Where do you write?

The Scotsman asked a whole host of authors what their ideal milieu was for creating words on a page and for the “right way to write a novel” Among those interviewed were Alexander McCall Smith:

I don’t think I could write in a café. I couldn’t write in garish, modern surroundings. Certainly not somewhere harsh. For example, somewhere I could never write would be Luton Airport. I could never write anything in surroundings like that. The prose that would come out ould far be too brutal. I require my writing environment to be aesthetically pleasing. I find myself quite sensitive to that.

I’ve been writing the radio versions of my Botswana novels recently, and for that I’ve been using a pen. I think, because of the portability and the format, it works rather well.

The word processor provides easy and immediate access to the unconscious, where I think a lot of literary composition takes place, whereas somehow a pen is a more physical process, and one therefore might be thinking in different terms and may not gain access to areas of the mind in the same easy way. I think that word-processed prose tends to be more loquacious. “Logorrhoea” can set in, a sort of writer’s version of diarrhoea, when rather too many words appear on the screen.

I can certainly attest to the fact that longhand writing is a far cry from the word processor, but in my case, it’s because I think fast and type fast, so it’s a much better fit than thinking fast and writing slow, as I do with a pen*. But the physical location of where it’s best to write is of profound interest to me because I do find that I need to have a certain environment to do my best writing, which is my home computer, in the upstairs den. And writing, even blogging, on the road just doesn’t feel quite right.

So what’s your own favorite, or ideal, place to write? And can you write on the road?

*Especially for those who have seen the way I hold the pen as I write.