"I always think they're showing off, and probably they're not typing anything; they're just hitting the keyboard."

The writers' shared workspace:

Paragraph and the Writers Junction are part of a growing number of members-only centers springing up in writerly metropolises like New York, Boston and Los Angeles. For $100 a month, on average, members secure the right to a desk, a lamp and a power strip in a shared space where they can ply their trade day and night.

Ms. Parisi compares writers' rooms to gyms. In both, a large group of people share the same equipment. And, paying for membership helps writers take their commitment to writing seriously, she said, and gets them "off of the couch" and onto the literary StairMaster....

And like exercise buffs, the writers who use these spaces need to be self-motivated and disciplined. "The concept of writers as drunken Hemingwayesque malcontents traveling the globe is over," Ms. Cecil said. "They see it as a job now, and they see themselves not as inspired alcoholics, or depressive psychopaths alone in a tenement. It's more mainstream. It's good kids going to M.F.A. programs, then looking for a place to find the kind of writerly community they had in grad school."...

You might think that a writer surrounded by dozens of direct competitors tapping away at the Great American Novel would find his creative juices frozen, not freed. But the playwright Kirk Wood Bromley, a member of the Brooklyn space, says he finds the atmosphere bracing. "I think writers get jazzed by writing in a room with other writers," he said. "Writing is a very competitive art."

Another Brooklyn member, the novelist Lisa Selin Davis, was less jazzed. "I hear people typing and I freak out," she said. "I think: 'They're typing so fast. Why aren't I?' And then you've got the loud typists, and I always think they're showing off, and probably they're not typing anything; they're just hitting the keyboard."

There is something about being surrounded by other people working that can make you feel that what you are trying to do is real. But then there is that way that you can get alienated all over again, where you feel that all the others are doing something real, and you're the fake, and maybe they can tell. And then there's just that $100 a month you're spending. That could be an incentive, but it could also haunt you and worry you and make you feel that you owe your writing to some boss, but you're really that boss, who's paid for you, so you'd better get cracking. And then you can fritter away even more hard-bought time wondering if this really is the way an artist ought to live. But, then, didn't you set yourself up here to overcome procrastination? Oh, why don't you just think about that for a while?