Why Paris? – The Magic & The Mundane (Part II)

Today’s post follows on from yesterday’s Writing Spaces article. Here Cynthia Morris looks closer at the individual spaces of the authors, and how they have found life as a writer in the City of Love.

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What about your writing space must you have?

Janet Skeslien Charles Absolute quiet at home or good coffee in a café. I love notebooks and pens. Le Thé des Ecrivains has lovely notebooks and my newest pen is part porcelain.

I’ve also been going to the Bibliothèque Nationale, right across the river from my apartment. You can’t check anything out of the BN, and a year pass in the research section is 60 euros. There are few distractions. At home, I can check my email, tidy up, make yet another cup of tea, or call a friend, but at the Library, I have to focus. I only stay for an hour to ninety minutes, but do get a lot of writing done in that time.

Heather Stimmler-Hall Sometimes I’ll take notes on the metro, but I can’t get any serious work done anywhere but my own desk on my computer. I like to have my music, my cup of hot tea, my Burt’s Bees chap stick, and my little doggies Pedro & Lena snoozing in their basket nearby.

Katy Masuga I grew up without much, sometimes not even a bed. So to define my needs in terms of, well, anything beyond being alive feels slightly disingenuous. I happen to live in a studio which is in a turret literally overlooking the Eiffel Tower. This round room is part of the intended apartment from Last Tango in Paris, though the interior shots in the film are elsewhere.

Cara Black A pencil. I like the French mechanical pencils. I’m always making notes. Ideas come to me as I walk. Using my laptop, I write at the kitchen table. I work at different times of the day.

I also listen to French music when I write to help me remember what I saw and felt while researching in Paris. When I started writing, my son was small. I had to grab writing time when I found it.

Mary Duncan I must have natural light. Maybe that’s because I come from Southern California. Sometimes I go to Café de la Mairie on rue St. Sulpice. I go upstairs there to read manuscripts or to write longhand. It’s quiet there and you see other writers and editors there.

What writing challenge have you had to overcome?

H S-H In my travel writing career the hardest challenge has been differentiating myself as a professional journalist among the growing sea of bloggers who write as a hobby. Pithy observations and witty commentary may be fun to write, but it’s not journalism. Good travel writing should be well written, accurate, and useful. That requires quite a bit of real work and fact checking in person, not just online. It’s the unglamorous side of travel writing, but it’s the most important, as well.

Other than that, there’s the age-old writing challenge of actually writing. I wrote my first professional news article 18 years ago, and it’s just as hard today as it was back then. But like Paris, the rewards of being a writer are worth the effort!

CB When writing a series, the challenge is to keep the stories fresh. How to keep my character’s motivations personal. Aimee has to evolve throughout the series and has to be familiar.

It’s really important to use sensory detail to bring the reader to Paris. Smell is easiest to write, and my challenge is I can write in too many scents. Touch is really important and also difficult to write.

JSC I haven’t overcome it yet: my second novel. A project dear to my heart that I have worked on for several years has just gone back into the drawer, and I am moving on rather than overcoming. There are no guarantees in writing or in life. Even with hard work and the best intentions, there are setbacks.

KM The question can obviously be taken many ways. I’m in the process of transitioning from publishing in academic writing to literary, and, although I don’t find the writing to be a challenge per se – I have always done both – , I am having to learn a whole new field in terms of publication.

MD It’s very easy for me to have too many irons in the fire. Then I don’t get any of them done. Also being able to block out the ‘other’. This is where discipline comes in.

What Paris myths have you found to be untrue?

MD People think they can come to Paris and write the Great American Novel. The myth is that city will give you the energy and environment to do it; the truth is you need to create that energy for yourself.

H S-H The idea that Parisians don’t like to work. I think every culture has its lazy contingent, and in Paris they get a lot of attention with their protest marches.

But the small business owners I meet daily in my work — hotel owners, restaurant workers, tour operators, and small boutique owners — are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. They’re too busy to go on strike, don’t expect government handouts, and aren’t planning on retiring at 60 years old.

JSC It is disappointing to hear people talk about how rude Parisians are, because for the most part, I find that people here are lovely.

KM Well, by definition all myths are untrue. As for Paris, I think that any city eventually becomes ‘real’, in the sense of gritty and bureaucratic, once you allow yourself to move beyond the surface of idealized images.

Anyone who makes the choice to live here learns that fact quite quickly and generally finds it annoying when casual visitors make the typical references to being enamored with a place that doesn’t exist but in their minds.

At the same time, expats are perhaps guilty of this mystification more than the rest. After all, it is precisely despite the ‘gritty and bureaucratic’ that we remain here and sustain our own image of the city as simultaneously beautiful and actual, imaginary and abrasive, comfortable and yet dreamily elusive.

What about your writing space?

Many thanks to these writers for contributing their time and sharing their experience. I loved doing these interviews because my work is devoted to helping people do their creative work. I’m fascinated about what circumstances provide the best environment for our work.

Answer these questions for yourself, for where you live and what’s vital for your writing process. You might be surprised at your answers! Please share them in a comment below.

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Images courtesy of Frits de Jong and Cynthia Morris