The Writing School

Some people want to be writers more than they want to write. They're mesmerized by the mythology, theparaphernalia. Reverently they contemplate the little table where Jane Austen wrote her novels, peer in at thewriting hut, lost in Welsh woods, where Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood. Roald Dahl peered into Thomas'swriting shed once and liked it so much that he went off to build one for himself - and now people can peer into that one, too.I've looked through my fair share of windows - in at Virginia Woolf's writing studio at Monk's House in Sussex, or out at the Pacific as I stood beside Pablo Neruda's desk on the Chilean coast, trying to see what the poet would have seen when he wrote his epic poem Canto General. I have peered through the window that inspired Emily Brontë when she wrote Wuthering Heights. Can we see what they saw? Can we get some of what they had? Atea towel only takes you so far . . . we're looking for the key to creativity.