We were talking with a friend last week about the great lengths writers achieve to avoid actually writing. Despite the fact that most of us truly derive pleasure from the act, many of us do strange things to avoid something we enjoy once we stop making excuses. Sometimes, changing your approach to your work is as simple as, well, treating it like work. Hence, The Grotto (and others of its type) in San Francisco.
The concept is simple: writers share rent on office space. They occupy rooms with doors. We cannot imagine that cubicles would work as well. Someone will surely always be on the phone or listening to bad music on the radio or both.
However, when using the idea of a shared office space to convey the return of sanity, we might, just might, humbly suggest that the following example doesn’t convey stability of the mind:
[Rodes] Fishburne uses short story master John Cheever — who dressed every morning in a suit and tie, kissed his wife goodbye and headed to the basement of his building where he undressed, hung up his clothes and wrote in his underwear — to illustrate his point.
