The Mind, the Most Important Writer’s Space

What does a writer need to write? We need spaces, and so many of them. One might think that we need pen and paper, or in our modern age, a keyboard of some kind. Those are indeed spaces to create marks on physical or digital blank pages. A writer needs so many more different kinds of spaces: space in their schedules, space in the greater world, space from or with others.

I started this blog to discuss and even recommend how to create space for writing. There will eventually be posts on different apps I use or have used to organize my time, tasks, and writing as well as tips on organizing and decorating one's space in the physical world: a desk, for example. I might even include the social spaces for writing and writers and how one might create them, digitally and physically of course.

I am a bit of a productivity app fan, always exploring what new ones are out there that may better improve my day to day. I escape into these digital worlds hoping one of them will help me unravel the multi-coloured tangled ball of string that is my own mind. I obsess over every detail of my home, including two desk spaces (but not Virginia Woolf's prescription for a room of my own; I live in a modern big city after all, not the Bloomsbury of a century ago with a cottage in the English countryside). I recently realized that I do this constant tinkering with my physical space in a lifelong attempt to create a feeling of mental safety. (Maybe this Focus Poster I just made with Canva will finally make me feel comfortable in my own mind?)

I am good at the physical and digital spaces. I have a long way to go on my journey of discovering the right mental space for my writing.

This blog will, yes, have those app and tool reviews, how-tos, and tips. But perhaps, too, it will include my journey for overcoming my mental hurdles against my writing, a much less polished subject. If there's one thing I strongly believe in, it's honesty and vulnerability around including discussion of our true selves. We can’t create space for one another without it. For me, that includes a lifelong journey with mental illness, which informs everything I do, and don't do. Spaces for Writers can't be a blog by me without the mind, the most important space.