Where it all happens. A lot of good people died here.
I forget there’s a good reason why MTV Cribs and all those other shows taking viewers into people’s homes are so popular: We’re a curious species. We love to see how other people live and work and commit ghastly crimes of taste.
So it came to pass, then, that reader FZA asked:
Can you describe your writing environment and the hardware/software in detail for us?
What make of computer/laptop you use, what type of office chair you’ve bought, the music that’s playing (you mentioned Steve Roach), which writing programme you use, what your office looks like, what reference books you keep to hand etc. etc.?
More a question of the practicals rather than the fundamentals but still useful info I think, no?
My first reaction: Who could possibly be interested in this?
Then I remembered: Even I like checking out other writers’ set-ups.
So here you go, the grand tour, complete with:
• A pair of resource giveaways at the end
• A couple of TMI (Too Much Information) Alerts for the hypercurious to click for in-depth whys and wherefores.
Infrastructure
Desk. Massive. Solid oak, through and through. With a hutch and miles of hidden cables. Crawl underneath it for cover and you’d survive a bomb hit. I love it so much that, when I die, I want it to be remade into a small longship to cremate me in.
Chair. It’s just a chair. By HON. Which I know only because the tiny info booklet is still in a packet stapled underneath the seat. I didn’t realize they tested these things so brutally: “In one test, a 125 lb. weight is dropped onto the seat 100,000 times.” Good to know. I weigh 167 and probably bounce up and down that many times in one day.
Setting. At a window looking out on the Flatirons, Green Mountain, and Bear Peak. Some writers need to be closed off in a hermetically sealed room, but gimme a view of the outdoors any day.
Hardware
Computer (main). A Mac Pro with dual-quad 2.8GHz processors, all four drive bays filled, and three external drives. Overkill? For writing, absolutely. No writer needs 8-core oomph for the usual things writers do. But it utterly rocks for other things I love to mess about with: photography and, especially, music, sound design, and other audio work, all in obedience to my maxim:
Success in one field of creative endeavor should fund the ongoing abuse of another.
TMI Alert: Hard drive breakdown
The other keys I like to pound.
Computers (secondary). A basic 14-inch MacBook. All I need for the living room or deck, coffee shops, and travel. Plus I keep my semi-retired G5 handy, in part for reasons covered in #4 of “To Produce & Protect: 5 Things Creators Can Learn From IT Geeks.”
Miscellaneous. Monitor, 20” Apple Cinema Display. For wi-fi and network routing, an Apple AirPort Extreme. Picking up a theme yet? Belkin combo USB hub + iPod dock.
Sound. An Altec-Lansing 2.1 desktop sound system for everyday listening and, for audio work, first-gen Alesis M1 active nearfield studio monitors sitting atop the hutch.
TMI Alert: Audio geekery, but with writer relevance (and scary picture)
Printers. Canon MX-700 all-in-one. It’s connected by Ethernet to the AirPort to serve as a network printer. The beauty of this model is that you can easily replace the print head if needed. Every Epson I ever had died because the print head eventually got too clogged for the cleaning function to rescue it, and it was cheaper to buy a new one than repair it. Gee, that wouldn’t be by design, would it? Not an issue with the Canon.
That said, for photography, we have Doli’s Epson Stylus Pro 3880, which creates prints so gorgeous you want to lick them. Occasionally I get asked for a signed picture, so having a dedicated photo printer around makes it easy to crank out pro-grade copies on demand, no lab required. Not, umm, that I’m recommending licking my photos.
Wide-angle lens distortion not actually present in real life.
Unsung hero award. This cubbyhole organizer I found at Office Depot for, I don’t know, $14, maybe? 6 horizontal slots, 4 vertical slots, plus the top, which shelves the main backup drive and AirPort. It makes life easier.
Old-school essential. Yellow legal pads. No software yet devised, or ever to be devised, can better the tactile, free-associative immediacy of roughing out ideas by thinking on paper.
Soon. An iPad. Like you couldn’t see that coming.
Software
Primary. For most writing, Microsoft Word. I know, you don’t have to look far to find someone howling about Word being something that trickled from Satan’s bile ducts, but I can honestly say I have no problems with it. It’s the industry standard, so if you’re dealing with editors and publishers, it’s what they generally expect, and you’ll have to convert eventually. The highlighter and insert comment functions get a lot of use as in-document reminders.
However, for blogging, I like Scrivener. It has great tools for keeping track of ideas and notes, and a sidebar where you can create nested folders to organize however you see fit, and see everything at a glance.
In both programs, I love love LOVE the full screen view, which blocks out everything but the words.
Secondary. I’ve got programs up to my unibrow here, but for writing support, two are of particular note:
Circus Ponies NoteBook. It creates, well, digital notebooks. Which rule for keeping track of research cribbed from books, doing week-month-year planning, whatever. Its modular approach, with pages and separators, stomps all over word processing programs for flexible info cataloging. Plus each notebook automatically compiles its own index, which is nine kinds of awesome.
DEVONthink. You have to see it in action to appreciate it, but it’s another info tool. I mainly use it for corralling research gathered online: images, the jillions of web pages saved as PDF files, links, etc. Having a central organizer/viewer is infinitely easier than rooting around the system’s folder structure for these things one at a time. It supports multiple databases, so you can create them on a per-project basis: one for your current novel-in-progress, one derived from self-rehabbing your Krav Maga injuries … well, maybe that part’s just me.
