noisy? Try a cemetery. (Seriously!)



Open Spaces

Although the outdoors has the glaring disadvantages of weather, bugs, and the need for sunscreen, it can spur innumerable thoughts and reactions. 

In rural areas, consider fields, wooded paths, pond sides, and honking huge rocks. Or be adventurous. Climb a tree.  

You’ve heard of mountaintop experiences? Try one. Find highest elevation you can find and sit atop it. Even if the rise is not exactly mountainous, let the view and air remold your thinking.

Or on the opposite plane, find a low place–a valley, a hollow, a dry riverbed–and feel the earth enfold you with its presence.

In urban settings, every major business these days enhances their campus with glorious plazas. Forward thinking cities provide their citizens respite from the concrete and steel with parks and other green spaces. Educational institutions, especially colleges and universities, seem to love picture-perfect scenery for their advertising brochures by planting trees, crafting malls, and erecting monuments, all furnished with benches to encourage reflection.

Enclosed Spaces

Libraries and restaurants, as stated before, are obvious choices for a writing environment, but rather than selecting ones you're accustomed to, drive to another town. 

Lobbies are great no matter what the site, as long as the business owners don’t mind your presence. Those in cities are safer since the traffic seldom notices you.

Did I mention museums? Museums are great places for meditation and revelation. Besides the inspirational surroundings, the curators love to provide information. Just ask. 

Few rural communities offer the enclosed spaces that cities do, but they are not without their locations. For example, many include shelters in their picnic areas, some even with electrical outlets. Yea! (Few with wi-fi, however. Sigh.) For a completely different experience, one can always try the local bar. 

Walks/Runs/Hikes

Sometimes, what you really need is to put the computer and pen away and just walk. Not to quit writing, but to re-energize, to reboot the mechanism, if you will. It is surprising what the process of walking in the fresh air (or polluted air, depending on your location) can jar free. Maybe it's your feet slapping against the pavement. Maybe it's the synapses flapping together for one mind-clearing moment. Maybe a hornet stings you in the nose and you let loose the perfect expletive you've been searching for to give your protagonist as she realizes her favorite color is puce. Suddenly, a half-formed, harebrained notion  morphs into a fully realized concept ready for typing when you get home.

Great writing often comes from not writing.

At least not in your usual writing environment.

Creating stories, elucidating ideas, or simply joining a noun and verb into a coherent system is difficult under ideal familiar conditions. Rather than allowing the same inconsequential temptations to distract you, rather than breathing the same stale air, rather than consuming enough of the same coffee to support the entire city of Seattle, it’s best to simply leave and write elsewhere. 

Wherever you go to write or to think will provide a new perspective, a change of pace, and a change of attitude that allows your brain and fingers to do what they were meant to do: Write!