I used to like to write in the spare bedroom in my house, which is tucked away in a lovely urban-woodsy Brooklyn-ish neighborhood between Beacon Hill and Lake Washington. We have a nice brick house, three stories tall, perched precariously on a steep grade alive with pine trees and oak trees, and home to a ninety-year-old laurel bush that looms thirty feet high and stretches fifty feet from one end to the other between our house and our neighbor’s—seriously, this is one plant, with a trunk thirty-six inches in circumference. Like they make in Brobdingnag.
The house was built in 1924 and has a peek-a-boo view of Lake Washington. We’re across from a park, which, like almost all of the older parks in Seattle, was designed by the Olmsted Brothers around the turn of the twentieth century. The old trees on the drive below our house bend over the road and form a mall of leaves in the summer, like you would see in a French film. And when you’re on the top floor of our house and look out to the park, if feels like you’re in a tree house.
I loved writing in that back bedroom; I wrote my second novel there. But I also loved it because it provided me the perfect excuse not to write. (The easiest thing to do in the world is not write!) I could invent the need to cook an elaborate dinner, for instance. Or cite my sons’ sudden need to learn to throw a baseball. Almost anything would do.
But then one day, my wife walked into my office while I was writing. She carefully sized up the layout, ticking items off in her head. “I think we’ll put the crib there,” she said. We had two sons, eight and ten; now we were having a third. And I was being evicted.
I found a little apartment just down the street from us, also overlooking the boulevard. That was a good place to write too. But it was short-lived solution. The owners converted it to a condo, and I was evicted again.
I wandered the coffee shops, hoping to find salvation as an itinerant writer. Victrola. Bauhaus. Caffe Vita. Yes, even Starbucks. But I never took to coffeehouse writing. I was too worried about having to pee after drinking so much coffee that my hands shook, and the inevitable next question: Should I leave my computer at a table and ask someone to look after it, or should I pack up and go to the restroom and then change locations? It was very disconcerting to me.
Then I drove through a neighborhood just south of us called Columbia City. It used to be its own city before Seattle grew up around it and swallowed it whole. In the nineteenth century, it had its own train station and a lumber mill. The old movie theater is still there. Yet the neighborhood had no office vacancy.
Rob Mohn, one of the local developers in Columbia City, told me to check with a guy named Joe Fugere who had just opened a pizza restaurant and was using a loft above the Columbia City Ale House as his support office. It was too much space, and he was thinking of bringing in some freelancers to fill out the floor.
Well, that was just perfect. Joe was the nicest guy in the world. His pizza was great. And I had a new place to work.
I loved working in the offices of Tutta Bella Neapolitan Pizzeria, mostly because the folks there treated me like I was one of them. They all had jobs. They were general managers and accountants and marketing people. I didn’t have a job. I was a guy in the cubicle in the back who wore headphones to blot out the sound and could sometimes be heard acting out dialogue from a scene in his book.
“Who’s that?” a vendor or a guest might ask.
“Oh, him? He’s a writer. Don’t worry about him.”
I wrote The Art of Racing in the Rain there. People sometimes ask me if I cry when I write an emotional scene. I do. The fine people at Tutta Bella will verify that fact.
I was with Tutta Bella for seven years. I didn’t want to leave, and Joe didn’t want me to go. But his pizza place had grown into a family of five restaurants, and he needed my desk for his business. The other freelancers had all moved on, but I had become somewhat of a mascot, I like to think. The hardworking writer who hit it big with a novel written, edited, and marketed entirely under their roof. Still, I knew it was time. And besides, Joe had charged me almost no rent for seven years; I could afford an office of my own.
So I took off for Georgetown, a stubbornly industrial fringe neighborhood mashed between I-5, a phalanx of railroad tracks, and the north end of Boeing Field. I have a loft in an old beer brewery that’s been taken over by artists. I eat falafel from a food truck and some of the best pho in Seattle from a little place in a strip mall a few blocks away, and I eat some of the best Mexican food I’ve ever tasted from the restaurant across Airport Way. I have no air-conditioning, so in the hot weeks of summer I practice what I call “Bikram Hot Writing” in my baking top-floor office with three fans pointed at my face. I stand at my sit-to-stand desk and sweat and write books. I’ve written another book here, in this place. The trains are frighteningly loud when they use the spur a hundred feet from my window to change tracks. The horns and the clacking and the shrieking of brakes. And the airplanes. When Boeing tests a Dreamliner, it thunders over Georgetown, so my windows rattle and I look out at the blue belly that’s so close I feel I can touch it. That’s when I love where I am so much. Because I am alone. I have no phone here. I am anonymous. If I want to turn off my Wi-Fi, I can. Then I am unreachable. But I do not feel alone, because I always know civilization is just outside my old, leaky windows and just above my whitewashed wood ceiling.
Location plays a big role in my writing; it’s another character. I write about Seattle: the places where I grew up, the places I hung out and explored, the places I’ve lived. But as much as Seattle has informed what I’ve written about, it also informs how I write.
This is a city of neighborhoods, each with its own personality. Wherever a writer finds a place to perch is a good place to write. For me, I’ve moved from our upstairs bedroom to the Tutta Bella support offices in Columbia City to my loft in Georgetown, and I’ve felt the energy of each place seep into my bones and infuse my writing with something unique. I recognize that each of the three books I’ve written in Seattle has taken on some of the distinctiveness of the place it was written. The reader may not see it, but I do. I don’t want to move again to write another novel, but I know that if I do have to, there will always be another perfect writing spot in Seattle for me to find.