Why I Prefer to Work In Public Spaces
As much as I’d love to be a homebody or a library hermit, I recently realized that I do my best work in public spaces. And when I say public spaces, I want the whole package: noise, people walking around, constant interruptions and music blasting through the speakers.
You’re probably horrified at the suggestion but just stick with me for a bit.
There’s this story I read during the week about the jazz musician Charles Mingus. During a performance in Europe, Mingus’s pianist Jaki Byard delivered a dazzling solo that wowed the crowd. After the performance, instead of patting Byard on the shoulder, Mingus yelled at him and said: “don’t ever do that again!”
At first, Mingus sounded like a jealous ass but he also had a point. Though the solo was successful, Byard ran the risk of banking on the same solo again during his next performance, and again, then again… This is usually the beginning of the end of a jazz musician.
I think writers also suffer from a similar symptom. If something works, we want to replicate it just to ensure another successful writing day. We want the same time, same tea, same music and the same word count without realizing that rigidity isn’t necessarily a good thing.
In a recent interview I did with Caitlin Ellis I briefly explained why I love the spontaneity of public spaces. In short, I believe that these places offer a good amount of resistance to make good ideas great.
When I’m out and about, all kinds of distractions could knock me off track. I might see a friend and waste the whole afternoon chatting or a song might capture my attention. Over time I started to see these interruptions as blessings because if an idea is strong enough, it will absorb whatever’s happening around me and re-emerge in a more vigorous form.
Whereas if I’m home alone, any idea sounds great because I don’t have the privilege of forgetting them. This is when I started to put monkeys in tuxedos and dress shaky ideas in formulaic writing. In a way, the outside world is a good tool to trim the fluff off of ideas.
“Sit as little as possible” Nietzsche advised in Ecce Homo and told us not to trust “any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement”.
I think the education system has convinced us that great ideas usually come from sitting still in a quiet space, but the opposite is usually the case in the real world. Some of the most significant ideas came to me when I was either mid-conversation or half-listening to music on the train.
And if I take this one step further, I think that we are in fact, co-authoring the idea with the world and all the people in it. On a really good writing day, I even get this feeling that the world is writing itself through me. Everything becomes a source of inspiration and these moments usually cannot be replicated, but the best I can do is to ride the tide and trust my surroundings.
Until next week
Robin
