Recently, a famous writer posted a photo of Charles Dickens's desk on display at the New York Public Library. Looking at the photo I got the same feeling as when I'd seen Donald Bradman's bats in glass cases at the Bradman Museum in Adelaide: how could such vast achievement have ensued from such a small piece of crafted wood? The Don's bats are actually really small, little bigger than the size of bat recommended today for 11-year-olds, and probably much lighter than the heavy clubs all the little wannabe Carlos Brathwaites tote around nowadays. Clearly, the short and wiry Catholic boy from New South Wales depended totally on footwork, timing and wrist-work for his cascade of runs, the muscle and zip being largely provided by the hapless bowlers. In comparison, Dickens's desk can't be said to be really small, and it clearly weighs a bit, with all those drawers and the rampart of wood around the writing area. In other photographs, taken at the desk's actual home in Dickens's study in London, the desk becomes even bigger with the entourage of the well-appointed room and the view from the bay widow that it faces. Nevertheless, the piece still gives off a sense of something that is too small for the tasks ascribed to it, of punching well above its weight.

This, perhaps, is the difference between writing and many of the other arts. Theatre and dance can be rehearsed in small or big venues, but a minimum amount of space is required for a team of bodies to move around; musicians, too, can play in quite intimate joints, but again, for a performance, a minimum amount of acoustically imical space would seem necessary; film-makers need studios, sets or actual locations; photographers are different but, again, there is a certain relationship between space and practice, even in this post-darkroom era; painters and sculptors can cuddle up to small desks as well as writers, but again, some of them need aircraft-hangar sized studios to execute their work; contemporary and conceptual artists are another species altogether and needn't concern us here.

Writing though, is a strange and elusive creature, so much of it is done in the mind but then again, only so much of it can be done in the mind. At some point, the actual act of writing needs to take place, the downloading of words and ideas onto a physical receptacle, whether paper or computer screen; these words need to line up in sequences that can be recognized by other humans; words which the writer herself can read; these readings and re-readings which then start a fight or a negotiation with other words still remaining in the writer's mind, or with new ones that start to come together in his mind, incited by the ones that have already escaped, the words on the page sometimes waving madly like refugees who've reached the shore, encouraging the rest of their tribe to embark on the dinghies and risk the perilous crossing. Of course, there is always collateral damage in these crossings: many words fall out of the boats and never make it, or the succeeding batches that make it ashore ungratefully and ruthlessly push many of the earlier arrivals back into the water, sending them off to drown under the Delete key.

Now, what is endlessly fascinating to me are the various processes and contexts in which writers manage to produce. I suspect I'm not the only writer who is fascinated by the daily text-ablutions of my fellow species. Many writers, especially those writing fiction, actually like to peek, not over the shoulders of other writers, whether dead, contemporaneously alive or imaginary, to see how, but rather where they produce their stuff. I suspect this is because writing is perhaps the only art that doesn't involve doing something interesting and difficult with your body. Again, painters and sculptors actually need to make stuff with their hands, photographers are forever crouching and bending and getting back pains, theatre directors need to shift positions in relation to the rehearsing actors, film directors are veritable hives of activity, looking through camera, shouting at art directors, cajoling actors, sulking showily with editors and so on. Writers, on the other hand, are fundamentally absurd beings - they sit (or stand) (or lie down) and write; they either use a pencil or a pen, or some kind of typing instrument, or, much more rarely, some voice-to-text method involving a recording device such as a dictaphone or a stenographer. This absurd existence, so hard to differentiate from simple idleness, breeds its own self-fascination, where the small quirks of other fellow-writers expand like pungent spices in the mind.

Therefore somebody has a little notebook in which they scribble (in fact, there are many legendary writers now connected to little hardbound notebooks, enough of them to create an absurdly priced but very lucrative brand of said notebook). Others travel from London to Paris to pick up a specific kind of handmade khata without which they cannot create deathless prose. Yet others need the booster rocket of alcohol - Cheever needed x number of martinis, Capote needed some other booze (and to lie in bed) (like Proust), Duras used to finish five bottles of wine every single day, (red wine, French, since you asked) (it's alright, she died at 81 after producing a huge amount of work, some of it quite good). Then, of course, there are locations, oh the locations! The study, of course, with a view of the Himalayas, or overlooking a Buenos Aires park, or a bend in the Rhine; the café, surrounded by babbling Parisian intellectuals, in Edinburgh with a wailing baby in a pram or, well, a bar, actually, populated by gun-toting pimps and murderers; the little hole in the wall in Gobordanga where there is only space for books, a bed and an ashtray; the little hut in the Yorkshire woods with invisible loved ones leaving food in the outside room; the woman who could only write on a moving train; the man who could only write in a jail cell; the man who needs to shut himself in an apartment without telephone or the internet; the woman who can only write in hotel rooms; a writer I know - he knows who he is - has bravely produced large chunks of his work while squeezed into too-small airliner seats as he burns up the earth's atmosphere for his day job.

Asking someone where they like to write, or at what time, after having eaten or drunk what, sometimes feels like those naughty questions glossy magazines ask celebrities about where all they've had sex and in what positions: you're not actually supposed to answer, the joy is in watching the answering party sidestep disrobement in this verbal striptease. Some writers are spoilsports, though, and reply quite directly: 'I get up in the morning. I have a shower and breakfast. Then I sit at my desk and write from 9 am till 5 pm, with a short break for a light lunch. My desk overlooks a parking lot.'

No, the one thing that most of the serious writers agree about is that writing is not, by itself, fun. It's difficult, and it can be boring as well. A lot of writers avoid it for as long as possible, basically till the point where not approaching the writing becomes more painful than the act of writing. Releasing yourself from scriberly cunctations into the dreaded act itself is often attached to the phrase 'out of the frying pan and into the fire'.

What the photographs of writers' desks, or indeed the many images of people like Tagore or Tolstoy at their desks, don't (and cannot) convey are the struggles a writer goes though. The image of a Michelangelo chiselling away furiously or a Van Gogh painting in a storm or a Tansen creating an actual storm with his singing, all lend themselves to filmic mythologizing. The kind of internal wear and tear a writer goes through is fundamentally anti-visual, and sometimes it seems that the only way to convey the pain and perils of writing is through writing itself. Perhaps this is why writers turn into nosey detectives, picking up the clues of location, context, the grain of the wood on the desk and such like, in order to map their own invisible turbulences through those of others.