How do you get that creative space you want?

Virginia Woolf famously wrote a book about it: A Room of One’s Own.

About the importance of a solitary space for creative work.

Be you writer or coder or artist or indie biz person, you want your space. That space that is yours and no one else’s. That space to do your work. Your fab work.

Before I had a creative space I had the tiniest version of it you can muster: A lap desk.

Then a real desk. If old and battered. A cheap used desk is better than no desk at all.

And eventually over the years that desk moved into its own space.

But first I had a lap desk I used while sitting on my futon in the small-as-a-tiny-house apartment I shared with my friend Gil in New York City.

He had a loft bed in the bedroom — what we nowadays call a walk-in closet — and I had my futon underneath.

But it was glorious, our little 380-square-foot apartment in the dark dungeon of a Hells Kitchen tenement. A lot of creating went on there.

Even more living. We were in our twenties. That time of life where you slosh from one apartment to another meeting up with other young soul sparks like yourself, where you spill through the streets raging for experience and getting it.

You’ve got to start somewhere. I’ll bet more beginnings began on beds than anywhere else.

Yeah, I know you want to take that sentence somewhere else — I say take it there, you guttersnipe — then come back here to this.

That girl sitting on a bed plunking a guitar who grows up to be Jewel.

That kid spreading notes of verse on his bed who grows up to be Walt Whitman. Or Walt Disney.

That future starter upper lounging on her bed right now coding away on her laptop.

Beds are big dreamboats, large enough to sprawl on, large enough for any fantasy. And just the right size for any position you want to contort into while scribbling drawing musing humming those first notes thoughts marks life questions that morph into life quests.

How do you earn your creative space?

By creating in whatever limited space you’ve got right now.

(You have more than you think.)

Using what you have sets you in motion for bigger n better. My home office attests to it.

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature sings to it. Off key.