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I don’t pretend to answer these questions in the following pages—probably some of them can’t be answered, or can be resolved only individually, in shaky personal compromises
A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.
In reality, most of the people in this book are somewhere in the middle—committed to daily work but never entirely confident of their progress; always wary of the one off day that undoes the streak.
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition,”
“There is no real life except in working, that is to say in the imagination,” she wrote in her journal.
“Do you know what moviemaking is?” Bergman asked in a 1964 interview. “Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you’re lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don’t come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you’re going to get your good ten minutes this time.”
When he did find the time to compose, Feldman employed a strategy that John Cage taught him—it was “the most important advice anybody ever gave me,” Feldman told a lecture audience in 1984. “He said that it’s a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop and then copy it. Because while you’re copying it, you’re thinking about it, and it’s giving you other ideas.
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. But then, he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours,—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas.
always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases.…
“After all,” as he wrote years later, “work is still the best way of escaping from life!”
The children were strictly forbidden to make any noise between 9:00 and noon, Mann’s prime writing hours.
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.”
“I cannot imagine life without work as really comfortable,” Freud wrote to a friend in 1910.
“I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,”
“At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself,” Jung wrote. “… I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”
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.”
You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until that next day that is hard to get through.
As he got older, though, he found that anything after noon was unnecessary and even counterproductive. As he told one interviewer, “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 disciplined life,” he said.
When he enlisted in the army in 1917 and was sent to training camp in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the barely twenty-one-year-old Princeton dropout composed a 120,000-word novel in only three months.
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. “Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to the length,” he once explained. “The three-jump story should be done in three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes.”
“I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
“Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”
“In an ideal world, I would work six hours a day, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon,” Close said recently.
Sometimes I could go back and work in the evening, but basically it was counterproductive. At a certain point, I’d start making enough mistakes that I would spend the next day trying to correct them.
Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,”
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.
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.
Generally, three hours of composition were the most he could manage in a day, although he would do less demanding tasks—writing letters, copying scores, practicing the piano—in the afternoon.
If he felt blocked, the composer might execute a brief headstand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.”
The scholar Roger Shattuck once proposed that Satie’s unique sense of musical beat, and his appreciation of “the possibility of variation within repetition,” could be traced to this “endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day.”
“That’s why painters live so long,” he said. “While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque.”
I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be down here [in the living room] and at an impasse and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me. The shower is particularly good in cold weather. This sounds so silly, but I’ll be working dressed as I am and I’ll want to get into the shower for
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(For Falling-water, perhaps the most famous residence of the twentieth century, Wright didn’t begin the drawings until the client called to say he was getting in the car and would be arriving for their meeting in a little more than two hours.)
(“I don’t approve of people who watch television,” he said, “but I am one of them.”)
“routine is a condition of survival.”
but her usual nighttime reading was a seven-hundred-page volume of Thomas Aquinas. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she said.
“Let’s face it, writing is hell,” Styron told The Paris Review in 1954. “I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day.”
A good doctor isn’t in a battle with his work; a good writer is locked in a battle with his work. In most professions there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. With writing, it’s always beginning again.
Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but the English philosopher’s own experience was very nearly the opposite: he lived a long, productive, and mostly peaceful life, dying in bed at age ninety-one.
Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, and he made sure not to overexert himself.
Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.”
As a result, Darwin maintained a quiet, monkish life at Down House, with his day structured around a few concentrated bursts of work, broken up by set periods of walking, napping, reading, and letter writing.
Wyeth almost never worked under artificial light, so the daylight hours were precious to him. He hated to stop at the end of the day, often wishing he could start the next day immediately. “It’s the hardest work in the world to try not to work!” he said.
The rest of Corbusier’s morning was devoted to painting, drawing, and writing. This was the most creative part of his day, and even though he often spent hours on paintings that had no direct relation to his architecture, and which he showed to no one other than his wife, he attributed his professional success to these private mornings of artistic contemplation.
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.
“I hate commitments, obligations and working under pressure,” he wrote to his editor. “But on the other hand, I like getting paid in advance and I only work under pressure.”
“The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer’s life, as to a professor’s life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don’t do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
