Where I Write: Hattie Williams

Described as ‘thrilling, compulsive and utterly addictive’ by Women’s Prize longlisted author Kirsty Capes, Hattie Williams’ debut novel Bitter Sweet is a thought-provoking exploration of a relationship founded in power, control and silence. To celebrate the publication, we met with Hattie to learn more about her writing workspace and creative process.

Where do you write?

I live in a small Victorian terraced house in east London and we don’t have a spare room to make into an office. Sometimes I like to write in bed, which feels very decadent but is terrible for my back, but mostly I write in my living room slash dining room at a table which has many, many functions alongside being my part-time desk. At 6 p.m. on weekdays, this room completely transforms into the hub for my family. The space takes on a totally different feeling, even the light feels different. My ‘desk’ becomes a craft table, a painting station, where we eat our meals, make sock puppets and do Play-do.

This is where I wrote my first and second novels, and where I am writing my third. I’m quite good at making the most of the space I have, and blocking out distraction, which is essential for writing. You have to quite aggressively carve out time for writing, and then even more aggressively protect that time. This means sometimes letting housework go, and accepting the mess, because cleaning is the opposite of protecting my writing time. This was a big lesson for me. In the week, when I’m home alone writing, I regularly trip over toys and single Crocs and have to peel bits of yesterday’s penne off of my socks, but I have learned to see it as a beautiful mess that I have to accept if I want to write.

What do you have on your desk?

Every few weeks I will have a massive sort out and clear the dining table of the mountains of ephemera that have built up, and I will feel very grown up and professional. But it only takes fifteen minutes to return to its chaotic state. Right now, there is a laundry basket, a pile of proofs I’m very excited to read, a stack of Bitter Sweet branded postcards I’m writing to bloggers, two empty mugs, an ominous looking black box I keep receipts and other such boring financial things in, a box of paints, a few notebooks and a fan of nice pens. I try to always have a vase of flowers by my laptop to make the immediate space around me as nice as possible, and today it is full of my favourites, peonies. There is beautiful ceramic fruit bowl that my friend made me, which makes me feel very loved. It never has any fruit in it, but it has just about everything else; I call it The Bowl of All Things.