In tandem

Here's a little passage from Stephen King's ON WRITING that I've been thinking about today.

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room--no more child's desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study. For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity...I got another desk--it's handmade, beautiful, about half the size of the T. Rex desk. I put it in the far west end of the office under the eave... I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. ....

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.