Sunday, March 27, 2011

creative spaces: the writing hut

There are very few things as marvelous as a quiet place of your own.

Especially when you are a writer or otherwise creative type and need to be left alone to create whatever it is that you create.

Here is a look inside the writing space of a handful of amazing writers.


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The inside of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond.

This is where he stayed when he went to the woods to live a deliberate and simple life. The land he built it on was borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson and the entire cabin was 10'x15'.

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Virgina Woolf's writing shed.

Where she went to write because she was "always being distracted" by the rest of the world.

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Michael Pollan's writing hut.

His own words about his hut in his book A Place Of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.

"Is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape? What they propose, to anyone who admits them into the space of a daydream, is a place of solitude a few steps off the beaten track of everyday life."


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Dylan Thomas' writing hut.

He liked to keep his walls covered with "photos, reproductions and magazine cuttings of Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden, William Blake, a painting by Modigliani, picaresque nudes, serial specials from Picture Post and similar magazines, rhyming lists and word lists of alliterations."


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Roald Dahl's writing hut, The Gipsy House.

Where he seldom had to move from his chair because he arranged everything to be within reach and he wrote on yellow legal pads.

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George Bernard Shaw's writing hut, dubbed "London" so his staff wouldn't be lying when they said he had "gone to London".

The inside of "London." Shaw built his hut on a turntable, which enabled him to push it to follow the sun.
All info found HERE

9 comments:

  1. This is wonderful, Susie! I feel like they are in line with what you'd expect, given the respective styles. Pollan's and Dahl's are tugging at me especially on this drizzly day of ours.

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  2. Thanks ladies :)
    I want a hut too!!
    And Emily I agree, the hut does sortof match the writer. I love it!

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  3. Susie, I can't tell you how much I loved this post! So many of my favourite writers and I'd never seen their writing spaces. Amazing! Thanks so much for sharing x

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  4. Kerri I am so glad you liked it :)
    you guys brighten my day!
    xo

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  5. These are amazing! I sent the original article to my boyfriend with the tag "I want one"...which he took to mean that I want him to build me one...not what I was implying, but I will not turn down the offer!

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  6. OOh, you should send a photo once he's finished it! :)

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  7. Great post. I found you from a comment on another blog. I have been trying to convince my husband that the pool shed he built last year would make an excellent writing space. So far he has not agreed. Love you blog!

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  8. WOW. . such an awesome peek into their creative processes!

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Thank you so much for commenting!