Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods. This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” Ironically, James himself was a chronic procrastinator and could never stick to a regular schedule (see this page).

“Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

I often thought of a line from a letter Kafka sent to his beloved Felice Bauer in 1912. Frustrated by his cramped living situation and his deadening day job, he complained, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” Poor Kafka! But then who among us can expect to live a pleasant, straightforward life? For most of us, much of the time, it is a slog, and Kafka’s subtle maneuvers are not so much a last resort as an ideal. Here’s to wriggling through.

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995)

When she later moved to France, Highsmith had to get around the prohibition against bringing live snails into the country. So she smuggled them in, making multiple trips across the border with six to ten of the creatures hidden under each breast.

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007)

“I have been working all the time,” he said, “and it’s like a flood going through the landscape of your soul. It’s good because it takes away a lot. It’s cleansing. If I hadn’t been at work all the time, I would have been a lunatic.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

Benjamin Franklin’s ideal daily routine, from his autobiography (photo credit 13.1)

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)

Trollope managed to produce forty-seven novels and sixteen other books by dint of an unvarying early-morning writing session.

All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

to write with my watch before me, and to require of myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Then, at 9:00, Mann closed the door to his study, making himself unavailable for visitors, telephone calls, or family.

The children were strictly forbidden to make any noise between 9:00 and noon, Mann’s prime writing hours. It was then that his mind was freshest, and Mann placed tremendous pressure on himself to get things down during that time. “Every passage becomes a ‘passage,’ ” he wrote, “every adjective a decision.” Anything that didn’t come by noon would have to wait until the next day, so he forced himself to “clench the teeth and take one slow step at a time.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

(When his seventeen-year-old nephew once refused a cigarette, Freud told him, “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.”)

Carl Jung (1875-1961)

Jung was not shy about taking time off; “I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,” he said.)

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein confirmed that she had never been able to write much more than half an hour a day—but added, “If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.”

Ernest Hemingway (1399-1961)

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

Henry Miller (1891-1980)

“I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.”

Two or three hours in the morning were enough for him, although he stressed the importance of keeping regular hours in order to cultivate a daily creative rhythm.

“I know that to sustain these true moments of insight one has to be highly disciplined, lead a...

F. Scott Fitzgerald (...

The real writing usually happened in brief bursts of concentrated activity, during which he could manage seven thousand or eight thousand words in one session. This method worked pretty well for short stories, which Fitzgerald preferred to compose in a spontaneous manner.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early ’40s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10:00 A.M. and midnight—a personal record.) “I write when the spirit moves me,” Faulkner said, “and the spirit moves me every day.”

Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process,” Morrison said. “For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

Chuck Close (b. 1940)

“Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

John Adams (b. 1947)

“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,” Adams said in a recent interview. “Because creativity, particularly the kind of work I do—which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music—is just, it’s very labor-intensive.

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990)

The founder of behavioral psychology treated his daily writing sessions much like a laboratory experiment, conditioning himself to write every morning with a pair of self-reinforcing behaviors: he started and stopped by the buzz of a timer, and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph.

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)

the author of the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—spent thirteen hours a day in his study, beginning at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. (He noted in his diary, “I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave very early.”)

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience—indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty. And at the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims—a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life.

William James (1842–1910)

“Recollect,” he wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.”

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

James Joyce (1882–1941)

All in all, he wrote, “I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20,000 hours in writing Ulysses.”

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)