Photo by Nathan Van Egmond on Unsplash
Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929 about A Room of One’s Own and spoke to writers through the ages.
She needed that physical space to be the creator she was, the writer she strived to be, and she addressed other spaces she required in her time and in her age. In the early 20th century, women writers weren’t provided the recognition in the cultural and literary community that they deserved.
In our age, a few decades into the 21st century, we writers and creators need our space. Our age designs and demands many types of spaces, many rooms that Ms. Woolf could not imagine — and a few that she likely experienced but didn’t include in her famous and timeless essay.
With this essay, I’ll share many of the spaces I’ve created and encountered, that I’ve succeeded with or continue to battle.
Here are the spaces.
Physical Space
If you are a creative, you need a room, just as Virginia Woolf did.
That may be a corner of the kitchen or a bedroom, or an entire room where you can shut the door to the world and any distractions or demands that steal your attention.
Beyond that physical space, you need and deeply benefit from a variety of other spaces — some physical, some spiritual, some cultural, and some with other considered and important characteristics.
I am lucky enough to own a home and property in an urban area with a separate office, in a separate building, that’s all my own. This is where I’ve worked, created, meditated, launched businesses, and hidden myself away from time to time for the last 23 years.
That space is a blessing. That room of my own is a key reason why I may never sell this property.
Temporal Space
You need to create room in the time available to you during the day.
Time, by many measures, is the only asset you possess. We so easily give away our time, when we would not do that with our possessions or our money or our relationships. Too easily we view time as an infinite resource and waste it thoughtlessly.
Time may be the most important space, the most critical room, that we have available.
Space for Play
You need room to have fun.
This can be a cognitive space, where you can experiment, try and fail, and MacGyver your art and develop your voice without fear of judgment. That requires you to surrender your own critic, to give yourself the time and the permission to treat your creativity like a grand laboratory.
I’ve discovered that many of the experiments in my lab require patience. Some must ferment, others are full of sediments and clouds that need time to settle and others come to life almost immediately.
And some just never go anywhere.
Space in the Global Mind
In this digital age, you need to find your virtual publishing spaces.
You need to be in the world to publish, express, connect, share, and engage that global mind. You now have access to people and projects and ideas unprecedented in the history of men. But be selective, find the spaces that open you to your audiences and resonate with your ideas.
I choose these:
- Twitter because of its immediacy and reach
- Medium, to support unique longform contact
- LinkedIn, to stay engaged with all my business and professional interests and colleagues
- ConvertKit, to build a paid following
- My own blogs and websites to have a clear, fully controllable headquarters on the inter-webs.
Space as Media
You need spaces to capture your words in sentences.
My preferred tools include an old Selectric typewriter that shakes the room when I use it and smells of machine oil and the fine linen paper that I use with it.
My writing and creative passion lies in my collection of 100 fine fountain pens that I use to write longhand and then transfer to digital via voice dictation. Those fountain pens and my love for using them have inspired and motivated my writing for the last year and a half.
It’s pure magic. I can’t explain it, I can only follow it– gladly.
Your Story Space
You must also define or discover your topic space, your themes, ideas, messages, and the unique premises you will offer the world.
This space represents your body of work, those mountains you climb and lay claim to before anyone else, those veins of inspiration that you claim as well, and those fertile meadows that you homestead after long pilgrimages.
My focus and my passion is on teaching and promoting authenticity and how we all interact with one another in the world today. Our culture is now driven by falsehood, conspiracy theories, deep fakes, lies, and many other forms of deception and exaggeration.
My long years with interviewing, direct human research, and creating compelling human experiences has shown how to build intimacy, credibility and to uncover the truths that are revealed only through asking and listening.
I apply authentic experiences to build understanding, I use intimacy to develop trust and compassion, I teach dialogue and reflection to dissolve prejudice and bias.
Space as Source of Light
Where are your inspirational spaces?
Where can you open your mind and your heart? I use my front porch, any high mountain meadow, coffee shops where I can be with a crowd of bustling people and still be totally alone in my thoughts and anonymous in my time and space to create.
Do you prefer a warm, quiet, comfortable cabin in the woods, with a big soft recliner and a crackling fire? Do you prefer whatever context and location you call home? Are you at peace and comfortable in your identity, your persona as an artist, where you can relax and be at ease with yourself and your muses?
I’ve finally learned surrender and the inner peace it provides. I’ve discovered how to be in the moment, to be at home in the space of my own skin and mind and abilities. I’ve finally learned to appreciate who I am, in addition to what I can do and how I perform. That’s been a lifelong quest.
That level of surrender has also taught me to find space as freedom from fear, obligation, and distraction.
Life Space
We must also create space in the span of our days.
How much of who you are, what you do, and what you have will open up space for the writer and creator in you? How will the writer inform and inspire you as well as inspiring your audiences? How will you move beyond finding time to making time?
Space as the Unknown
Then, perhaps the biggest, most important, most influential and powerful space of all is the Mystery and how it manifests in your experiences. For centuries, writers and artists have spoken of the muses. Their inspiration, ideas, motivation, and the voices they use in their art come from sources they do not understand and cannot control.
Find your spaces. Whether they be physical or emotional or creative or spiritual, all these types of space will allow and encourage your art.
All outcomes in business happen only through the experiences we create.
$995 value, now FREE: The art of compelling experiences
In-depth Masters-level Course, e-Workshop, Virtual Toolkit, and weekly Newsletter on User Experience and Human-Computer Interactions: the art and science on how to influence users to engage, respond, sign-up, and buy
Or sign up for The Experience-Experience Newsletter
I’m Bob Berry — researcher, speaker, writer, and innovator on the art of compelling experience.bob@itstheusers.com / LinkedIn / http://ItsTheUsers.com
