Writing in Coffee Shops

What to Write

I’ve written five novels in coffee shops. I’ve written dozens of short stories in coffee shops. I’ve written a few poems in coffee shops. I’ve written a few hundred articles and blog posts in coffee shops. Coffee shops are great places to write.

However, you may not know what you want to write; you just want to write…in a coffee shop. And that’s cool.

This is where mindless writing comes in as deus ex machina to save your writing urge at the last minute. If you really want to write in a coffee shop just because the beautiful idea of it somehow attracts you, then do it…just for the hell of it.

Go to your coffee shop, sit down with a steaming cup of coffee and think of something that happened during the day. It might have been an argument with your spouse, or something that happened at work. It might be something you saw in the news that caught your interest. It might be a thought you had sometime that day.

Whatever you have on your mind that can be written on a piece of paper, entered on your laptop or phone…anything. Write about it. Mindlessly. In a coffee shop. Then you’ll be a coffee shop writer.

BTW, someone once asked me if you can call yourself a writer if you’ve never been published. The answer: If you’re writing, you’re a writer.

Publishing in a Coffee Shop

If you publish (or post) what you’ve written at the coffee shop while you’re still there, you need to do some serious self-editing (unless you carry an editor around in your pocket). This isn’t as much a big deal if you’re posting to a personal blog as it is when you post to a professional site either for money or as part of your extra curricular work…and, if you have any pride at all, you’ll want even your personal blog or website to carry the best writing possible.

It may not be a professional editing job, but sending something out with no editing at all shows a lack of respect for your own creation, so how can you expect anyone else to respect it or even read it?

Stumbling through paragraph after paragraph of spelling mistakes, typos and senseless sentences isn’t my idea of enjoyable reading. If there’s more than two mistakes in the first paragraph, I stop reading. You don’t have to be a grammar expert to do basic editing…you just have take a short break before publishing and then carefully read (don’t skim) what you’ve written.

And get this…you’re a writer, so you should be able to read intelligently. Look for sentences that may have been corrupted when you re-wrote something as you were writing. Look for fine-tuning points like: did you use it’s when it should have been its; did you write your when it should have been you’re? These are mistakes that undermine your credibility as a writer and mark you as an amateur.

Pay attention to your spell check…both ways. Sometimes the spellcheck will find things you missed and sometimes you’ll find things that the spell check got entirely wrong, especially when it comes to sentence construction.

Ideally, you won’t publish a piece the same day you write it. The best scenario is to schedule your writing so that you know what you’re going to write over a period of a week or more and you write each piece a day or two before publication. This isn’t always possible. I spent a month in 2014 taking a picture each day and writing something inspired by the image. Sometimes I finished minutes before the deadline and had to publish without editing. In this case, I re-read the piece the day after and made edits. It’s best to do this as early in the day as possible given that most people read blogs later in the day.

And that’s it. This is pretty much all you need to know about writing in coffee shops…and maybe a little too much. I hope you’ve enjoyed these articles and I wish you great success with your coffee shop writing.