Well, here I am, ensconced in my hotel room. I didn’t manage to write too much last night, but I got a great jump on the morning before going down to breakfast. Now I’m about to get back to work but want to do a quick blog entry.
I received a complimentary upgrade to a double queen suite with a full kitchen. I have no idea why, but it’s quite nice. But who comes to a hotel to cook? I sure don’t.
The main trouble I have with hotel rooms is that they don’t provide tables with a lower tray for laptops or keyboards. Just about every businessman and woman travels with a laptop today, but these desks in hotel rooms are always high (for eating). We need something lower for typing. Fortunately, I brought my separate keyboard so I can sit it on my lap. Still…
In response to my Writing Experiment post yesterday, I received this comment from Swan:
Hm, I don’t think sitting in a hotel room would inspire me. I’d need some kind of nature setting, a forest or quiet park nearby where I could sit among the trees maybe. Possibly if the hotel room had a balcony…
To which I must respond: This has nothing to do with being inspired and everything to do with just writing, just getting the words down.
Many people assume that a writer needs to be inspired to write. Wrong. If you wait for inspiration, you’d rarely write. Same thing is true for doing the laundry. If you wait to be inspired to do the laundry, you’d quickly run out of clothes to wear. The point of going to a hotel room like this is to get away from all distractions — the phone, the mail, even the pretty forest or quiet park that might be nearby. The point is to get as many words on paper in as shortest time as is possible.
This morning in a daily digest from a writers group, I received a link to this great Writer’s Prayer by Lawrence Block. It comes from a book published in 1981, and I remember reading it when I first started writing. Block was the fiction columnist in the Writer’s Digest Magazine back when I began writing, and I never missed his column. I also read several of his books which are very good. I’m sure this link will be repeated in a number of authors’ blogs because it is so good and so true. This is what it’s like to be a writer, and this is sure a prayer I need to pray!
-rlh-
