Sunday, December 16, 2007

Literary Stereotype


See these guys with their laptops at some coffee shop? Disgusting. Ever since I saw these dweebs show up at my caffeine watering holes, I'd give them dirty looks and wish they'd go back home with their techno gadgets. I thought they were pretentious ass wipes letting the world know they're working on the next big screenplay.


Well, today, I couldn't take writing in my apartment one more minute. Actually I wasn't writing in my apartment, which made me wonder if there was something to writing in a coffee shop. I packed up old Myrtle, my laptop's name, and we headed over to the Coffee Table, a joint about a block away. I ordered their Asian Chicken Salad and sat down to work. You know what? I came up with some pretty good pages, I think. Yes, there were about five other people in the place writing and I thought maybe it was this collective energy of writers trying to put things down on paper that helped me write. I mean, anything in a group harnesses power. (I meditate alone which is great, but meditating in a group has its own kind of greatness.
You might see The Coffee Table in the Acknowledgment section of my next book.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Always easier to diss when you're not one of them eh ?

If you can't beat em, join them ! haha.

I too , have been guilty of doing this. Difference is, I'm just blogging.

Jeff said...

I like the collective energy concept, but it just seems so fragile. One person doing a marketing presentation in PowerPoint, and I think it would deflate the whole thing, no?

Frederick Smith said...

I love The Coffee Table. And yeah, I find it rewarding to get out the house every now and then to write. The people watching alone gives me inspiration.
fs

fred said...

Lo these many years I have been a proud member of the coffee bar set, making best use of the plethora of Starbucks' clogging the NYC landscape. Since I began writing it's been interesting to watch the transition from people sitting with their books/newspapers/magazines and lattes to those same people hunched over laptops (mostly Macs for some reason). The bulk of my writing has been done in a handful of different coffee shops to where I cannot concentrate at home anymore. Too quiet.