A writer needs a table

I don't think I know anyone who doesn't want to be a writer in some form. I know I want to write. I often make fledgling attempts. Well intentioned, if poorly prepared. I sit down, think, open a new file, the white empty screen (the digital equivalent of fresh parchment, I think if I am feeling particularly philosophical or pretentious.)

I start out pen an idea and spend some time articulating it – but then find myself drifting off into trite banalities, rather than exploring the depths I set out to. It isn't rare either, or confined to creative writing, seeing how it often happens when I am just faced with an email.

Writing, no matter how ordinary, often brings my brain to a grinding halt, unable to tell my fingers which keys to peck. I think about this often (though neither long, nor) before deciding that I need another cup of coffee. This goes on so that by about four in the evening its hard to tell if my phone is vibrating, or it's just me.

And all this caffeinated thinking has led me to one very important conclusion - a writer needs a table.

Let me to me explain.

We are surrounded by distractions everyday, every waking minute. There are appliances everywhere - ringing phones, singing cellphones, noisy neighbors, beeping, whirring printers, yelling psychos - you name it, we have it. In the midst of all this our brains, well mine at least, becomes incapable of handling any complicated thought. If I'm lucky I can manage a coherent conversation with one individual, while typing a roundabout reply to another. Anything that requires more focused thought is well beyond my reach.

Adding to this is the ubiquitous modern workstation. It clubs together many interfaces, telling us to explore our creativity. This is ridiculous. I can't be creative and focused at the same time. If I am being creative my mind is wandering, weaving rainbows, concocting illusions and brewing the philosophies for a new world. (A religion and world view based around Duct Tape for example. I will explain later.)

And having a work station which offers you books, pads, colored pens, phones, a computer hooked to the interweb, a white-board, a soft-board - which doubles as a dartboard - is really not the ideal environment for me to 'focus'. I do anything but. Trying to see if I can hit the bulls eye on Nemesis A on the soft-board with DIY darts, making a thought map on the white-board using colored markers to highlight, using the pad to make paper airplanes, getting more coffee. Just about anything.

And that's why past generations could write great literature, and I can't. Hemingway only had a typewriter, and Shakespeare just parchment – and one thing in common, a desk.

I think to write, the most fundamental need is a desk. Something you can sit at without distractions and disruptions. Where the blank parchment, sheet of paper or screen is all that is in front of you. And that is precisely why we see large, forbidding desks, set in dimly lit chambers throught history – to discourage those who try to have an annoying conversations with you. The moment the coffee shop came around, literature took a nosedive.

You see without that, the best we can do is trite, annoying 'copy'. For example, a rant on the importance of desks in writing, written from a beanbag with a laptop set on an exercise ball in front of a television while watching Pirates of the Caribbean and drinking Red Bull.

I bet the guy who wrote the screenplay had a desk.