If you haven't read the previous post, you might want to before you read this one.

Writing, Privacy -- and A Room of My Own

Part Two

The room, clearly, had to be painted. Yellow is almost my least favorite color, but I have found it a cheerful and uplifting color for walls. It always seems to reflect and augment sunshine, so yellow the walls were painted. Megan and my husband, our resident carpenters, filled a large closet with book shelves, we moved...

This starts out being general and perhaps a little polemic, but it becomes personal and rather happy, so please stick with me.

Writing, Privacy -- and A Room of My Own

Part One

In her famous essay Virginia Woolf (famously) said that in order to produce fiction the female writer should have a little money -- that is, an independent income -- and a room of her own.

She then went on to explain at length why this is so, offering many examples...

Not the saint himself, naturally. John and I visited the mission named after him yesterday.

There are few buildings in California where you feel like you can reach out and touch the distant past, but Misión San Francisco de Asís is one of them. (It is also called Mission Dolores, because there was a stream nearby which had already been named by a scouting party Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, the Brook of Our Lady of Sorrows.) A building that is over 200 years old will...

This post is not about writing, except that it is about something that affects everything I do (or don't do) including my writing. It's prompted by a visit to my therapist today.

I don't speak often or very much about my severe clinical depression, because I think that the topic is boring. It bores me. It's not a dramatic stick-your-head-in-the-oven sort of depression. (Anyway, suicide would take more initiative than I have most days.) It's ... drab ... and it feels so trivial....

Part II

Context

Without the context of a story, the conflict, the tensions, and the emotions can fall absolutely flat, confuse the reader, or create the wrong impression. The closer the setting is to the world we and our readers personally inhabit, the more the society that surrounds the story is like our own in time or space, the more we can depend on the reader to know the context and the more things both the writer and the reader can safely take for granted....