The Write Place

Editor's note: Each month, the CCW blog features one of our members. This month, Nancy Hoag reflects on having her very own place to write. Nancy wrote this piece in her fifth-wheel  RV, riding in the front seat of a pick-up truck, and emailed it while waiting for the washer to finish.

  

Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t let not having a room of my own in our home stop me from writing—I wrote anyway and everywhere. At a Smith-Corona portable typewriter planted on my sewing machine cabinet, at the kitchen table, on Pizza Hut place mats and scraps of paper created from junk envelopes. Then I started noticing articles about "the setting” a writer must have. I especially remember a photo of a well-known author reclining in her Adirondack chair beside a sunny lake. I’d long dreamed of lake living and mentioned this to an editor friend that since my sales had slowed, perhaps that meant my setting wasn’t right? She suggested I create a space that would be the prettiest room in our home. So I purchased wallpaper, country curtains, a pretty chair, an antique desk, and a dozen fresh-cut tulips—and that worked!

            Not too long after, though, we found ourselves moving every several years because of my husband, Scotty's, work. Still, the first thing we looked for was space where I would write. In one home, that special place measured eight-feet square, but my husband cut through layers of wall and added a window so I could see the sun rise. In another home, we discovered a nook up under the eaves where I could watch the sun rise and set. In my very best place—in Northern Virginia—a cottage door opened onto a balcony from my office—and I wrote and wrote and wrote.

            However, shortly after moving back to Montana (my husband’s best place), Scotty and I felt called to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. We would build homes for the working poor and single moms—and live in a trailer with not even a corner to call my own. And I began to believe I would never write again.

            To my surprise, that was not the case. I still longed for a balcony, and a view, but I discovered I could write behind chain-link fencing and concertina wire in North Carolina; in a thrift-store parking lot in Georgia; next to railroad tracks in sweltering Florida heat; and stuffed between deteriorating and abandoned mobile homes in Louisiana. In just over three years, I created nearly 100 articles and devotions, saw 71 pieces published, received an AMY award, and recently got news that one of my stories would appear in an upcoming Chicken Soup book.

            While I still believe a special writing space would be the ideal, and I personally dream of one day having a hideaway again, today I type in a fifth-wheel of an RV with my supplies in overhead cupboards, inside my stiff-backed chair, and in tubs below the floor (with access from the outside only)—and I finally understand that writing does take courage, but our inspiration comes from God—and He is the “setting” I need.