The question of where to write sounds like procrastination and mostly is. People rearrange the office instead of writing the chapter, and buying the right chair has never finished a book.
One part survives the skepticism. Your brain associates places with states. The desk where you also answer email and pay bills is a desk you’ve trained to make you feel behind. Going somewhere else on purpose breaks that, and it works for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the coffee.
People rearrange the office instead of writing the chapter, and buying the right chair has never finished a book.
Safety Harbor is a small town, about seventeen thousand people, and it has more workable places for a writer than a town that size should. I’ve used most of them, each for a different kind of work.
Where can you write for free in Safety Harbor?
The library, at 101 Second Street North, is the first answer.
Open seven days a week with evening hours four nights. Quiet without being severe. A view over the bay from the upper level. And nobody moves you along after ninety minutes. I’ve written about what makes it good in more detail, and the short version is that it’s the best free workspace in town.
Use it for the long stretches. Three or four hours of drafting, or a research session where you need the databases and somebody at a desk who knows how to find things. It’s not the room for a phone call or for talking a chapter out loud. For the head-down hours it’s unmatched.
The second free option is the waterfront itself. The marina, the park, and the path along the water are public. A bench is a legitimate writing location if what you need is thirty minutes with a notebook and no screen. I do a particular kind of work out there, which I’ll come back to.
The pier, and the walk that fixes paragraphs
The most useful writing tool in this town is the walk to the water and back.
Every writer hits the paragraph that won’t resolve.
You read it again, you move a comma, you read it again. Thirty minutes disappear and the paragraph is worse. The cure is leaving. The walk works because it stops you looking at the words and makes you think about the idea instead. Nine times out of ten the sentence sorts itself out somewhere near the water and you walk back and type it.
What makes Safety Harbor good for this is the geometry. From the library or from most of downtown, the water is a few minutes on foot. In a bigger town the equivalent trip is a drive, and a drive is a commitment, so you skip it and keep grinding at the paragraph. Here the interruption is cheap enough that you take it early, so you lose ten minutes instead of an afternoon.
The pier is also the best place I know to say a sentence out loud. There’s enough space and enough wind that nobody hears you, and hearing your own prose is how you catch the rhythm that fails. I have stood out there mumbling dialogue more times than I want to count.
Downtown, and the art town factor
Safety Harbor is an art town and wears it plainly. There’s local art everywhere, and once a year the streets close for a chalk festival and the pavement becomes a gallery for a weekend. That atmosphere matters to the work.
A place that takes making things seriously, without being precious about it, is a place where sitting alone working on something nobody has asked for feels normal. Anyone who has tried to write in a town that regards it as an eccentricity knows the difference.
Much of the credit belongs to Todd Ramquist and Kiaralinda, the artists known as the Whimzey Twins.
In 1985 they bought a plain bungalow on Third Street and never stopped decorating it. It’s Whimzeyland now, the Bowling Ball House, covered in mosaics and sculpture and hundreds of hand-painted bowling balls, and people drive across the state to see it. They also helped found the Safety Harbor Art and Music Center, and I respect that most, because they took a private obsession and made it big enough for other people to step inside.
A book does the same thing, and walking past the house when the work is going badly helps.
Where do you go when you need a table and a meal?
The resort on the springs is the town’s landmark, and when clients come here that’s usually where they stay. I meet them at the little fish restaurant across the street from it, and a surprising number of books have started at that table.
Talking is a real category of writing work.
The conversation where somebody says the thing out loud for the first time and you both realize that’s the book, and it wasn’t the thing they came in intending to write. It doesn’t happen at a library table and it doesn’t work well on a video call. It needs a meal, a couple of hours, and somebody across from you paying attention.
Downtown has a handful of cafes and restaurants that will let you sit with a laptop. Their fortunes change the way small-town food businesses do, so I’m not going to name a list that goes stale. Walk Main Street and look for the ones with people sitting at tables instead of queuing at a counter.
Philippe Park, for the long think
North of town there’s a county park on the water with a Tocobaga temple mound in it. That’s roughly a thousand years of local history sitting under the picnic tables. It’s shade, tables, and enough space that you can be alone.
I use it for a different task than the library: the structural one. When a book refuses to take a shape, the fix is almost never more drafting. The fix is sitting somewhere with a notebook and no keyboard and asking what the thing is about. That work needs a place with nothing else to do in it, and a bench under an oak at Philippe Park qualifies.
Bring paper. Leave the laptop, because a keyboard makes it too easy to write sentences when what the book needs is a decision.
Is it better to write at home or somewhere else?
Most people write their books at home, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you have a room with a door and a household that respects it, you have better conditions than any public building can give you and you should use them.
The reason I go out anyway is narrower.
Home is where every other obligation lives. The laundry, the inbox, the thing you promised somebody on Tuesday. All of it is visible from the chair, and the part of your mind that tracks unfinished business never fully shuts up. A public room has none of your obligations in it. That absence is what you’re buying.
The compromise that works for a lot of people is home for the routine hours and somewhere else for the hard ones. Draft at your desk on ordinary days; when a chapter has been refusing to move for a week, take it to the library or the water and let the change of room do what willpower has stopped doing.
My take
Home is the worst place to write the hard chapter. Every obligation you have is visible from the chair. Draft the ordinary days at your desk. When a chapter hasn’t moved in a week, take it to the library or the water, and let the new room do the work willpower stopped doing. In Safety Harbor that move costs you five minutes, so you’ve got no excuse.
How do you build a writing routine in a small town?
Pick two places and alternate on purpose.
One should be the head-down room where you draft, and it should be the same one every time so the association builds.
For me that’s the library. The other is the thinking place, used only when you’re stuck or planning, and it should be somewhere you can’t type. That separation does what people expect a productivity system to do.
Then set a time and defend it. A small town helps here. The distances are short, so the routine doesn’t collapse the first week you’re tired. A forty-minute drive to a writing spot is a routine with a short life. (See also where to write in Clearwater) A ten-minute walk is one you keep.
And accept that the room is the easy part. Most people who haven’t finished a book already know where they’d write it. (See also the springs the town was built on) What stops the book is the shape of it, and no amount of good scenery decides whether chapter three belongs in the manuscript.
The shape of the book is what I work on with people, and being a ghostwriter in Safety Harbor means we can do it over a meal here instead of on a call. The rest of this cluster lives in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub. If the shape is the wall you’ve hit, the Discovery Intensive answers it in about thirty days, and then the library hours start counting for something.
