For many years, my writing was conducted in a corner of the bedroom of our small urban home, my laptop balanced on a narrow, pull-out writing table that had been purchased from a certain Swedish retailer and that slid in and out without warning, so that I would shoot forward in my chair, hands locked on the keyboard. My writing life was similarly stop-start, a night-time pursuit, when the kids were safely in bed, the dog walked, the dishwasher humming away in the kitchen.
It was a hobby, and nothing more, I told myself. Not for me the room of my own decreed by Virginia Woolf in her essay, A Room of One’s Own, as being necessary – along with money – for a woman to freely write. Much has changed since 1929, and, of course, the obstacles apply to both men and women: the worries about giving time to a pursuit that may never result in concrete success, but I wonder if, for women, there persists the additional barrier of “little old me” syndrome, apologising for ourselves, afraid to say that we take the whole business of writing seriously.
Thus, when my husband, a serial DIY enthusiast always in search of a new project, offered to build me a writing shed, I ummed and awwed and dithered – “Sure, I’m fine as I am!” – and he went off to do other projects in a bit of a sulk. It’s true, I was used to my routine. I had written with the background din and the constant interruption of children for any number of years. No amount of saying that I was working would distract them from the myriad little visits to the bedroom to get me to sign homework or to impart a bit of information that they simply had to tell me when I was working away on chapter 2, in spite of having had the entire afternoon to do so. My youngest eventually drew a sign for my bedroom door with a picture of a very cross-looking me and the edict: “Mum is working!” in block capitals below it. Mum was indeed working, not that any of them paid a blind bit of attention.
However, after having written one work of non-fiction and two novels, feet propped up on the bed, I had to acknowledge that I did deserve something else. It was time. But I also had to be honest with myself about my reliance on my martyr complex as a distraction from taking my work seriously. I had to ask myself what it might be like to have nothing else to do but to concentrate on my oeuvre, to be truly alone with the blank page, the blinking cursor at the top of the screen. I’d grown used to the constant background noise, had almost come to rely on it as the soundtrack to my writing, so what might it be like to be forced to focus on the written word entirely? The thought filled me with mild trepidation.
The breakthrough came when my sister-in-law, Mary, gave me a copy of a book called A Woman’s Shed by Gill Heriz. I pored over pictures of “spaces for women to create, make, grow, think and escape”, and I thought, “Oh, yes”. When I was a child, a man’s need for a shed was seen as par for the course – men needed to escape, to be alone with the lawnmower, the shears and 16 different kinds of fence paint. Their need for space was seen as an entitlement at a time when the women’s space was the kitchen. Here was a book telling me that women needed exactly the same thing: time, as one lady said in the book, “to ease myself out of the ‘oughts’ and ‘musts’”, the endless list of “really must dos” that pepper our lives.
“You know,” I said to my husband, “I think I will have that shed, thanks.” His eyes lit up and he immediately went online to pore over shed plans. We both agreed on one thing – that the shed had to be just big enough for me to work in – to fit a table and chair and possibly the dog basket in. I confess that I was a teensy bit disappointed, as I’d had visions of myself lolling on a sofa, Netflix in front of me, but then I realised that this was to be a work space – and a work space only. The shed was at too far a remove from the house to get wifi anyway, a blessing in disguise.
My husband announced the first of many trips to the DIY store, from which he returned with bits of two-by-four and some substantial-looking insulation, and, after the regulation couple of months of tripping over electric screwdrivers and bits of chipboard, my shed took shape. It is indeed small – with just enough room for my table, a lovely office chair donated to my by my other sister-in-law, Cliona, and some excellent shelves, now laden with books, but it has a lovely northern light, so it feels bright without being sunny and the best thing of all is that because it’s in the garden the kids rarely venture out to it, leaving me blissfully alone.
My husband has occasionally attempted to put tools in there “to keep them out of the rain”, but they are politely but firmly returned to him. This is my space, one that has given me the permission to be a grown-up writer, to ditch the apology for what I’m doing, the protestations that I’m only writing “a bit of a novel”, whatever that is. And, most importantly, I’ve discovered that the dreaded blank page is no more or less terrible than usual. It’s a room of my own, and it’s perfect.
[ The House on Seaview Road by Alison Walsh is published by Hachette IrelandOpens in new window ]
