Whine. Whirr. Bang! It must be Sunday morning. 9am and my neighbour is at it again with his lawn mower. For him, it’s the middle of the day. Never mind the poor author next door (me) who’s been writing into the small hours and needs his sleep.

Rural bliss? I’d trade it for a building site in Greenwich.

It’s not the traditional country noises that offend me. I yearn to hear the susurration of larks, lambs and tolling bells. No. It’s the tractors, leaf blowers, shooting parties and kiddies in laybys playing rap CDs. They kill the Muse as fast as gout.

What can I do? Move back to London? No. You need to sell a country estate nowadays to buy a garage in Dulwich. Rent a desk at my local library? No. Since the Silence notices were taken down, to avoid offending kiddies, libraries have become noise fests of music and popcorn.

There’s only one remedy left, isn’t there? Apply for the post of Poet in Residence at the Muckle Flugga lighthouse (right), the most desolate spot in Britain? No. My wife would object to hanging her laundry above the North Sea. Too many seagulls.

Let’s be serious.

Here are seven tested ways to find your own perfect writing retreat and get away from it all, for a long, long while. (Well, somebody must have tested them.)
  • Strand yourself on a desert island. Take with you La Récherche du Temps Perdu. Translate it into Klingon.
  • Take up speleology. Sit 500 foot below ground and shout ‘Yo, ho, ho!’ up a pothole.
  • Fulfil your lifetime dream to read Finnegan’s Wake on an ice floe.
  • Paraglide low across Jefferson Airforce Base, without air traffic clearance.
  • Lock yourself in the cellar. Build the Mt Rushmore Memorial out of Silly Putty. Talk to it.
  • Kiss your sweetheart on a public street in Abu Dhabi.
  • Book a walking holiday in North Korea.

No. Let’s get really serious.

Buy an insulated garden shed (aka office), lined thickly with cork. Proust had one and, immediately, became inscrutable. You can spend twelve years in there and write twelve novels. That’s not quite time enough for a literary agent to respond to your first submission, of course, so best make it twenty years.

For me, this idea is very timely. My wife and I are about to move to a village so obscure it doesn’t even feature on Google maps. To confuse visitors still further, I’ll give out my address as Yeoman House, Little Miching, OH ZZZ, UK.
BTW: That’s a serious tip. If you’re an author who wants to stay legal with PayPal and the like, but you don’t want readers to drop in without appointment (yes, it happens), append your name simply to your postcode. Or zipcode. In rural areas, at least, the mailman will find you. No one else will.
We’ll turn the lawn into a Zen garden of little gnomes, sand and pebbles. No more mowing! And John will have his own shed aka folly. A beer cooler at one end, a coffee percolator at the other, religious stained glass in the window and a big mirror on the wall. So wherever I look, I’ll see a saint.

If I don’t write a New York Times best seller there, my name’s not John Yeoman.

Well, that’s my dream of a writer’s retreat. Total silence. Total seclusion. And a plaster gnome in the garden if I need a copy editor. What’s yours?

What sort of conditions do you like to write in?

Some writers - I’ll concede it - enjoy a background buzz. Music in both ears. A sitcom on the telly. My children used to do their homework that way and, as they now earn more than I do, it must work.

Many authors demand fetishes or sacred props. Rex Stout banged out most of his Nero Wolf novels on the same 1927 Underwood manual typewriter, a machine so old that by the 1970s he had trouble getting ribbons for it. Isaac Asimov typed the last of his 500+ books on a cranky IBM Selectric, though he lived into the age of word processors and was very tech-savvy.

All writers use yellow legal pads. Don’t we? Plus fountain pens with purple ink. And we jot our ideas on pink file cards so they’re always to hand in our pants pockets. (Don’t scoff. One of my Academy writing students does exactly that and his work is awesome. So is his laundry bill.)

Do you compose straight into the laptop or on paper first? Sitting down, standing up or even jogging? Russell Blake made $1.5 million last year by hacking out a ‘novel’ every five weeks, using a laptop strapped to a gym treadmill. He wrote as he jogged. Hence the term ‘treadmill author’.

Maybe a treadmill is his fetish? (No, it's money.)

It’s a truism that 'the author creates a world for readers to live in and then readers create a world for the author to live in' ~ Yeo-tze. (Is it worth a tweet?) But first, the author must create a world that they can write in.

What’s your writing world?

Peaceful or strident? Can you write effectively in any environment - a restaurant, train or lurching taxi cab - or must you have a locus amoenus, a beautiful place, a secluded haven?

Is your perfect writing haven:

1. A loo with a view?
2. A hammock beside a beer cooler?
3. A place where the children (or your spouse) can't come, even if they bring you chocolate?
4. None of these?

What writing places, tools or fetishes spur your creativity? What tips have you found for getting your creative tides into full flood? Please leave a comment here and share your thoughts! Every comment is guaranteed a fast, helpful reply.