For most of my life, writing has played second-fiddle to my education. I'll admit that most of that was due to me going around getting more education than was probably good for me,  but my workspace was never writer-centric. 

It was essentially my life in desk-format. I'd plonk my university books at one end with the tutes I was going to be teaching, pile my assignments in descending order of duedates (topped with whatever bill had to be paid in the next few days) near my mouse, and create horizontal 'files' of any interesting article, note, book, doodles, picture, letter, page of notebook, stickynote, sandwich* or gadget that I was pretty sure I'd want later**. Drafts of stories (and their edits, redrafts, feedback from my writing groups and notes for improvement) had their own special pile under the really urgent notes from <health and car care profesisonals> assuring me I was overdue for my <whatever>, which kept the stories safe from accidental exposure to editing, sunlight or cogitation. You get the notion that my writing really blossomed under this regime.

It's been about eighteen months since I left university, less than twelve since I left teaching, and my workspace has only now started to be wholly writer-focussed. I recreated the old one out of habit when I moved, with some small concessions - I made a 'cave' out of bookshelves and filled them with books that I might conveivably reach for as a writer.   I congratulated myself on my writer's workspace, but I wasn't all that happy. It wasn't until I read A Writer's Space by Eric Maisel (gift of my mother) that I realised my workspace had always irritated me - that it actively discouraged me from writing.  Maisel asks a really simple, really obvious question: What is one thing that you don't like about your current workspace?  I knew my answer immediately - writing was being marginalised under "general life stuff", even though said general life stuff could really be housed in a single in-tray, now. Writing was what I wanted to do, and I wanted my workspace to reflect that. I wanted a workspace that encouraged me to write, one that was designed for writing.

So I revamped my desk. I cleared off a lot of stuff that didn't need to be there, pushed the monitors back and leant a corkboard against the back of my bookshelf. I cleared out underneath it and used it for storage, with an old TV-table acting as some shelves. The return still has piles (currently one of books, because I want to wait for the rest of the Amazon shipments to arrive, so I can goggle at the sheer number of books I bought in the last six weeks) but of projects - and projects do not sit on top of other projects. And I decided it was time to get the one big writer's aid I've been drooling over since I realised they didn't just sell them to schools:

 Not so with a whiteboard. I plotted out nine books in my current novel's series in the space of an evening (picture above. No, it's not at a size you can read any spoilers). My office is about writing. I sit and am surrounded by writing, books, ideas, my projects, my thoughts. 

I'm also aware that I have a great luxury, here - a room to myself to create this space that's "mine". No kids, no pets. A partner who respects my space - because we made sure things were fair when we found this place - he has his own room, too. And don't think there weren't raised eyebrows when I insisted on a three-bedroom house for two people, and insisted on my own office. 

But I want writing as part of my life - a big part. I want to make my living that way. So it makes no sense to make it scrabble for scraps in my environment. It needs its own space. I need to respect what I'm trying to do, here.

Same goes for you. You may have kids, pets, no extra rooms, no money for giant whiteboards and a hell of a lot of other things that need juggling. But you can still make a space for writing, and space that invites you to write. 

Look at your workspace, where you go now to write. It may be a desk, or the corner of your bedroom with your laptop (or notepad). Look at the things that are there that aren't writing-related, or that distract you from writing. Do they really need to be there? Can they be put in a drawer, on another table, stored somewhere else? Is there something that isn't there that you'd want there, that would help you write? In short - What is one thing that you don't like about your current workspace? 

Now, what are you going to do about it?

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* The sandwich only happened once, but the resultant mould has lodged itself permanently in the wood of my desk. I'll know I'm going loopy when I start talking to it.

** Later never happened, of course. I'd have a semi-annual clean-off of my desk whenever I had something really important to procrastinate about, or a pile of things had eaten my keys. The piles were sorted through in thirty minutes, and each item was either put in the recycling, returned to its original (confused and later, irate) owner or condensed into a single A4 page of all the information or ideas that were still interesting that I'd want for later, which then started the next lot of 'files'. You'd think that this would lead to a collection of A4 pages of concentrated brilliance, but unfortunately a space-time anomally would always leach all the really great ideas off the pages, leaving a assortment of unrelated words urgently circled, and lines leading off to other, irrelevant and increasingly uninteresting words. Ideas have a shelflife, they just disappear when they go off.