You need more than a cabin - #99

Lies writers tell themselves.

It’s a shared dream; one even the populace has bought into. We don’t imagine the perfect little places lawyers or marine biologists do their work. We don’t all agree that painters want cute cottages on main street or that hair stylists want lofts in Brooklyn. But we do seem to all agree that there is a picture-perfect place for writers to do their work: in a cabin in the woods. 

The writing cabin is always made of wood. Maybe stone. But it’s earthen and undeniably so, as there’s often an element of moss or at the very least, lack of heating, because the writing cabin is at its best with a fire. The writing cabin is difficult to reach, too. No one talks about who built the writing cabin because that would imply another human could theoretically get there while you’re writing which is the writer’s nightmare. They are in isolation, excepting the birds singing in the morning or the indeterminable whine of animals at night, depending on the genre. Do birds really sing for Jonathan Franzen? 

The writing cabin is, of course, only for serious writers. Or men. Or very unhappy women. Because the writing cabin is where the real work happens. Art. Of course the writing cabin is also a hug, littered with the comforts necessary for writing: a kettle, books, candles, etc. It could be called hygge but no. The writing cabin is a straight jacket until you straighten out because writing is hard. The writing cabin is a small gift in a very difficult world where writers write about very difficult things. They leave the cabin just in time to not be totally lost to the cabin, and they carry their manuscripts like molten shells bedecked with all the barnacles and parasites they scrubbed from their life for writing. The writing cabin is their operating room, their recovery suite, their pen. 

But the writing cabin is an illusion. It is merely a vacation with a phone on airplane mode, all the goblins and ghouls waiting on the other side of reception. You cannot live in a writing cabin because as far as is shared on the internet, no one talks about them having bathrooms. No writing cabin has photos of children or spouses because the spouse would begin to move in the frame, slowly turning their back on you to wash the dishes you left behind. There are no dishes in a writing cabin save the mug you simply refill. It only gets gross around the edges if it’s pertinent to the story.

A writing cabin is the set piece you leave in an M. Night Shyamalan movie only to discover you are not a literary darling but a person who missed the deadline on paying for your car’s registration. You might have remembered if you’d been looking at the car, but cars are not part of writing cabins. You simply arrive there, deep in the woods. A driveway would shatter the illusion, because that’s what writing cabins are.

You can try another kind of cabin, though. There are others. I live in one. I live in a box of logs with vines crawling up the fireplace. There are old metal pokers for the fire, candles of petrichor and sandalwood, a bit of incense, and of course there’s a kettle, but it is not a writing cabin. It is a log cabin because despite the literary trappings, it is too big to be called a cabin and therefore cannot be a writing cabin. It has a bathroom and a driveway, after all. 

But it is a type of cabin and it is where I write. I am a darling, just not a literary one. Technicalities are not managed in writing cabins, OK? Technicalities are for editors. Writing cabins are for writers. But I am in a cabin right now and I am writing and someone on the other side of the door is saying darling? and I have just enough time before they open the door to put my headphones on to make it look like I wasn’t ignoring them. 

Yes? 

Did you water the mandevilla yesterday? The tray is full of water.

In a writing cabin, you do not take care of anything but art. That’s how I know this isn’t a writing cabin because there’s a husband with a migraine and a mandevilla who simply insists on dying and a kitten of only 1.6 lbs that is being fostered and a large cat demanding to go outside and a dog scratching at the door and a kitten of 6 lbs who doesn’t feel well and is deeply distracting this writer. Distractions do not happen in a writing cabin. There is only birdsong or deep fog but never both and maybe, maybe, an old dog. Not the kind of old dog I have though. No, the kind of old dog that rests its snout on your leg when you’ve lost the thread in your story and you go, “you’re right old man, we should get some air.” That dog never takes medication. It simply dies in its sleep the night after you held him in the lake one last time. He is the equivalent of the poorly developed female character that dies (tragically!) in the first ten minutes — there only as a reminder to the writer that feelings exist. 

I do not have a writing cabin, as you can tell. If I did, I wouldn’t tell you where it was. I couldn’t. Their only address is “in the woods” and there are many of those. But you would be able to tell what kind of cabin it was by reading my bestselling novel. Characters would speak of the chill in their bones or the salt in the air or even the inescapable dampness and you would go, “ah, I know where the cabin is.” The writing cabin needs to maintain its position in the cultural lexicon as the place where people escape to, so it always writes itself into the story, one way or another. 

Maybe then this is a writing cabin. She’s written herself into — good god, 99 essays? She's prolific! She’s the voice of her architectural era! She’s a darling. (That’s her, writing this now, I’m sure.) I, on the other hand, am simply a woman at a keyboard, still struggling with not calling herself a girl. I am not romantic enough to have a typewriter and my hand cramps after half a page with a pen. There is a Slack icon with three unread messages right below this page. Can you imagine? A writing cabin with Slack? Disgusting. 

On Thursday, I had a Zoom call with my mentee of three years. (Writing cabins do not have Zoom.) She and I have met almost every week, though never in person, to work on her writing. Her poems always have a darkness and a tension, like the roots of the Earth are reluctant to release her entirely to the surface. Sometimes I thought, “god if this girl could have a writing cabin, she could do some big work.” 

I gaped. How pernicious. How pervasive the lore of the writing cabin had become to even think for a moment that the best of a teenage girl is unleashed in the woods and not in her journal in her room in her home with a bathroom and her pets that cling to life.

Oh you won’t get me, writing cabin. Not with your fanciful location or your creaking floorboards or your eerie or comforting silence depending on the genre. Oh, no no. I live in a house with problems and people yelling darling about plants I’ve miswatered! I live in a never ending state of panicked care because I continue to bring creatures inside my house instead of relying on my imagination to conjure their toil in the wilderness when in reality most people cannot tell the difference between a bobcat and a crow! I live in a never ending sprawl of distractions and you can bet your furniture that was definitely brought their in a truck that I’m gonna write about every single one of them because I don’t need a writing cabin. I have something better. I have something no writer can resist. Something so manipulative and so powerful that even the journey to you wouldn’t be worth it.

I have a deadline.

Oh, and bills. I also have bills. 

In 99 essays, I’ve only never had a single idea of what I would write once. And that was… well for you it was yesterday. A Saturday in August where I sat down in front of my computer and thought, “god it’d be nice to have a writing cabin.” But I’m just a girl (woman) in her room (the guest room) with her journal (her laptop) and that’s all I need to write. That, and the will to do it.

Plus, this is a cabin. That’s gotta be worth something.