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Paragraph by paragraph, a writer’s room

By Sri Sowmya Tanguturi

When she started crafting her first book, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson utilized Paragraph Workspace for Writers, a spot on Fourteenth Street reserved for writers. 

Among that workspace’s various offerings was a flexible schedule. “I had assumed that I would go to the office on a nine-to-five schedule,” she said. “But it was Paragraph that taught me that, if you’re engaged properly in intensive creation, it’s not really possible to do that for more than three or four hours at a time before you become very burnt out.”

Dylan Landis, author of “Rainey Royal,” agreed that, as a writer, it is hard to concentrate for more than a couple of hours. “I’m physically a restless writer; it’s hard to stay put for long,”  Landis wrote, in an email, to this The Spectrum reporter. 

When they weren’t writing, Landis and Simonson often went to the coffee room to socialize and to sip. “That hush,” Landis said, referring to the concentrated quiet at Paragraph, “would fuel my work for about an hour until the need for coffee and community struck and I would head for the kitchen with my laptop, and work there awhile,” Landis wrote.

“A writer’s space,” Simonson said, “is a silent space … sort of like a library.  It’s not appropriate to talk to people. That’s why it was very good that there was a lively coffee room in the back.”

Coffee was a minor perk offered by Paragraph, whose ultimate goal was  helping writers maintain their motivations to publish their work. Staying motivated, especially before an author sees her name on the cover of a book, can be difficult. “It’s sometimes hard to hold in your mind the concept that you are a writer and that you’re doing something valuable if you’ve yet to be published,” Simonson said.

Motivation wasn’t her problem, Landis said. But finding a workspace where she could concentrate on her novel was more difficult than she expected. 

“The ritual always began with choosing the right desk for the day’s channeling-that’s an inexplicable thing. It’s like a cat deciding where to settle,” Landis wrote in an email. 

Simonson  enjoyed her time at Paragraph.“It felt cozy, slightly shabby in a very good way. And the stairs up and down, very, very long, slightly wobbly staircase, a lot of stairs. And you had to go up, sort of, past some, sort of, nail salon. So, it felt very much like an out-of-the-way secret New York loft space.”

Along their journeys, the writers also found much of what they needed.

Simonson said, “Having a community really helped support my vision of myself as a writer in a day when I was completely unsolved.”