Sitting or Standing?
Sitting or Standing?
If it worked for Papa Hemingway...
Most writers sit—or do they? Most of my life, I've sat to write, whether it's been in a kitchen chair at my typewriter, a squeaky office chair before a computer, or a rocking chair with pen and journal. But there was a time when I needed to stand.
No, it's not because of what you think. My butt was fine.
It was my final summer at the Bread Loaf School of English. I'd shouldered a couple of extra courses to complete a five-summer degree in just three. I had to really hump—each course required me to kill a novel a week (or a book of poems) and dissect it in a paper.
If you haven't heard of Bread Loaf, it's a kind of summer camp for adults. But instead of a merit badge, you earn an M.A. in English in the end. Bread Loaf consists of a set of quaint, yellow-and-green cottages with an inn nestled in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Formerly a resort, it's surrounded by hay fields, stone fences and woods through which two roads (and more) diverge.
Most of you will recognize the allusion to Robert Frost. It's fitting because Frost helped develop the school in 1921 and was a fixture on its campus until his death is 1963. Today, you can visit his cabin there and see the old Morris chair he wrote poems in.
My room, more of a garret, really, occupied a corner of the second floor of Cherry Cottage. From my one dormer window, I had a view of the hay fields, and throughout the evening hours, I could hear the locust-like clacking of typewriters. (I imagine the campus is quieter now, with everyone typing their papers out on laptops.) Although Bread Loaf sits at an elevation of nearly 1500 feet, summers are warm, and the heat often built up in my room so that sitting before a typewriter and scratching the dirt for the next word with a garden trowel made me want to take a nap.
My solution was to stand. I pushed a dresser in front of my window and hefted my typewriter to its top. Standing, interspersed with bouts of strutting around the room while organizing my thoughts, kept the blood moving. A cup of coffee from the snack bar at the Barn staved off sleep, and finally I was able to win that merit badge.
I haven't stood to write since then, but Hemingway apparently made a practice of it, writing A Movable Feast at a stand-up desk at his home in Havana. Here are some other writers who wrote standing.