Want to Write Better? Consider Building Your Own Writing Desk

My writing desk, which I loved so much and had been with me through a decade of writing and teaching, was built into the wall. We were moving—more space—so I lay under that desk, looking at it to see if I could pry it loose to bring it with us. The basic construction looked simple enough, but the realtor said it was a fixed entity, so had to stay with the house.

I then fell into a deep rabbit hole of YouTube videos about DIY desks. I started watching woodworking videos as a way to distract myself from writing. Even with my favorite desk, the book I was working on had essentially turned sour in my hands. I couldn’t work on it anymore. Part of me felt that waiting until we got to the new house, setting it up, then making space to begin writing again would fix me enough to fix the book.

I took out library books on woodworking, starting with how to use basic tools, then moving to complex wood joinery. The saws in the video clips I watched looked so nasty I imagined my finger flinging across the room. I’d heard all good carpenters had a missing finger. It was a sign of putting in your time.

Writing and reading books for my job as a Creative Writing Professor took more time than I had. All through graduate school, I felt that with such steep competition, I had to work harder than anyone else to succeed, get published, get a job, and then discovered I had to work even harder, saying yes to everything for six years until I was tenured and doubling down to edit hundreds of stories and my first two novels.

I had pushed as hard as I could for almost fifteen years and was running out of creative gas, resulting in a deep panic. I felt I’d just scratched my way into the center of a career I had nothing left to give to.

Having trained myself to be incapable of idleness and fueled by a global sense of anxiety, I went into the garage with a new mission to build myself a desk, despite possessing none of the skill to do so. I’d be methodical. Teach myself the tools, read manuals, and practice with my circle saw, drill, and impact driver. Each new tool firing up gave me a thrill from being far from my comfort zone.

I built two wobbly sawhorses and a mobile workbench, each a practice in cutting and drilling. Then I started hunting for plans online and bought more tools. As our move approached, I had a late-night fantasy of furnishing our new home by building everything myself.

For the first few weeks of working in the new house’s garage, my wife Becca saw the growing carcass of a 9.5-foot-long farmhouse table. Each evening I spent working out there, our kids came out to watch me or play nearby. When the table was stained, assembled, and brought into the house, we looked at it in awe.

“You gave me no proof you could do something like this,” Becca said.

“I wasn’t sure myself,” I told her.

“Now what?” She was game.

Next came a giant king-sized bed from scratch. Then, matching nightstands.

A basic joint could take me a long way. Then came a new miter saw with a 10-inch blade that spit sawdust all over the driveway. I started paying attention to the way wood cups, twists, and bows, and the burls, grain patterns, colors, and wood densities. I bought rasps, squares, and chisels.

Our oldest son, eight at the time, whom I taught how to use wood glue and the impact driver, joined two-by-fours together perpendicularly, then sawed a point into the tip. He held it up with a sneaky grin. It looked like a giant cross. Then he bent forward and pantomimed stabbing me with his sword. After he painted the sword blue and it dried, our daughter, seven, took it to him in front of the house, got on her knees, and handed it up to him in a ceremonial gesture she must have seen in a movie about knights.

Our garage was a sawing, drilling, and sanding cacophony. When the kids wanted anything we stopped what we were doing and made it. An armory of lances and spears. A medieval catapult equipped with rubber surgical tubes to launch marshmallows. New neighborhood kids came over and left swinging swords over their heads.

I studied new joinery, wood species, and grain patterns and how different stains would make each bloom. My youngest son and I wandered through the local hardware stores, studying what I did not know how to use. He loved sitting on tractors and learned the tools’ names as I did.

When Father’s Day came around, and Becca asked what the kids should get me for a present, my four-year-old yelled out, “Table saw.” Something I wanted but was sure would be the tool to claim my fingers.

Our family built bike racks, blanket ladders, cutting boards, planters, ball holders, a stuffed animal zoo with bungee cords for bars, wall art, bunk beds, benches and finally a desk.  The kids wanted limbo stick bars, bookcases, and shoe racks, and Becca asked for a built-in cabinet and bookshelf wall running 179 5/8 inches across a bare wall. When that turned out gorgeous, friends started asking for projects to be done. Can I make a Murphy bed? A conference table? Garden beds? A five-person bunk bed?

I could start a woodworking business. A second table took me only three days. I could pour my creative energies into this. I loved the idea of making dining room tables for families to gather around. A year into building furniture, everywhere I went, I looked at the furniture and structures of buildings, pergolas, and moldings to see how I could reverse engineer them.

The contrast of having results for my labor was shocking. There is no knowing how long it takes to have something to show for efforts in writing, where over a weekend in the garage I can make a desk to write at for the rest of my life. In three years, if I’m lucky, I can write and polish ten stories. In three weekends I can build a wall of cabinets and shelves to hold a lifetime of reading. Having some tangible result to my work was so refreshing. Yes! I could keep myself very busy.

However, I noticed my creative writing brain, the one looking for stories everywhere, was not as active, and that began to gnaw at me. Before, I could hear a story or read a book passage, and an image of something I wanted to write would appear. I’d trained myself to think like that. But I had become more linear, mathematical, and pragmatic with woodworking.

I believe anxiety is sutured into all creative cycles due to natural questions like: Can I pull this off; how much energy will this take; and what will people think of this? What I needed was a pause on the manic pace of trying to write to buy time and credits to keep writing. I had achieved my first goals of selling novels and getting a teaching job but was headed toward a pit where I had ground the joy out of that work.

Though the same thing that I always found magical about writing, I found in woodworking. It let me look closer at the world to find the intricacies I would otherwise overlook. At my most alert and alive feeling, any new information I come across fascinates me and I want to understand how it works. I want to capture it in a story.

Working with my hands and having results to show eased some of the constant angst I had when I gave all my work energy to writing. Moderation is my problem. I’d been mono-focused and needed to find new ways to be a novice where there is joy of discovery in every act. That had to be sought after and even manufactured by broadening the scope of my work and lens I process the world around me.

My writing break, which often felt like the end of my writing life, ultimately saved me. The stories I want to write now have handy people in them—people wielding tools and obsessed with projects. Now I’m even more aware of the details of how everything around me is made, and thus, I look closer with more specific vocabulary when I’m trying to capture that image.

I took the idea that two pieces of wood can be joined in so many different ways—miter joints, dovetail, butt joints—and applied that to the book that had fallen apart. I went back and reverse-engineered what I’d done and built it all over again with new skills, with time having passed, that angst, thankfully having eased.