Put Your Desk in the Corner

Background

This one isn’t a speech at all. It’s a passage from the middle of On Writing, at the hinge where Stephen King’s memoir turns into his advice about the craft — but it reads like a commencement address delivered to an audience of one, which is why it lives in this library. It’s the story of two desks: the massive one he dreamed of, and the small one that taught him where a desk belongs.

The passage

The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. 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 (it’s a converted stable loft at the rear of the house). 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 and put in a living-room suite where it had been, picking out the pieces and a nice Turkish rug with my wife’s help. In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind when they moved on, but I didn’t care. They came, they seemed to enjoy being with me, and I know I enjoyed being with them. I got another desk—it’s handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. That eave is very like the one I slept under in Durham, but there are no rats in the walls and no senile grandmother downstairs yelling for someone to feed Dick the horse. 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. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn’t), and now I’m going to tell you as much as I can about the job. As promised, it won’t take long.

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.

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000), pp. 100–101. © Stephen King — quoted in full with love and attribution; please buy the book.

Why it hangs in my office

Gavin’s poster of this passage is on my office wall, and I really love it. It’s a great reminder for me personally — I literally have my desk in the corner, and the Legos for my son sit out in the middle of the room, where they belong, so we can play together.

The poster

Gavin Aung Than — the same cartoonist behind the Bill Watterson tribute and the Make Good Art comic in this library — drew this passage as a comic, following a writer from the big desk in the middle of the room to the small one in the corner. It’s the comic at the top of this page, Zen Pencils No. 207.

See “The Desk” at Zen Pencils →
Gavin Aung Than’s illustrated adaptation of the passage

Go to the source

The passage is quoted in full above — and the rest of the book more than earns its reputation as the best thing ever written about the job.

Get On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft →
Stephen King, Scribner — part memoir, part master class