Photo above: Ruth’s desk at Essex University. Below: at Thomas Hardy’s writing desk

Writers are notoriously superstitious.

Along with whisperings of ‘the muse’ and the curse of the ‘second book’, writing spaces are shrouded in mystique. Famous writing nooks are places of homage, as if something in the structure of the room, or a trinket on the desk, will reveal the secret to the author’s success. Is the space messy or clean, what is on the wall, what is the view? 

This voyeurism is like opening a diary. An intrusion into a private space, where we can marvel that this desk – bench, billiard table, bath – was where a whole universe was created.

Writing in public: cafes and bars. 

Edinburgh is humid, the Royal Mile bustling. I know I’m in the right place when I see a group of tourists gazing up at a boarded up building. The group is diverse: all ages, many nationalities, all waiting patiently to be photographed beneath a sign.This is The Elephant House, where Harry Potter was born. His origin story is compelling: Joanne Rowling (born 1965) was a single mum. Too poor to heat her mouse-ridden Edinburgh flat, she took her baby to the cosy cafe and wrote the book that ‘came to her as a complete story’ during a delayed train journey between Manchester and London.

A cafe is a bustling, public space and to visit with a baby is not a relaxing prospect. Nappies and feeding, gawking customers, noise. The Elephant Cafe is the antithesis of the  romantic notion of an author at work. Now destroyed by fire, the bathroom walls inside were graffitied in multi-coloured sharpies with messages: thank you for making my childhood better. 

Unlike The Elephant Cafe, there are no tourists at The Oxford Bar, favourite writing space of Ian Rankin (born 1960). The pub dates back to 1811, squatting within a row of terraced houses along Young Street in Edinburgh. Discreetly identified by a simple sign above the door, inside is cramped with regulars who chat over their pints with an air of being at home. Window seats are tucked around the small bar, there’s a shelf of books and board games. The atmosphere is bachelor; homely yet unadorned. It is the embodiment of Inspector Rebus, the gruff fictional detective who drinks here, just like his creator. 

Writing can be lonely, and in these spaces Rankin and Rowling found remedy. Writers are also cannibals, devouring what they see and hear. Public spaces are vibrant, they offer the writer snippets from other lives. 

Writing in sheds: the Boathouse and the Cutting Shed. 

Dylan Thomas’s (1914-1953) writing shed in Laugharne is so full of personality it practically speaks. Or possibly sings for; as Thomas says in Under Milk Wood, the Welsh are a musical bunch.The Boathouse dates back to the 1800s, and is precariously near the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Gower peninsular. The ‘sea-shaken house on a breakneck of rocks’ became the Thomas family home in 1939, and Dylan Thomas adopted the old car garage as his study.

Inside, is creative chaos: a cluttered desk; half-empty beer bottles, ashtrays. There are pictures of admired poets (Byron and Auden) intended to inspire and prod Dylan into frenzied productivity before his medicinal does of whisky at Browns Hotel. Black and white photos of Caitlin and the babies are tacked to the wall, there’s a jam jar of leaky pens, sheafs of notes. As Thomas railed against the dying light, he would have heard the cawing seagulls and the sea. Did he also catch the chatter of Polly Garter and Captain Cat as they walked the streets below? The shed is evocative and cheery, full of the life, as if Dylan Thomas has just stepped out for a fag and will return momentarily. 

Virginia Wolf (1882-1941) may have said that every writer needs a room of ones own, but her writing place was actually a cutting shed. She and Leonard moved to Monk’s House, in Sussex, at the start of World War 1, and she took over The Cutting Shed in the orchard garden. 

Virginia was no neat freak. There are balls of crumpled paper, leaky nibs, half used bottles of ink. “The litter in this room is so appalling, it takes me 5 minutes to find my pen,” she said. But find it she did, writing Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as the birds twittered  and Leonard dead-headed the roses. 

Sheds are perfect for the solitary occupation of writing. Without heating or electricity, they are elemental, primitive. Thomas and Woolf were connected to nature – the sea, the garden – as they wrote in their simple spaces. 

Writing in other spaces: the Billiard Room and the Bath

Mark Twain (1835-1910) travelled widely, and was a prolific writer, there are many writing spaces associated with him. My favourite is in Hartford, Connecticut, where in 1871 he built a large gothic mansion, with turrets and gables and wrap-around walkways. For 19 years his writing space was The Billiard Room on the fourth floor. 

Away from the chatter of his four children, and with views across the large garden, The Billiard Room is flooded with light, despite the walls being red, and the dark wood around each window. It’s a masculine space, you can imagine Twain and his friends playing billiards and drinking into the early hours, when he would still have found the energy to write. 

Twain used the billiard table as a worktop, scattering his notes across the green biaze. Against the wall is a wooden rack of cubby holes, to store his works-in-progress. He would slide out a manuscript, work on it for an hour or so, then slide it back in place and retrieve another. 

There are two desks – the smaller one faces the wall, monk-like, to avoid distraction. Here, he created Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Editing and planning could be done at the billiard table or at the second, more ornate, desk under the window. The Billiard Room reveals Twain’s personality; his energy, his active brain, his need for order. 

From a billiard room, to a bath, writers have always been attracted to unusual spaces. 

“I get my plots in the tub,” Agatha Christie told the New York Times in 1966. When she renovated Greenway, her home in Devon, Christie stipulated that the bath should have a wide ledge, for pencils and apples. She would recline in the sudsy water, munching on a russet, thinking through her dark plots with forensic detail. Then she would get out, dry herself, and put her ideas on the page. Christie published 66 crime novels, as well as plays and short stories, so her technique obviously worked. 

The writing brain doesn’t stop, even when the body is at play or rest, and there is a creative pay-off to multi-tasking as the mind continues to chew over ideas.

Writing by the sea: the Crystal Room and the Beach Hut. 

After his political exile from France, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) moved to Guernsey. Hauteville House is lavish, furnished with Hugo’s collection of exotic treasures, with a grand mahogany staircase circling up. At the top of the house is The Crystal Room, where Hugo wrote Les Miserables, one of the greatest novel of the 19th century.

As anyone with a conservatory knows, glass rooms are cold in winter and too hot in summer – it became so hot in this room that the silver on the mirror bubbled! 

Despite this, Hugo found peace here. There’s a bench wide enough for him to sleep on, and a cupboard for him to wash. With its glass ceiling, and pretty blue and white Delft tiles, the room is bright and interesting. Hugo could also see his lover’s home from here, and I wonder if she secretly visited too, the space feels so private and sensual. 

Like Hugo, I like to listen to the sea whilst I write. My writing space is the beach hut I bought in 2005, after winning the CWA Debut Dagger. I resigned from the probation service to concentrate on writing and my beach hut was part of that brave (possibly foolhardy) decision. 

The Beach Hut is a simple shed, with no electricity, but what it offers a working space away from the house. I wrote my first two novels here, whilst on maternity leave. My writing has always been juggled with domestic tasks – things I need to escape, in order to inhabit the far darker world of my crime novels.  At The Beach Hut I can hear the waves, not the washing machine. My characters can speak without interruption.

As writers, we need to find the place where our words will flow most freely. Visiting writing spaces offers valuable insight: Hogwarts was imagined at a cafe table; revolutionary France was conjured from a wooden bench. 

Writing spaces are where magic happens, and every desk tells a story.