Environmental
Reference books. FZA asked about this, but there’s nothing I consistently keep at hand. Sometimes the Mac OS built-in dictionary/thesaurus/Wikipedia portal, but that’s about it.
The Green Man sees everything, from every wall.
Music. Whatever it takes to conjure the proper mood, but in general I gravitate toward various forms of ambient and other instrumental music — vocals can be obtrusive. And yes, Steve Roach is my personal MVP. I’ve said before: He’s the one artist who never leaves my CD carousel. He’s hugely prolific, and alone covers so many styles and moods. His music goes deep, really gets in there and stirs the subconscious.
Sometimes, too, I’ll sequence a bunch of disparate stuff together as a soundtrack to a particular work. It’s a good way to alchemize the feeling of the whole entity. This is a lot easier with iTunes playlists than it was during the age of the mix-tape.
Totems. Green Man iconography. I have it all over the place. A workspace just feels better, and feeds you better, when you stock it with bits of beauty, mystery, and whimsy.
Fionn: Part paperweight, all goofball.
Office manager. A Maine Coon cat named Fionn. Getting up there in years, but he still picks a pretty good fight with the rug.
Come And Get It: 2 Resource Giveaways
Because what’s a tour without souvenirs? Download at will, and if they fit the way you work and think — or can be adapted to fit — great.
Daily word count tracksheet. This is getting a bit ahead of things, as I was planning a short post about this soon, but here it is anyway. An easy way to see at a glance how much I’m getting done (or not) each month.
Project planner. A worksheet I made based on the system detailed by Tony Robbins in his “The Time Of Your Life” program, the time and task management system that’s resonated most with me.
In a highly condensed nutshell, Outcome is where you get clear and specific about what you want to accomplish; Capture is where you randomly jot down whatever pertains to it; and Plan is for working the Captures into a series of steps.
Thanks for dropping by. But remember: To more or less quote Julia Cameron, the work doesn’t care where it gets done, or how it gets done; it only cares that it does get done.
Awesome people share.
You are awesome, aren’t you…?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Brian, thanks for the insight. I envy you, being able to work where you want, how you want. I am recently unemployed, and am toying with the idea of getting back into photography (being self employed). Otherwise…I’m either into the factory scene, or retail (YUK).
YOU LIE! I have seen your desk and can say, in fact, that it DOES suffer from wide-angle distortion! Fess up, man! We can take it.
ARGH!
Very nice, Brian! I would’ve spattered a little fake blood here and there though!!!
@ Kurt: Oh, you may be able to take that, but then I have to get into the telephoto distortion on other things and … it’s a slippery slope.
@ James: That’s probably the twisted Jackson Pollock in you. And I was pretty sure you, for one, would appreciate the keyboards, etc. Three more of which aren’t seen here: an Alesis QS7, an Oberheim OB-12, and an Akai MPK49 controller, which is great for interacting with software synths.
@Mike: I’m sorry to hear about the change in employment status. If you’re inclined to striking out on your own, then take the leap with both feet and total commitment. Half measures never seem to cut it with anything like this.
There’s a quote I like on this, from a Scottish mountaineer named W.H. Murray. To my understanding he was framing this out of his expeditions, but of course saw it as applicable to any endeavor:
“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the discussion, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”
Yes sir, that is an excellent workstation, thanks for sharing, but as you rightly say as long as the work gets done, that’s all there is. I remember that fantastic DarkEcho interview where you said that you’d written Wild Horses in pretty basic conditions http://tinyurl.com/5wxpmge
One programme I’m surprised not to see is Dropbox which has pretty much restored my sanity because of working from a desktop and a laptop. I just use that instead of My Documents now and it pings across both my hard-drives.
Interesting you use Word for Mac. I hate the damn thing, even though I always loved it on Windows. The viewing is abysmal (no page number breaks unless you set them yourself) and tiny fonts across the screen. Ugh!
Great post, very grateful. Thanks for taking the time to share all this stuff with your readers
> I remember that fantastic DarkEcho interview where you said that you’d written Wild Horses in pretty basic conditions
That was at a place by some lovely woods where I lived for several years. Actually that was a great locale. Those woods fed my spirit to no end. What you’re referring to, though, I think of as a deliberate ordeal that I initiated for a few months, to strip things down and keep the focus tight. It verged on the monastic, and really was an amazing experience.
Funny story about that interview: Paula Guran told me that Peter Straub read it and sent her $100 to keep up the good work. Apparently it was my telethon fundraiser moment and I didn’t even know it.
> One programme I’m surprised not to see is Dropbox which has pretty much restored my sanity because of working from a desktop and a laptop.
I do use Dropbox, and mentioned it in an earlier post, about 5 things to learn from IT geeks. Rightly or wrongly, I think of it more as a service rather than a productivity program. Had to draw the line here somewhere!
> Interesting you use Word for Mac. I hate the damn thing, even though I always loved it on Windows. The viewing is abysmal (no page number breaks unless you set them yourself) and tiny fonts across the screen.
Maybe it depends on what you’re using, both in terms of hardware and program version. On a 20″ display, the 2011 version gives me no grief at all, especially in full screen mode, which can also do 2 full pages side by side; it’s fine on the MacBook too. Although the font size in the balloons for comments and change tracking is ridiculously teensy. Today I was doing a galley markup in Acrobat, and that’s more like it.
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