Be careful what you wish for

I wrote my first newspaper article sitting on an oversized plant pot in Milan’s Malpensa Airport. I wrote my first book in 37-minute windows on the train between Guildford and London Waterloo. Most of my poems first find form in the Notes app of my phone when I’m supposed to be doing something else.

And I’m not alone. All but the luckiest few writers are familiar with the squeeze of writing in the margins of their lives. My sister gets up at 5am to work on her novel before her husband and son wake up and the three of them head out to work and to school. My friend Lucy writes all her poetry in the early hours of the morning while breastfeeding. Another friend, Oliver, ran an entire publishing company from his commute to Plymouth—he had to fold the company when he got a job closer to home.

The dream, of course, is money and a room of one’s own—by which Virginia Woolf meant not just literally, but figuratively. She also wished for women writers “the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think” and the “liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment”.

And I always thought that was what I wanted too. I mean, don’t all writers? The creative freedom to write whatever I choose, the financial freedom to write full time, and, of course, the space to do it in—a room of my own. That was the dream.

Until I got exactly that.

In 2016, after my first traditionally published book, Makers of East London (Hoxton Mini Press, 2015) came out, I was approached by a Belgian publisher. She wanted to me to write a book about the rise of studio pottery in urban areas. She had five cities in mind and suggested a structure comprising an introduction, followed by an essay exploring this phenomenon along with profiles of five contemporary potters for each city. She shared word counts and the advance she could pay and told me she would need the manuscript by Spring 2017.

I asked for more clarification on the brief: what tone of voice were they looking for, which potters should I feature, could I explore the history that informed the contemporary ceramics scene in each place? I remember her laughing at all my questions: “Katie, we love your writing, we trust you, write it however you want to write it.”

Creative freedom: tick.

At that point in my career, work was typically slow over Christmas and often well into the New Year. I will never forget the January in which I made a grand total of £120. I realised that I could just about stretch my advance to cover that quiet time and carve out three clear months to write full time.

Financial freedom: tick.

And we’d just bought a slightly-too small house in Surrey and therefore built a studio at the end of the garden for me to work from.

A room of my own: tick.

It was everything I had ever dreamed of and I hated it.

My abiding memory of that time is spinning around in my office chair, staring at the ceiling, bored out of my tiny little mind. And it wasn’t the book. I loved the subject matter, I adored every single one of the potters I interviewed, I was fascinated by the secondary research. It was doing the same thing, all day, every day, for weeks on end—my only deadline months away. There was no urgency, no patina to my days, no end to the samey, same sameness.

It turns out I have ADHD (and possibly autism), but I didn’t know that at the time. I hadn’t yet learnt to walk the tightrope between familiarity and novelty, between spaciousness and urgency, between structure and spontaneity, that I now understand my neurodivergent brain needs to function at its best. On paper, I had it all. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy and so, I felt ashamed of my ungrateful response. This was what I had dreamed for so long; what all writers dream of—wasn’t it? Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a writer after all. I spent a long cold, dark December in a shame spiral and wrote virtually nothing.

In January, when the days started to get lighter, I took up running, which got me moving and added structure to my days. I started working one day a week from the National Art Library in the Victoria & Albert Museum, which gave shape to my week and provided fixed hours (deadlines of sorts), and other humans! I even started writing on the train again. I eventually found my way out of that endless winter with a finished manuscript in time for my publishers’ deadline. Urban Potters: Makers in the City (Ludion) was published in September 2017, and I have never carved out a chunk of writing time that big again.

Now I get up early to walk to the gym before rushing back for the 8am London Writers’ Salon Writers’ Hour to squeeze in 60 focused minutes of writing time before my day begins. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, my days and that ‘room of my own’ are filled with calls, meetings, emails, and the sort of quick deadline-pressured work that energises me, when there isn’t too much of it. On Wednesdays and, if I’m lucky, on Fridays too, I write, but somewhere else. On Wednesdays I start my day with a Lido swim, a coffee and a walk to a Victorian library where I pay the handsome sum of £40 a year for membership. I set myself up with a laptop and a view, ignore my emails, and work on my current book for a maximum of four or five hours. On Fridays, if the rest of the week has gone my way, I start with another walk, scribbling down poems in my Notes App as I go, and come home to enter them into competitions or share them via Substack or Instagram, from the comfort of my sofa.

It turns out what women really need, or certainly what this neurodivergent woman needs, is ‘a frame to dance within’—a term coined by creative strategist Kerry Tottingham for the perfect combination of freedom and constraints. Of course, gender inequality is still a huge issue, and women need more time and space for creative pursuits. But what that actually looks like is different for everyone. It might look like a room of one’s own and the freedom to write somewhere else, time for protected writing time carved out of an otherwise busy week, the right combination of non-urgent spacious work and deadline-driven work. Or it might look like none of those things—what matters is that it works for you and your neurotype, even if it doesn’t look like other writers’ routines, even if it feels selfish, even if it needs to change every few months to keep it interesting.

I still dream of being able to write full time and without constraints; don’t we all? Right now, the dream is travelling across Europe in a camper van, writing a travelogue en route. But let’s be honest, I’d probably hate it.

By day, Katie Treggiden is an author, journalist, strategist and speaker, but Substack is where she’s exploring narrative non-fiction, micro memoir and poetry. Subscribe to Brackish for a micro memoir in your inbox every Wednesday and a poem every Friday, and upgrade to paid for poems in the post every month—that’s right, actual snail mail! You can also find Katie’s poetry on Instagram and TikTok.