The Hedgehog Cafe: A Haven For Writers And Bookworms

When do I go to a café? When I’m feeling down, and when I’m feeling elated. When I want to be with my friends; when I want to be alone. When I want to spend time with my crush; when I’m nursing a broken heart. When I feel famished; when I want to just hover over a cup of hot coffee.

And of course, when I want to read; or when I want to write- like Hemingway, who used to frequent a café called La Closerie des Lilas, established in 1847 and which prides in calling itself Hemingway’s home café, with a steak named after him. When this story became a legend, during the 1920s, Americans would flock to Paris, where the cafes of Montparnasse had played the main role in la vie de bohème for authors like Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, all vying to write as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. So, will writing in a café make you a writer? It’s as good as asking whether standing in a garage will make you a car. Of course not.

But there is a reason this myth of cafes producing writers has earned its stripes, one on the top being, that there is this something about such transitional spaces, which provides you with a sense of freedom that sets the mind wandering in just the right speed- directionless, but like scribbling, holding amazing promise in its shapeless womb. This proves right, more so when you are in the drafting phase of your writing.

Once sitting in a café, I overheard a client and her lawyer talk about the former’s divorce. There are people wooing someone or complaining about another and yet some fawning over a cricketer or a new singer, around you. This chance of an “encounter to the unknown” opens up another window along with a chance of meeting or observing absolute strangers, which can be manna to a writer. On the other hand, writing from home or an office continuously has been reported to be lonely and alienating.

However, these chance encounters that add spice to the work of the writer also has a flip-side; that of distraction and an attack on your already short attention span. But, because you know you have a possibility of a distraction, you take that extra effort to keep focused, which as a reverse psychology works. Though home or offices sound like the perfect work environment, their unrestricted silence and uninterrupted solitude breed more distraction. Coffee shops filled with other busy people typing away on laptops or flipping through books, on the other hand, provide a structure and sometimes, a silent social pressure, which pushes you to milk your creative juices.

So, which café, do you think we will recommend for budding writers? A café, in which so many authors surround you that they are bound to rub off their creativity on you- The Hedgehog Café.

Ernest Hemingway wrote in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, “It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.” If you have been to The Hedgehog Café, you may be forgiven to think he was talking about this café.

Happy writing.