Dear Huma: has the process of renovating your house affected your writing?

Dear Huma

I'm really enjoying seeing the snippets of your home renovations on Instagram. I'd love to know if the change of environment, and the process of creating your dream home, have affected your writing in any way?

–N

Dear N,

Why, thank you!

I figure I can’t really answer your question without explaining a little bit about what the house was like before we renovated. When we moved in there was no shower, tiles were falling off the wall, worktops held together with brown sellotape, limited daylight because of condensation trapped inside the windows and a particular kind of odour coming from the floorboards. Because we were naive about how long things like architect plans and finding a contractor would take, we thought we’d only live in the house for three months. Instead, we lived in it for nine, which also just so happened to be nine of the busiest months of my writing life: How We Met was coming out, Things was coming out after, and I had a novel deadline.

Did this affect my writing? Yes. It did.

The thing is, I kind of felt like I had no where I could go to, to write. It sounds precious to suggest I need to be in nice surroundings to write. But I found the house utterly depressing, every single bit of it, and this got me down. I dreaded having to sit here all day, the way it was, trying to write sentences. I know there are many writers who would call this nonsense, procrastination to the highest degree. If you want to write, just write, they’d say. But my surroundings really matter to me, in a feelings sort of way; these things affect my mood. Maybe that’s just the sort of person I am. Maybe I really am that superficial. Or maybe it’s just normal, to be affected by these things.

But in my defence, all of this was heightened because there was nowhere to escape to. It was 2020, maybe the third or fourth lockdown and by January 2021, the month How We Met was due out, we were back to homeschooling three small children. The combination of all of these things made it impossible to do anything, let alone write, and a house that was falling apart didn’t help. In the run up to my online book launch, my husband painted one of the rooms that didn’t smell quite so bad yellow and put one of my big art prints up, so that I’d have at least a sort of backdrop (not a virtual one) to all those live events my publishers had planned; I chose yellow because I was desperate for colour in a house that felt so drab. Within three months of moving in, it was pretty clear to me that I would not make my deadline, which is why it got pushed back to this summer instead.

We moved out before the building started, and we budgeted for this. But everything still felt very temporary (which it was) and I suppose that kept taking its toll on all of us. By now, we were no longer homeschooling, but the renovation was in full swing and renovations take up a lot of headspace. Before I knew it, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love was coming out, and between publicity and house stuff, it meant I didn’t have that much time to write anyway. I mean, I kept on writing, I sort of had no choice, but there were lots of tears, lots of moments of overwhelm, lots of telling myself I could not do this.

But don’t get me wrong! I really enjoyed the process of designing and creating a home for us. I loved choosing paint colours and sifting through fabric samples. I felt, as I began to see rooms come together and started collecting little things I wanted to put in specific places, as if I was telling a story, just in a different way to writing one. I also found myself poring over descriptions of interiors in writing (Tessa Hadley does this so well!) and I began to think about the role the places, the homes, my stories are set in play.

Our home is now finished. I finally have a room of my own in which to write. I have never had this before. It is tucked at the back of the house, the opposite end to the playroom, which means I can work and not always hear my children’s shrieks. The walls are the colour of clotted cream, and there’s a little bit of wallpaper full of wildflowers. My room looks out onto the garden and gets a lot of sun; it is full of my books and artwork I love. It makes me happy, to come here.

I can write here. Not least because I am no longer thinking about a hundred and one different things. I like the space, the light, being surrounded by my own things. I wish I could say that since having this room of my own, my writing has suddenly started to flow as if a tap has been switched on but I’m not sure it’s that simple. I have written, but I can’t honestly say that I feel any more productive than I did a year ago. It still at times feels hard. Mostly, I’m just so damn tired, possibly the aftermath of the last couple of years, and this affects my productivity more than anything.

I’m also wary of suggesting you need a room of your own in which to write, because it’s not always possible to find this. I never had my own office or study or whatever before, it’s taken me years to get to this point, and I still managed to write books then. But it is undeniably nice to have a place to go, yes. It is undeniably helpful, to be able to close the door, to partition this life and that for a couple of hours at least. I hope I write many more books here. But I also hope I might write them anywhere, really.

I think though, more than anything, the process of moving four times in the last couple of years, out of one house to another, then another, then back again, reminded me about what it is to feel restless, when you don’t have somewhere that feels like home. To a certain extent, all my stories are about lost people trying to find a place they can call home, in ways big and small. I am home now but in feeling so unsettled myself even for a short while, I guess I came to remember why it matters so much, to feel grounded; and I suppose it is this extra understanding that I’d like to think I am bringing to the themes of my writing.

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On the subject of writers and their houses, check out the flat where Toni Morrison lived. Plus I always loved this old Guardian series on writers’ rooms, which actually I think they ought to bring back. When I was planning my writing room, this little Beata Heuman designed home officewas on my Pinterest board for a while (the creamy coloured one, not the red one). I just loved how calm it was. And finally, here is a little reel of my writing room albeit before it was finished for anyone who wants to see it (I’ll post up-to-date pics another day)!

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So! That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading, and there’ll be more snippets of my writing life as I work through this deadline coming up (maybe. I mean, lets see how that goes…!) And as I said before, please do get in touch if you have anything you are burning to ask me, writing-related or otherwise and maybe I’ll answer your question next.

With love from,

Huma x