#writing

The Still Room Blog

Becky Fifield

Dec 10, 2013
2 min

Fighting Writing: Musings on the Recalcitrant Pen

Does a battle assume there has been a victory? Writing has a threshold that must be crossed, marking the departure from everyday life and its patterns. The space writing affords can be threatening to the underpinnings of everything else. Writing lives within a separate space that I must single-handedly fill. She is lazy and indolent. She crabs snittingly how little I visit. Is it ennui? Do I no longer care? Will I abandon her in this space with only the occasional roses and r

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Becky Fifield

Dec 20, 2012
1 min

Spaces that Feed the Writing Brain

McSorley’s. 2003. I just finished Dwight Garner’s “A Critic’s Tour of Literary Manhattan” in The New York Times (December 14, 2012). I’m smitten. I like heady romps through the bars and bookshops where original things take place. I swoon for the places that have suckled and bolstered many a writing generation, and it was Garner’s mission to see how active the scene still is. Certainly, tripping over leagues of high-pitched cookie-cutter blow dry girls on their way to clubs ca

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Becky Fifield

Nov 20, 2012
2 min

Transportation Tuesday: Amtrak’s Quiet Car

I was putting together another post on Amtrak when I stumbled across a New York Times Opinion on Amtrak’s Quiet Car by Tim Krieder. The Quiet Car is at first brilliant: I settle myself away from the din of the other carriages. There’s the cellphone conversation we’d rather not hear about (surgery, sales, boyfriend). The businessmen strutting their acumen to each other. The travelling family unaware that others are using the train. The Quiet Car is for single people who enjoy

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Becky Fifield

Oct 14, 2012
2 min

Writing Fiction – Business Trips Aren’t a Loss

Business travel breeds ideas. My business trips involve some off days, waiting around at my destination, combined with really long stretches of being “on.” Combine that with jet lag, and ideas that I’ve stowed away in the corners of my gray matter seep out into my consciousness. They’re prodded by new experiences and strange juxtapositions. It seems to be the perfect environment for the underbelly dwellers of my brain to percolate to the top. Recently, I was in Germany, and a

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Becky Fifield

Oct 7, 2012
2 min

New York Diaries Redux

I moved into New York City proper in 2005, and while my journalling habits have given way to blogging, research writing, and fiction, I was curious to see how my own New York entries held up against those selected for the text. In comparison, I wondered at the volume of diaries created today. Do people write for themselves as much? Or have they replaced it with lesser notions of privacy and revealing all to others online? What is Facebook but one lengthy diary, with commentar

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Becky Fifield

Oct 6, 2012
1 min

Scenes from a Manhattan Apartment Hunt

No, we aren’t looking to move! But I was flipping through a book in which I kept notes about my apartment hunt in 2005. I had 54 apartments on my list and looked at 30 of them – yep, 30 different one room apartments at the bottom of the market on the Upper East Side. Here are a few notes from that experience – I’ve substituted “#” for the street numbers. 9/5/2005 ### East 95th: Scummy. 9/12/2005 ### East 89th St. Apt 2D: Big but serious fixer upper. 9/12/2005 ### East 90th. A

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Becky Fifield

Sep 15, 2012
1 min

New York Diaries, 1609–2009

Teresa Carpenter does not arrange the selected snippets of text in a chronological order. Instead, she starts with January 1, and then includes diary excerpts from a variety of New Yorkers celebrating the New Year throughout time: John Bigelow in 1844, William H. Bell in 1851, John Sloan in 1906, and Judith Malina in 1953. Then she proceeds to January 2. The format is compelling, meshing the New Yorkers stories in a way that would be lost in a chronological arrangement. The e

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Becky Fifield

Jul 31, 2012
2 min

Transportation Tuesday: Amtrak Fiction

I’ve been working on a short story for years about a friendship slipping into an unfamiliar place. One of these days I’ll fish it out of the muck. In my book (ha), trains are good places for writing, and good places to write about. I don’t feel the same way about airplanes, where you enter a sort of stasis between points A and B. This introductory portion was inspired by the Northeast Corridor, the stretch of rail between New York and DC. A jolt over the old join in the rail

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Road Trip – A Snapshot from the Lincoln Highway in Illinois

Becky Fifield

May 9, 2012
2 min

Road Trip – A Snapshot from the Lincoln Highway in Illinois

Preserved original stretch of the Lincoln Highway, between Rochelle and Geneva, Illinois. RL Fifield, 2005. First designated in 1913, the Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental highway across the United States, stretching from Times Square in New York City to Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco. In 2005, I drove the section from Dixon, Illinois to Philadelphia. I had no plans except to follow the road, and to sleep and eat when the time seemed righ

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Becky Fifield

May 9, 2012
2 min

Road Trip – A Snapshot from the Lincoln Highway in Illinois

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Becky Fifield

Apr 6, 2012
2 min

Trainscribbling – Moving and Writing.

Grand Central Terminal. RL Fifield photo. When I leave the city, it’s either on a plane or a train. On a plane, you have little sense of forward travel once you’ve reached cruising altitude. Everyone channels sardine-ism for a number of hours, and the landscape below loses relevance and becomes a myth, of sorts. On a train, you hurtle through rapidly shifting landscapes of human scale. Each passing view brings you into a new space, posing new questions: Why was that factory a

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