But that's the thing about writing. It never hits you at 9am on a Sunday morning when you're sipping tea and looking at the birds. How picturesque that would be. It doesn't flow perfectly on the page as it's imploding in your mind to be written. Not for me. Some authors are, "inspired at 9am," and that's when they sit at their desk and write. But the whole time the landlord was droning on about this and that (I clearly wasn't listening as I should have been) all I could think, all I could feel, was excitement. Because I've never walked into a place and felt inspired by a room; a setting. A setting that I was in, and my book wasn't. More so, I always hated a room so I imagined it up to be something entirely what it wasn't.
But something about this place, the almost eeriness of it, struck me. It would by no means be considered your average studio apartment. Brick floors throughout the entire thing, and four large windows with an overlook to Pikes Peak. A kitchen you can barely fit your ass and a pan together, and a bathroom that is just that. A bathroom; no more, no less.
And yet there is so much space, for just one me. Room for daydreams and white noise and pacing back and forth as the next moment in my chapter eludes me. Room to find comfort in the silence on all sides of me, and rest in the easiness of not knowing what comes next. Room to do nothing, and yet room to create.
Room to go mad. So you can, too.
I would never expect to invoke an emotion in my readers, if I hadn't felt it myself. Which is why I'm glad I found this peculiar, all-brick-floor, white-walled, quiet mess of a home to give me space to feel. To, as Hemingway says, sit at a typewriter and bleed.
I think that's why I saw this place and thought, yes, this is it. The backstage of my first novel. Because just as much of a setting in your plot, you have a setting outside of that. You have rooms you will walk through and jot down a sentence or two, elevators you will ride where eyeliner will be the only thing you can write down a word to make sure you use it, because your phone is dead of course. You will have nature constantly beckoning you to create. And rooms that send chills up your spine, begging you to never enter them again, begging you to put it on paper and leave it there.
And so I might sound mad. Crazy. Absurd. "It's just a house, with rent the same as any other, Sarah." But that's just the thing, great things come from making the ordinary into something extraordinary.
Set the stage for the dream you want to pursue. Let it be right where you're at. Let the cold floors you hate when you get out of bed light a fire under you. Let the leaking faucet incessantly perturb you until you have to get away in a frenzy; until you have to do something you love to forget the ordinary annoyance.
Life isn't a Royals song, more often than not. We don't have jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash. But we do have our ordinary.
We have this peculiar, quirky normal, that potentially could turn into something amazing.
That's what I urge you to create.
Once you have your extraordinary-normal, keep creating. Your dream won't live itself.
