“I’d say that it is good to have a quiet place to work, and it is also good not to work there, but somewhere else — whether at one end of the dining room table, or sitting in an armchair by the fireplace or even away from all the usual writing spots entirely.”

I just finished reading Reeve Lindbergh’s memoir Forward From Here, in which she writes about writing places — and many other things. Reeve can look out her back door and see her mother’s writing house, moved from Connecticut after Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s death in 2001. But Reeve doesn’t usually write in her mother’s writing house.

I know what she means. For years I wrote in an office. We always had a dedicated room in our house where I could work. First it was an upstairs bedroom, and then, when the girls got older and each had their own room, it was a converted dining room downstairs. Now that I have a laptop I wander all over the house and yard. In fact, I do some of my best writing on Metro (provided I have a conductor who knows how to operate the brakes — not always a given with that outfit).

It helps to have a writing spot (because you’re telling yourself that your writing is important enough to make space for it), but if writing is like breathing, then it figures you should be able to do it most anywhere.