This whole idealization of what the perfect place to work from is like has gone to the extent of being generalized to a common place: a building where people come and go, buy what they need or like and interact with other people. This seems like the proper place for getting constant inspiration away from your office or even from your own home. It is also the perfect distraction, thus lowering your productivity and slowing you down from completing your tasks. What you hear, see, touch, feel, and smell does not belong to you but can become the subject of your writings or blog rants. The coffee shop has now become the most commonly named place as being an ideal perfect working space for writers in particular.
I did not understand the fuss about writing in a different environment than the one you are used to until today. I used to think I was only able to write in closed, peaceful, and quiet surroundings, but today’s escape from my favorite writing place makes me believe that I will keep doing this from now on. It is here where time flies with a purpose. It is here where ideas can be written without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard. You sometimes lose initial ideas, you get them back, you get distracted, you get lost in your thought process… whatever. And if you don’t know why you began to write a sentence, you look around. You watch the diverse people you’re sharing the same room with aiming to extract their thoughts and put them onto paper. I could spend hours writing what the people next to me are talking about: books, history, time, contracts… another man leaves the shop because they don’t have what he usually buys… I am distracted, I want ice cream. Hours in, you want to change your place. It is the seat that you choose when you begin to write that will influence the manner in which you write and what you write about. If I had chosen to face the windows instead of the people, you would have been reading a description of the cars and the weather outside. Now, I choose to keep this article short. I choose to let both young and old people tell their own stories wherever and whenever they want to. I could write pages on made up life stories for everyone I see, but I won’t. I’ll stick to listening to the chill music and to pressing the keys while today’s unknown authors share their last talk before they leave. I like being young. I have never finished an article as fast as I did now.
As I’m writing at this very moment from a coffee shop for the first time I find this place to be the perfect environment for encountering new people, new stories, interesting facts, and even local authors I’ve met before outside of this realm. Another proof that the world is surely small. I guess this is where stories go to meet. No internet, just a laptop with WordPad on it and you’ll be able to finish a piece of writing in a totally different way than you had at first imagined its ending. I used to hate coffee shops. I will come back.
Originally posted on my blog.