Omar El Akkad's 'Little House' in the woods is the perfect place to write in peace and quiet

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features What Strange Paradise author Omar El Akkad.

I do almost all my writing at a plain wooden desk that faces the forest. We live in the woods south of Portland, Oregon, and in addition to the main house, there's a one-bedroom unit that I suppose a more financially prudent homeowner would rent out for the extra income; for the most part, it's my office.

Because my wife and I have two young kids and no extended family or close friends in Portland to bully into occasionally taking care of them, we live in a state of perpetual messiness. But there are messes and there are messes — in the main house, it's a more organic kind of chaos: various foods mashed underfoot in the carpet; plush dragons jammed into heating vents. Down in what we call the Little House, the shambles is, I'd like to believe, much more sophisticated, and largely takes the form of diaries and notebooks haphazardly arranged, stacks of books, apocalyptically underlined and capitalized Post-It notes warning of assignments, such as this one, for which I am about to miss or have already missed deadline.

For the most part, the kids don't come down to the Little House — not because I pull some Kurt Vonnegut or J.D. Salinger art-monster, thou-shall-not-set-foot-in-the-sacred-writing-space routine, but because they just don't care. I'm fully cognizant of the reality that, in a few years, they're going to kick me out of here and use the space for the purpose God intended: awful teenage house parties.

I don't like replacing equipment of any kind, especially when it comes to writing implements. A few years ago, my old laptop finally died, and I'm still getting used to the new one. The same is true of my keyboard, which my wife bought me after my old one began shedding keys — I've had it for three years now and I still struggle to get anything resembling accuracy. In a way, though, I've come to like that — it forces me to slow down, to think more between words. I spend a lot of time these days doing events or writing assignments related to my second novel, What Strange Paradise, so I have a lot of the book's source material lying around next to the desk: large white sheets I used when planning the story, dozens of books that made up the bulk of the research, and folders of printed-out early drafts. In the past few weeks, I've started sketching some notes on what I hope will one day be my next novel, and that has, maybe unsurprisingly, coincided with a sudden urge to put all the notes for the previous novel in storage.

I am absentminded even at the best of times, but once I start working on a new project, particularly when it's something that takes over my imaginative life for long stretches of time, I become dangerously not-here. One night, years ago, when I was in the middle of writing What Strange Paradise, I finished up work around 2 or 3 in the morning and decided, as the tiniest gesture of domestic decency, I would run out to the 24-hour grocery store and buy milk. My kids drink whole milk, my wife drinks lactose-free milk, and I forget which one we'd just run out of, but between leaving the house and coming back, I'd sunk back into the world of the novel, and I realized when I got home that I'd bought the wrong kind. So I got back in the car, drove to the grocery store a second time and, having retreated into the novel once more, came back home with the wrong milk again. Anyone who has to live with a writer deserves your sympathy.

I wrote a version of this essay a few years ago, and I was trying to think of what had changed in my writing space since then (besides the pandemic, which hasn't done much to the physical space other than keep me confined to it for longer periods of time, ironically while making me far too anxious and preoccupied to actually get any writing done). A new set of neighbours has moved in next door, and with them a pair of very talkative dogs. I find the barking and occasional squirrel-chase comforting — I'm a bit of a tyrant when it comes to the soundtrack of my writing. Anything even remotely sourced in nature, from birdsong to rain to the dogs next door or the family of deer that wander through the property now and then, is perfect. Music I can live with so long as there's no words and it's not so good as to be distracting. A while back I read that one of my favourite writers, James Baldwin, used to listen to Bessie Smith while working, so I gave it a shot, but then all I wanted to do was sit and listen to Bessie Smith.

Mostly, I write and edit best in silence. I don't think there's ever been, and probably there never will be, a period in my writing life when I couldn't have used a little bit more time — a little bit more quiet.

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts.