Inside chapter one

On what makes a good writing space, plus: full subscriptions are back, for those who like them.

Jan 31, 2025

You can listen to me read this newsletter here or on your podcast app.

I’m back! Have you been writing? How’s it going for you at the moment? Please tell me all about it:

In October I paused all payments from subscribers to this newsletter. My book was about to come out and I couldn’t give this enough of my time to deserve your money. This week, I’m going to unpause those payments. There are things I want to share from my book In Writing: Conversations on Inspiration, Perspiration and Creative Desperation – some pages that I love and haven’t necessarily had the opportunity to discuss elsewhere, with thought-provoking snippets about the writing process from some of my interviewees (who have included George Saunders, Kiley Reid, David Sedaris, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jesse Armstrong and dozens more). Today’s newsletter is free, but I’ll be sending some paywalled letters over the coming weeks, and I’ll do my very best to make them worth your cash.

If you had a paying subscription before but don’t want to continue, it’s easy to cancel. I hope you’ll stay (or join) though, as I take anything that goes behind the paywall very seriously. At £6 a month, this newsletter costs about the same as a pint of lager in London, and is almost as delicious.

I’m going to choose a page from each chapter and talk a bit about why I like it and how I relate to it as a writer. Today’s is from Chapter One: How Do We Find Flow?

This chapter is about the practical conditions of our writing, which for some lucky people are almost irrelevant. Two brilliant Wendys – Erskine and Cope – are among those who’ve told me they could really write anywhere and under almost any circumstances; Wendy Erskine doesn’t even mind if her family have the radio on and are talking over her head. If you can switch your focus on and off like this, you have a superpower that is useful in arenas far beyond the page.

It’s true that if you’re writing professionally, at some point you have to get over yourself and get the work done, regardless of whether there is a builder drilling next door or you have your laptop on your knees in a train station. A deadline and a contract are galvanising, and I really benefit from them. Still though, there are preferable and less preferable ways to do it. Ideally I do like quiet, light, comfort, and things around me that are visually inspiring.

For years, I’ve worked most days at the dining table in the corner of my living room. It’s a spot that gets direct sunlight. It offers a view of the street and, for a couple of weeks in late March or early April – which I longingly think about all year round – the cherry blossom.

On the other hand, the sunlight is so bright that the left side of my face – the one towards the window – now appears to be five years older than the right side. Often it’s so bright that I have to draw the curtains while I work, which makes me feel like a depressed person, which in turn makes me depressed. In the summer, it’s unbearably hot, like writing in a greenhouse. Also, my day can sometimes look like this:

9am: arrive at living-room table
12.30pm: flop body from desk chair onto sofa, switch TV on and eat lunch
1pm: slide back to table to continue work
6pm: exciting holiday to other parts of my home, e.g. kitchen and bathroom
7pm: return to living room for evening on sofa

It’s a lot of life to spend in the same 2.5 square metres.

The stupid thing about this is that I also have a spare room. For long periods that room has been occupied by lodgers or friends, but not lately. It’s just been sitting there unloved, behind a closed door, with a bed and an enormous empty wardrobe taking up most of its floor space. Now and then somebody would say, ‘Why don’t you get rid of the wardrobe and turn that into an office?’ and I would think that sounded like a wild and unnecessary indulgence, greedy and unwarranted. I don’t know why. It’s not like the choice was between putting a desk in it or continuing to use it as a donkey sanctuary.

When I finally started to consider it, towards the end of 2024, I didn’t consciously connect that to the fact that I’d just published my first book. The timing probably isn’t a coincidence, though. I’ve been working as a writer in journalism for not far off twenty years, but there’s something about a published book that makes you feel a bit more justified in taking yourself seriously. Actually, on one level I’ve always taken myself embarrassingly seriously, as all writers secretly do, but I no longer have to completely deny that.

So I got rid of the wardrobe. I offered it up on Freecycle, and two impressive Spanish sisters came over with a drill and spent an efficient hour dismantling it. I bought a small desk, which was incredibly exciting. When I switched off the light in bed each night, I thought about what I wanted my study to look like and made a mental list of the jobs I needed to do to get it ready.

Some of the people I’ve interviewed for the In Writing podcast and book have preferred to be in very sparse rooms with nothing sentimental around. They want a sort of clarity that they can only find with blankness, and I understand that. Many writers, though, seem to strive for an atmosphere of love in the room, and I’m one of them. John Crace, the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, has his (now grown-up) son’s soft toys – monkeys – lined up along the windowsill. The novelist Sophie Mackintosh has on her desk a small sculpture that her parents gave her, because it resembles the sisters in her first published novel, The Water Cure. And of course, all the writers quoted on page 25 of my book, above – Emma Jane Unsworth, Liane Moriarty and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ – have in their eyeline gifts from loved ones.

Ayọ̀bámi’s particularly touched me. Her husband is also a writer – Emmanuel Iduma – so he obviously understands the faith required to complete a manuscript. Sometimes your faith in yourself begins to fail, and it helps for somebody else to offer theirs. He wanted her to know that he could envisage her finished book, and by expressing that, he helped her to finish it. It’s a real act of love.

I’m still figuring out my office. I don’t want to add things unless they’re beautiful or useful, because I know it will make a difference to how happy I feel here and how my work progresses – but I’m also not one of those people you see on Instagram who has a budget standing by, waiting to be spent at French antique markets and art fairs. At the moment I can’t even afford to buy the materials required to paint the room, but I’ve moved a few of my special things into it.

On my desk is an Anglepoise lamp in primary colours, which my mother gave me a few years ago.

It gives me such pleasure, this lamp, and I think it’s linked to growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s. I think a lot about the (arguably hideous) Saved by the Bell aesthetic and the mural in Three Men and a Baby, and Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Group. This graphic, cheerful, office-canteen look stirs something in my heart. I keep looking wistfully at Kathrin Blikisdorf’s gorgeous mobiles.

On the wall, I have a print of Van Gogh’s ‘Oleanders’, bought at the National Gallery last month. It’s a jug of heavy pink flowers with spikes of dark leaves, arranged against a zingy green wall, and there’s something so abundant, joyful and promising about it. Next to me, right now, I also have a real-life vase of hopeful daffodils that my friend Naomi brought last week. January has been so cold and miserable in London that they refused to open until I put them on the windowsill above the heater.

I also have in here an embroidered felt version of my book cover, which my friend Emily commissioned and gave me to celebrate its publication. It’s so sweet and, like Ayọ̀bámi’s gift from her husband, it is a visual reminder of someone in my corner.

And I have a pinboard, too. I’m striving eventually for something like novelist Meg Mason’s pinboard, with useful thoughts and images. At the moment, one of them is a quote by the comedy writer Jamie Demetriou – an excerpt from this Guardian article. Click through for context, but the bit I like (and sometimes need a reminder of) says, ‘making something of worth has nothing to do with what you can get away with, and everything to do with the painful task of connecting with your own sensibility’.

So that’s where I am with my new writing space, and it’s imperfect, but I’m very happy in it. Now I like my living room more as well, because I’m not under house arrest there all day. I would like to hear if you’ve claimed a room or a corner for writing, and what you’ve chosen to put around you. Also, should I consider it my office or my study? ‘Study’ feels a bit pretentious, but ‘office’ is a bit corporate. Let me know what you think.

In Writing with Hattie Crisell

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