Working from anywhere: a user's guide
As the tyranny of the office crumbles, take inspiration from authors’ idiosyncratic ideas on the most productive places to work.
While working from home, my role model has been Truman Capote. Not in the sense that I’ve been writing a trailblazing bestseller, but because when Capote was working, he always preferred to lie down.
“I am a completely horizontal author,” Capote told The Paris Review in 1957. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.” This is a practice that has stood me in excellent stead for the past 12 months, although without the cigarettes. (Smoking in bed is dangerous).
This is a moment when decisions are being made which will redefine working people’s lives. Return back to the commute, the office and pre-pandemic work life? Or embrace ‘working from anywhere’? While some CEOs are determined to coerce their employees back into the office, some of the world’s biggest companies including Google, Apple, AirBNB and American Express have extended their remote working policies. Deloitte will let its 20,000 UK staff work remotely all the time, with no requirement to go into the office. Last week, Industrious CEO Jamie Hodari argued that freedom to choose leads to higher productivity.
So, given the freedom to choose, where is the best place to work?
In the car? Or even the bath?
Let’s start with some of the less obvious. Vladimir Nabokov liked to write in the privacy of a parked car (although he never learned to drive), as did Gertrude Stein, who was at her most productive in the driver’s seat of ‘Lady Godiva’, her Model T Ford.
Agatha Christie created her plots in a large Victorian bathtub; likewise Dalton Trumbo, who liked to bang out his screenplays (Roman Holiday, Spartacus) in the bath at night. According to The School of Life, Christie and Trumbo were definitely in the right place:
“The primary obstacle to good thinking is not a cramped desk or an uninteresting horizon. It is, first and foremost, anxiety. It is in this context that the shower emerges as so helpful to the way our minds work and earns the right to be honoured as one of the best places on earth in which to do any kind of serious reflection.”
In a hotel room
Money no problem? Then I would highly recommend Maya Angelou as your work-from-anywhere role model: Angelou only ever wrote in hotel rooms. I could easily name dozens of hotels that I would swap my bed for. Back when travelling for work was normal, I had some of my most enjoyable (and productive) afternoons working in hotels. I always perched someplace where I could people-watch and order copious amounts of green tea (followed by wine come late afternoon): so at the baby grand hotel, The Marlton, I was in the expresso bar; it was the courtyard at Mandarin Oriental Paris; at London’s Rosewood I spent many a late afternoon ensconced in Scarfe’s Bar; and at the Tschuggen Grand Hotel, I forwent the people watching and worked in my room, mesmerised by the mountain view.
Angelou’s tastes were quite spartan. As she explained to The Daily Beast, ‘I have a bedroom, with a bed, a table and a bath. I have Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, and the Bible’. And to jolly things along, often an early sherry. ‘I might have it at 6.15am just as soon as I get in, but usually it’s about 11am’.
Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller and William Burroughs all wrote – and partied – at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel. Rudyard Kipling penned his most famous novel, The Jungle Book, during one of his stays at London’s Brown’s Hotel, while Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express at Istanbul’s Pera Palace Hotel (presumably in the bath).
In a shed
George Bernard Shaw’s most productive spot was a writing hut built on a revolving mechanism, allowing him to follow the sun throughout the day as he wrote. “People bother me,” Shaw confessed, “I come here to hide from them.” He named the hut ‘London’ so his staff wouldn’t be lying when they said he’d ‘gone to London’. Dylan Thomas wrote Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night in a bike shed, perched on stilts on the cliff above his boathouse in Laugharne. Philip Pullman penned His Dark Materials trilogy in his shed, constructed when his son started playing the violin.
You can imagine how a quiet room with no one to see and no messages to reply to, might be among the most productive places we could be. Although good luck if you fancy opting for a garden shed office at the moment: my friend invested in one of Hutsmith’s ultra-stylish garden offices, but now the waiting list is longer than for a Louis Vuitton bag.
In bed
Finally, far from being indulgent and indolent, working in bed may spark creativity and productivity – memorably, Samuel Johnson, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and William Wordsworth all worked from bed. And why not? A bed is warm, cosy and comfortable, with enough space to spread everything out. There are some dos and don’ts for setting up the perfect bed office, captured brilliantly by Guardian journalist, Emine Saner who has worked from bed for about a decade. Her advice is to create some boundaries between work and rest, and she delineates the two by, “getting washed, dressed and then climbing into my boyfriend’s side of the bed”.
Bed is definitely my best place to work. It’s work, but not as I know it, which in turn tricks my brain into thinking that I am relaxing. Then I think better. And since I am already in my favourite place, I’m less inclined to wander off to tidy the house, stroke the dog or eat the contents of the fridge.
Next week – where writers write…
In the second part of our Writing From Anywhere series, we speak to contemporary authors and journalists about their idiosyncratic working spaces. Featuring: DBC Pierre, William Boyd, Noo Saru-Wiwa and others.
Whether you work in a shed, a bath or a bed, at Forthwrite, we teach writing that is an aid to productivity, not a hindrance – more output, faster working, less time wasted on cluttered words and confused thinking. As an editor, journalist and ad man we know how much valuable time gets squandered . Our ‘How to write productively course’ will show you ways we’ve found to write faster and more fluently.