![]() ![]() ![]() Sitting silently at a sturdy desk makes you feel as though you’ve living inside a fantasy novel and/or an Instagram pic with over 200 likes.Īnd yet… there’s something about being surrounded by greatness that I found entirely demoralising and disheartening. Founded by statesman William Gladstone in 1894, the library’s reading rooms contain over 150,000 books and – arguably more importantly –wooden beams strung with fairy lights. Sarah Perry, Naomi Alderman and Jessie Burton are among the authors who’ve been writers in residence at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, but absolutely anyone can rent one of the residential library’s 26 bedrooms. No wonder, then, that I managed to hit a prodigious word rate, despite being at a difficult point in my plotting.Ī residential library – William Gladstone Grasmere was once home to William Wordsworth and there’s also a Beatrix Potter shop featuring embroidered Peter Rabbit socks nearby, so the spirit of literature is definitely in the air. With no one else around, I could speak and sing to myself, and with no telly there was no opportunity for distraction. I murdered both with the hut’s velvet throw cushions and then found it a remarkably productive place to write. While you don’t have to live off the land like the naturalist did (it’s a short walk to the hotel’s bar), there is something indescribably pleasant about the feeling of isolation, combined with the tap dancing raindrops on the tin roof – until, of course, you meet a spider. Two hideous long-legged ones visited me while writing in the Victorian House Hotel’s shepherd’s hut in Grasmere, a stay which was inspired by the dwelling Thoreau built for himself in Massachusetts in 1854. Henry David Thoreau, I can safely say, was not scared of spiders. A shepherd's hut – Henry David Thoreau Writing hut life. By meticulously counting the amount of words I managed to write in authors’ favourite writing spots, then averaging this into an amount written per hour, I was able to compare the pros and cons of different destinations. To find out, I decided to visit a number of these hallowed locales of literary influence and inspiration – a shepherd's hut a residential library a shed a bath – to see which was most conducive to writing, turning not to literature but to maths. ![]() Where would you go? More importantly, where should you go? Which writer had the right idea – is it more productive to work in a hotel like Maya Angelou, or should your eventual blue plaque be adorned to a shepherd’s hut, as Henry David Thoreau preferred? Sadly, we live in an era and country where professional authors earn just £7,000 a year, and many women writers don’t get to retreat anywhere to put pen to paper, instead fitting their writing around their caring responsibilities.īut still: let’s pretend, in the way that lotteries and late night phone calls invite us to pretend, that you could go anywhere in the country to work on a book for a couple of interrupted nights. In the midst of a cost of living crisis, both of those once prosaic places sound somewhat luxurious (in the age of renting, who has shed, or a housemate that doesn’t itemise the time they spend in the tub?). Roald Dahl wrote while smoking cigarettes in his garden shed it’s been said that Agatha Christie liked to come up with her plots in the bath. The best place to write a book is on a blank page – but the best place to put that blank page remains a mystery. ![]()
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