The Write Tuition

Each to his own.

All writers have a natural habitat, where they feel comfortable. But there are numerous experts’ out there, with their own agenda, who will gladly tell you to interfere with your natural environment ‘in the interests of efficiency’.

I have no doubt some people will benefit from giving their office a ‘feng shui’ clean out, but for those of you feel happier surrounded by piles of ’stuff’, here’s the other viewpoint.

Clutter Is Good!

If you have time to tidy then you’re not spending enough time writing

I used to think I could focus *despite* clutter but over the years I’ve decided that for writing purposes I focus *because* of clutter. When writing I create order out of chaos, and in other areas of my life I reverse the process to maintain a healthy balance.

Whereas some people have a filing system I have a ‘piling’ system. When a pile gets tall enough to fall over then I do something about it. That something usually involves lifting the whole pile carefully, to maintain the order, and dropping it carefully into one of those ‘fold flat’ crates. Stacked properly you can get them nine high, (possibly more in a room with tall ceilings, but the bottom ones do tend to bulge a little under the weight of those above and the ’stuff’ is still reasonably accessible.

How many ‘piles of nine’ you - or your floorboards - can cope with is an entirely personal decision

Despite these towering and trembling ziggurats of paper etc I can sit at my desk and focus quite happily on the task in hand without being distracted. On the few occasions when I do clear the desk and reveal bare wood I find all that empty space both distracting and intimidating. But with three computers (two semi-redundant) and a printer on the six foot by two foot surface there’s not that much bare wood.

When it comes to the computer ‘desktop’ that is pretty well organised though, even if my disc based filing system is a bit idiosyncratic

However, when I worked as a baker/confectioner I couldn’t stand a cluttered workspace. Cleanliness wasn’t enough, things had to be in their proper places. If someone borrowed a knife and put it back in the wrong place it drove me mad. Ten minutes lining stuff up before starting always paid off. It’s the same when I’m working on a motorbike. The right tools in the right place.

At the end of the day we all do what suits us best and attempting to apply ‘uncluttered feng shui’ type rules to those of us who thrive on chaos would be counterproductive. As would cluttering the desk of a naturally tidy person. I have a friend who can be driven to distraction by slightly misaligning the pad he keeps next to his computer, or turning his pen the other way up so it’s not ‘ready to use’.

Gyppo