How much "space" does a writer need? The only materials required are a pad and pencil, right? The physical act of writing can occur anywhere and usually does to a dedicated writer. How many books began as Jean M. Auel's epic Plains of Passage? She wrote, night after night sitting at her kitchen table, as she filled page after page on a legal pad. Are there writers even now, following John Grisham's example? He wrote his best-sellers as he rode the commuter train back and forth to his real job in a law office.

There have been times I've found myself scrambling for writing material in the most unusual situations. How many times have I reached for the nearby notebook while driving to keep an appointment? Eventually the force of the thoughts and sentences surging to the surface, demanding to be recorded, impels me to pull over to the side of the road. Once, inspired by a covered bridge discovered while on vacation, I sat beside its river, oblivious of the sand sifting into my shoes and wrote, preserving the essence for a later composition. Another time as I rode an ocean ferry, I dug in my bag for a piece of paper, wanting to capture the feelings evoked by the salt-flavored spray and the squawking, dipping seagulls overhead.

In reality, writers who take their work serious soon discover the process of writing encompasses several spaces beyond that of the physical. A writer's thoughts, memories, experiences, are places to visit as we draw from the landscapes of our minds for inspiration. In those rooms behind the multitudinous doors of our memories, are cached images and words, awaiting to resurface and inspire our writing. As we browse the storerooms of our mind, our space broadens to include the remembrances of the past. As those long-forgotten voices and incidents are recollected, our space expands.

But, we aren't limited to our own past experiences and memories; we can enter the space of anyone else who has ever inhabited this earth with the simple act of reading a book. Every book whose pages we explore expands the boundaries of our own limited experiences. We can expand our space to include places we’ll never visit in our lifetime, become familiar with lifestyles different from ours, get to know with intimacy people who live on the opposite side of the world or in a different time and culture. All time and space restrictions are dissolved within the world of books. We can travel eons backward into the past, perhaps even eavesdrop on a conversation between Romeo and Juliet, or forward into a future yet to come such as the one Orson Scott Card created in his Ender's Game. The reading of books are the ultimate "space expander", enticing us into worlds that can provide every writer with inspiration to last a lifetime or longer.

By now you've begun to comprehend we writers consider the world, past present future, near or distant, our writing space. With every breath a writer breathes, with every thought a reader thinks, we indwell the writer's space. The key is to always have that pad and pencil close at hand.