Many people don’t know that creatives, of any kind–whether they are writers, painters, musicians, etc.–do their best work when they have a place. Just like you might have your favorite pot or spoon in the kitchen, your favorite spot on the couch for watching television, writers get in their groove when they have a familiar spot to work in.

Virginia Woolf wrote about this in A Room of One’s Own. Stephen King has also spoken on his writing routine, and favorite spots.

In his memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King advises: “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

My spot and routine is The Orange Chair.

I live in a VW Bus. Many would think that my favorite place to write would be in the bus–I call it The Pod. And it would be. But it isn’t. The battery in my laptop is old and I don’t have a battery pack to plug into. So instead, I work at my neighborhood public library.

If you have happened to read my new debut novella, you may have noticed that in the book’s acknowledgments I thanked The Orange Chair for giving me space to write.

Over the years I’ve had a few favorite spots to work on my photo-edits and blog posts in this tiny library. Editing photos does not take the same concentration as writing first novels do. This is one of two orange chairs in the library that have the qualities any writer would enjoy–it’s in an alcove where one wall is a window that looks out onto the street, it’s tucked away so that no one can walk behind the chair, and it blocks some of the library noise, making it a little easier to focus. It’s the spot of least distraction in the library.

I’m a believer that sitting in the same spot everyday, once you’ve found it, creates a space where the book I am writing lives. I can’t help it if other people sit in the space from time to time, but I feel like this orange chair was the book’s favorite space more than my own.

I sit here almost daily when the library is open and I’m not off housesitting. I come to the library roughly at the same time every day. I don’t run my life on the clock, I run my life on routine. Directly after lunch I come here to write for most of the day. I’ve begun treating the librarians like workmates rather than as keepers of the books. If both of the orange chairs are taken, I wait. I think the longest I’ve waited for an orange chair was two-and-a-half hours.

“I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places…The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.” — Stephen King to Naomi Epel for her 1993 book, Writers Dreaming: 26 Writers Talk About Their Dreams and the Creative Process

Do you have a favorite place to write or create? Tell us about it in the comments!