If you know me even just a little, you’ll probably be aware that I’m renowned for having a messy desk. Well, I’m a bit of a mess in general, but these days usually I manage to contain most of that to my own office area, under threat from my husband of him eating all my chocolate if I don’t. I actually love having a neat, tidy desk, but somehow it doesn’t seem that easy. I often tell people the story of my university days when I lived together with my father; when dinner time came around, he and I would both spend a few minutes moving our piles of books and papers off the dining room table (onto the floor) so we could eat, then move them back to the table when we’d finished. You see – a messy desk is genetic, it’s not my fault.
And furthermore … a messy desk might just be essential to my fiction writing abilities. In Andrea Goldsmith’s novel Reunion, there is a character named Ava who is a successful novelist. And about her, Goldsmith writes:
Ava was proof that if one is too much in thrall to everyday demands the imagination, for want of quiet and unfettered energy, becomes dormant. Her clothes were unpressed, her room was a shambles, her desk was a mess. Almost daily she would riffle the layers for a lost page, a lost pen, a phone number, and with mounting impatience would pledge to keep a tidy desk, a tidier life, but she never did. [My italics!]
My first feeling when I read this was relief; my second instinct said it might just be Goldsmith’s way of apologising for her own untidiness (I have no proof that she is untidy, but it would seem a lovely way to deal with it – spread the belief that the creativity of a novelist requires it, and she has the perfect alibi). So what do you all think – which of you writers out there have a messy desk at the moment? I’ve admitted mine in the picture above, although this is one of its tidier moments. Now I’m off to be imaginative.
Tags: untidiness, writers' desks