Scott Adkins Helps Writers Hone Their Craft | Big Think

Scott Adkins Helps Writers Hone Their Craft

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The playwright on creating the Brooklyn Writers Space.

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Scott Adkins:

Scott Adkins is the co-founder of the Brooklyn Writers Space, Room 58 and Sock Monkey Press. The Brooklyn Writers Space is a shared writing space for writers in Brooklyn. It opened in 2003 and has served over 600 writers in Brooklyn. Room 58 opened May 2007 and is designed for journalists. Sock Monkey Press publishes The Reader, an anthology grown from the Brooklyn Writers Space Reading Series. He hosts the monthly Brooklyn Writers Space Reading Series at Book Court. He is a writer with an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. His work has appeared in many venues in the New York downtown theater scene. From 1996 – 2002 he worked for Scudder Stevens, and Clark which became Zurich Investments and finally became Deutsche Bank. He started as a temp and then became the E-Business Manager (VP) from 1999-2002 for the Scudder Offshore Funds and Threadneedle Investments (UK).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What inspired you to create the Brooklyn Writers Space?

Scott Adkins: Well, my wife and I had a child, our first son, and we realized that working at home and in the apartment wasn’t going to work for us anymore. So we needed a place to work and a friend of ours told us about The Writers Room, which is the first space of this kind I think in New York City that was made and we went over and talked to them about it and realized that the waiting list was way too long. At that time it was two and a half years to actually get accepted into the space. So, we talked to them and asked them what they thought about us starting up the similar space in Brooklyn and they responded very positively and said that would be great because of their waiting list. It would actually alleviate the pressure for them. So that was the inspiration.

Also, I had just lost my job, I’d been severed from a corporation. I was working for a financial company and I had started there as a temp and then very slowly the golden cage built up around me and I had been feeling trapped and complacent at the same time so it’s difficult to have the motivation or initiative to leave the cage so they did it for me and that was a major inspiration. Once I left there then I started thinking about how I wanted my day to be structured and what I would like to do. And so, it became sort of a great union in terms of creating the space, making that sort of the thing that occupied me to provide some sort of income and also having a space for us to make our creative work and to be surrounded by an incredible community of writers which has been an unbelievable inspiration that’s been totally amazing.

Question: What is the writer’s community like at the Writers Space?

Scott Adkins: It’s a fascinating experience.It’s as diverse as there are many kinds of writers. And some people don’t like to talk to anybody at the Writers Space but they will talk about how amazing it is to actually sit in a room with twenty other people working together and typing out their work and you sort of get this buzz, this undercurrent of energy even though someone might be playing solitare next to you. Well it doesn’t matter because you sort of project that they are doing this amazing work. It becomes this motivator for you to work really hard and in that sense you’re still solitary because you can’t see anybody in our space but you can feel them. And that’s a great experience. And then there’s another group of people who like to take breaks and they’ll come out until lunch and talk to other people and work things out verbally or vent about the current political things or whatever, whatever is on their mind and, and have great discussions about that and heated debate sometimes, and then they’ll go back and get to work on their fiction or their autobiography or whatever.

Question: How does the Brooklyn Writers Space foster creativity?

Scott Adkins: We try to keep a consistent environment as much as possible and I think that’s the key: allowing people to know what to expect when they come into this space.

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