Where Writers Work

Tee Tate

There is a strict schedule on my whiteboard. Dates and expectations, deadlines, and launch dates. I rarely stick to them.

When writing, I need to know where I’m going. I’m not a pantser. I’m a planner, at least when it comes to my writing and for a long time, I had to eek out space for myself wherever I could.

I dreamed of an office all to myself. I dreamed of pinboards and filing cabinets and a desk long enough to stack journals and books.

It took me decades and might have never happened had it not been for a flood in 2016 that devastated our lives.

Everything was gone. Books and journals, baby pictures, and family portraits. Our clothes, our memories, all washed into river water as we stared blankly feeling utterly powerless.

But there was a bright side to all that devastation: we got a new place and through some moments when I refused to do anything but put my foot down, I got my office.

For the last year, during the pandemic, this office has become my sanctuary. I read here. I write here. I binge far too many movies and shows here.

But mostly, in this small, sweet place with my hodgepodge desk and a custom bookshelf (thanks to my talented former carpenter hubby) that rivals a small library, I invent plots and create worlds. Everything comes to life in this place and it fills me with such hope and imagination.

Books surround me, journals brimming with new ideas and plots are just a reach away, and looking down on me are great, dynamic women who fill me with purpose.

It’s a wonderful little world where all the stories come from.

It’s the place where I am at my most productive.

What writer could ask for more?