I live across the bay and I work in Tampa often enough to have opinions about where.
The calculation is different from working in my own town. In Safety Harbor I can leave the house on a whim, and if a room is wrong I move. Tampa involves a causeway, traffic that varies by an hour depending on when you set off, and paying for parking. That cost makes the trip a commitment, so the rooms have to justify a day.
Several of them do, and I’ll defend the drive to anyone who thinks a writer should just stay home and work. The kitchen table is fine for email. For the hard days on a book I want a room I had to make an effort to reach, because I take the work more seriously once I’ve sat in traffic to get there.
Oxford Exchange
The obvious one, and it deserves the reputation. A bookstore, restaurant, and coffee bar built into a structure from 1891. It started life as a stable for the hotel across the street. Now it’s a brick and glass space with a conservatory feel.
The bookstore section is small and tightly chosen, covers facing outward on oak shelves, and it sits alongside seating designed for people who stay a while. That combination is rare. Most bookstores want you browsing, and most cafes want your table back.
What it’s good for: a working morning with a notebook, and meetings.
If a client is in Tampa, this is where I suggest we meet, because the room does some of the work of the conversation. What it’s less good for: a full drafting day. It’s popular, and a laptop session at peak hours is a session spent guarding a table.
That room is worth protecting from turning into another coffee shop full of people guarding outlets. Use it for what it’s good at, which is thinking and talking, and take the laptop marathon somewhere built for one.
They also run a book fair, which is one of the more accessible routes onto a Tampa shelf for a local author, and I go into that in getting your book into a Tampa Bay bookstore.
Can you write at Tampa’s university libraries?
For head-down hours, a university library beats every cafe in the city, and most people never consider it.
The University of Tampa sits along the river in the old Tampa Bay Hotel, minarets and all.
The University of South Florida has a large main library on its own campus. Policies for outside visitors vary by institution and change, so call the circulation desk and ask what a member of the public can do. That takes four minutes and saves a wasted drive.
Universities have what coffee shops don’t: silence as a rule, tables built for working, and research databases that would cost a fortune privately. For anyone writing nonfiction that needs sourcing, an afternoon in a real academic library is worth a week of searching from home.
It baffles me how many nonfiction writers skip this. They’ll pay for a stack of subscriptions and spend a week chasing sources online when an academic librarian could have pointed them at the right shelf in an afternoon. A book built on thin research reads thin, and readers notice even when they can’t say why.
The public system is the other half of this. The Tampa area libraries program events and hold local history material, and the same logic applies as in Pinellas, which I set out in getting your book onto library shelves.
Ybor City, for a different kind of session
Ybor is where I go when the work is thinking instead of typing. The historic district is compact, walkable, quiet on a weekday morning, and full of the kind of material that shakes something loose.
A book built on thin research reads thin, and readers notice even when they can’t say why.
There are cafes along Seventh Avenue that will let you sit, and the neighborhood itself is the reason to come: brick factories, social club buildings, the casitas, and the history I set out in why Ybor is the densest square mile of material here. Go in the morning. The district turns into an entertainment economy in the evening and the version of the neighborhood you want is gone by dark.
Tampa Theatre
Not a workspace, but you should know about it.
It’s a 1926 movie palace downtown, restored and still operating. It was built in the atmospheric style. That puts a painted night sky and a Mediterranean courtyard around the audience. Sitting in it teaches something books struggle with: how to build an interior world so convincing that people forget the room they’re in.
For a writer it works the way a good museum does. Go when the work has gone stale and you need to see what full commitment to craft looks like. The people who built that ceiling weren’t economizing. I find that ceiling humbling in the best way. Somebody decided a movie house deserved its own sky, and the work still holds up a century later. That’s the standard I’d like my own books held to, and I think most writers would benefit from seeing it in person.
The riverwalk, and the outdoor option
Tampa has spent years building out its riverwalk. The result is a long connected stretch along the water downtown, with benches, parks, and museums along it.
Same rules as any outdoor writing spot on this coast, which I go through in writing at the beach mostly doesn’t work: glare defeats screens, so this is notebook territory. It’s good for the walk that unsticks a paragraph, and for the long structural think. It also connects enough of downtown that you can move between indoor rooms without moving the car.
How do you plan a writing day in Tampa?
Because the drive makes it a commitment, plan it as one. Go early enough to beat the bridge traffic, which on a weekday means leaving before seven or after nine and accepting the consequences either way. Park once, in a garage, and walk. Feeding a meter every ninety minutes ends a session early for a reason that’s nothing to do with the work.
Split the day by task. Head-down hours in the library in the morning, when your attention is best and the building is quiet. Lunch somewhere with a table. Thinking and walking in the afternoon, in Ybor or along the river, when concentration has gone anyway and the change of scene makes that useful.
And decide in advance what the day is for. A Tampa day that produces two thousand words is a good day. A Tampa day that produces a decision about the structure of the book is a better one, and the two require different rooms. A Tampa day without a purpose is the worst of both worlds, all the cost of the drive and nothing to show for it. I’d sooner stay home than cross the bay to sit in a nice room hoping the book shows up on its own.
The bay in between
One more thing about the drive itself.
The causeway crossings are among the better commutes in the country, and I say that as somebody who spent decades driving to office parks. Open water on both sides, weather you can watch coming across the bay, and light in the late afternoon that photographers plan around. For twenty minutes nothing asks anything of you except the lane.
That’s useful time. I’ve solved more structural problems on the Courtney Campbell than at any desk, because driving occupies the part of the mind that generates excuses. Keep a recorder in the car and use it, since the idea you have at sixty miles an hour is gone by the time you park.
My take
Tampa is worth the drive if you go for the whole day. An afternoon there costs you more in traffic and parking than it gives back. Pick one room, settle in early, and stay until the work is done. Count the causeway as part of the session. Keep a recorder in the car, because the idea you get at sixty miles an hour is gone by the time you park.
What the drive is really buying
Separation. Every writer eventually discovers that the enemy of a working session is everything else you could be doing.
An hour of driving buys a day the household can’t interrupt. (See also who hosts author events in Tampa Bay) You can’t go home and do the laundry, you can’t answer the door, and you’ve committed enough effort that abandoning the session at eleven feels ridiculous. That’s a crude trick, and it works.
I’ll keep making the drive, and I think writers who never leave their own houses are cheating themselves out of their best working days. The rooms are good, and the distance is what makes them work.
If the problem is the book and not the room, that’s my job. As a ghostwriter in Tampa, I’ll meet you on your side of the bay, and I’m used to the drive. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive settles what the book is before you spend a year of Tampa days on the wrong version.
