Guest Post – Brendan O’Hallarn and His Writing Space

Three years ago, I was working as a reporter for WYDaily, the online newspaper for whom I write White Knuckles, a weekly column about my life as an overwhelmed dad of two.

On a crisp October morning, I was out walking the haunted streets of Colonial Williamsburg long before dawn. The Today Show was doing its series on battleground states during the 2008 election, and chose to do its show live from CW that day. The town was abuzz.

As a hustling, underdog paper, WYDaily sent me out to do a live blog that morning. I had a riot zipping around Duke of Gloucester Street and gathering color, then sprinting back to the coffee shop where my laptop was set up.

Sometime mid-morning, I was typing away furiously in the happy din of the brasserie. A couple next to me was having an animated discussion about Al Roker, and stopped when they saw me pounding away on the keyboard.

“How can you possibly write in here?” The gentleman asked. “I can’t even THINK in here.”

“Well sir, I kind of like it,” I said, adding a sly grin. “I hope you had a nice trip down from Baltimore, and that the traffic isn’t too bad on your trip through DC today.”

I’d been eavesdropping while I wrote. I can’t help myself. My mind has a spectacular problem with focus … well, sort of.

I was a journalist for 16 years before moving to a public relations position at Old Dominion University. Any newsroom I worked in was loud, profane and full of distractions. So now, whenever I write anything, I kind of like the din.

I have a wonderful office at home, with a comfortable chair, and shelf after shelf of my wife’s professional books, in case I need to feel like an underachiever. But if I want to sink into a writing mindset, I need to be checking the golf scores on pgatour.com every few minutes. I need to slavishly refresh my Twitter feed. I need to listen to ‘80s “complaint rock” on YouTube while I work. Sometimes I need to do all three.

It never fails. My wife will come into the room just as I’m reading The Onion or something similarly disposable and complain: “I thought you said you were WORKING this afternoon.”

I AM working. You’ll know I’m really not getting anywhere when I don’t appear completely distracted.

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Brendan O’Hallarn is a Canadian former journalist now living with his wife and two kids in Williamsburg, Va. He’s moved on from journalism to a career in public relations, but he hasn’t quite shaken the creative writing bug. He writes a weekly column “White Knuckles” in Williamsburg-Yorktown Daily, the online newspaper in his adopted hometown. You can see the column here: White Knuckles , or find Brendan on Twitter.