We Are Writer Nomads

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November 14, 2019 by bradcharlesbeals

We love our writing spaces, don’t we? And that’s good; the right physical environment is important.

But there’s a space that’s even more important to my writing. Not a physical space, but an internal one, a place where I’m square over my writing feet, a place of settled sensibility. A place in my head that feels like home.

It takes time to find it though. Years maybe. But that’s to be expected because I’ll only find this place after I’ve been kicked out of all the others. I try voices and points of view, forms and genres. I step into styles effusive and styles blunt. I try all colors of mood and tone. And when nothing quite feels like home, I begin to work through the permutations of these things.

But eventually I’ll spend time in one place just long enough to understand that it’s the one that belongs to me, and it’s there that I write as myself.

I walk the halls of my own story arc. I breathe in the air of a clear narrative voice. I settle into the firm, comfortable chair of my own resolve. And I work. I work hard in that place for a year or two or three. I work, for the most part, contentedly. And then…  

And then it’s gone.

I wake up one day and it’s simply gone, and I realize that it began to move away the moment I started writing and that it completed its exit, right under my nose, the moment I finished. 

Or maybe it was me who did the moving. I can never quite tell.

So I pack up my things, and I’m off again. Searching. Working back through the permutations and looking for a new place from which to write. A new home in my head.

It is a nomadic existence, this writing life.