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Yeats always made sure to write for at least two hours every day, whether he felt inclined to it or not. This daily discipline was crucial for Yeats both because his concentration faltered without a regular schedule—“
the job seemed to suit Stevens’s temperament and even encourage his poetry. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me,” he once said. “It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life. I am just as free as I want to be and of course I have nothing to worry about about money.” Stevens was an early riser—he woke at 6:00 every morning to read for two hours—and unfailingly punctual in his work habits. He arrived at the office at 9:00 A.M. sharp and left at 4:30. Between work and home he walked, a distance of three or four miles each way.
Amis said that he writes every weekday, driving himself to an office less than a mile from his London apartment. He keeps business hours but generally writes for only a small portion of that time.
When he’s not shooting a film, most of Allen’s creative energy goes toward mentally working out the problems of a new story. This is the hard part; once he’s satisfied with the story elements, the writing itself comes easy (and the filmmaking is mostly a chore). But to get the story right requires “obsessive thinking,” Allen has said.
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.
his 2006 book, Catching the Big Fish. “I meditate once in the morning and again in the afternoon, for about twenty minutes each time. Then I go about the business of my day.” If he’s shooting a film, he will sometimes sneak in a third session at the end of the day.
Maya Angelou (b. 1928) Angelou has never been able to write at home. “I try to keep home very pretty,” she has said, “and I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.” As a result, she has always worked in hotel or motel rooms, the more anonymous the better.
I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine. I keep a hotel room in which I do my work—a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin.
He was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year. It was better to work every day. “Like the pugilist,” Gershwin said, “the songwriter must always keep in training.”
after Catch-22. In a 1975 interview he described his process: “I wrote for two or three hours in the morning, then went to a gym to work out. I’d have lunch alone at a counter, go back to the apartment and work some more. Sometimes I’d lie down and just think about the book all afternoon—daydream, if you will. In the evenings I’d often go out to dinner with friends.”
“I write very slowly, though if I write a page or two a day five days a week, that’s 300 pages a year and it does add up.”
Years earlier, a writing instructor had advised O’Connor to set aside a certain number of hours each day to write, and she had taken his advice to heart; back in Georgia she came to believe, as she wrote to a friend, that “routine is a condition of survival.”
“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.”
Listening to music was a key part of this transition: “I often have to play music for an hour in order to feel exalted enough to face the act of composing,” he said. By 4:00 he was ready to move to his study for his daily four hours, which would typically yield only about two hundred or three hundred words.
I have had in my little study in Connecticut all these years that famous line from Flaubert tacked to my wall: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I believe it.
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) Wodehouse wrote more than ninety books in his career, continuing to work daily even in his last decade.
The eighty-nine-year-old author rose each day at 7:30 sharp and stepped out onto the back porch for the “daily dozen” series of calisthenic exercises, which he had performed every day since they were introduced in the United States in 1919. Then, his wife still asleep upstairs, Wodehouse fixed himself toast, coffee cake, and tea and, as he ate, read what he called a “breakfast book”—a mystery novel by someone like Ngaio Marsh or Rex Stout, or a light, humorous book. Afterward, he smoked a pipe, took a short walk with the dogs, and, by 9:00, settled down to work.
Lunch at home was followed, at about 2:00, with another walk—Wodehouse’s neighbor and longtime friend Guy Bolton would pick him up and they would take an hour’s constitutional, with the dogs in tow.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) 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 rose each day at about 7:00 A.M., ate a breakfast of bread and butter, and took his morning walk, meditating as he walked, until 10:00. Then, returning to his chamber, he would record the minutes of his thoughts on a sheet of paper pasted to an inch-thick square lapboard. Dinner was served precisely at 11:00 A.M. (In his old age, Hobbes gave up wine and meat, and ate fish daily.)
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) According to a childhood friend, Schubert “used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o’clock and compose straight through until 1 o’clock in the afternoon.
On summer afternoons, he often went for long walks in the countryside surrounding Vienna, then enjoyed a glass of beer or wine with friends.
Later in the afternoon, Liszt took a long nap of two hours or more—to make up, in part, for his sleepless nights, which he spent pacing his room and sitting at the piano or writing.
Hugo provided handsomely for his guests but ate little himself. After lunch he embarked on a two-hour walk or performed a series of strenuous exercises on the beach.
He rose at 7:00, had breakfast at 8:00, and was in his study by 9:00. He stayed there until 2:00, taking a brief break for lunch with his family, during which he often seemed to be in a trance,
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
The first, and best, of his work periods began at 8:00 A.M., after Darwin had taken a short walk and had a solitary breakfast. Following ninety minutes of focused work in his study—disrupted
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) “I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.”
After lunch he went for a long walk, regardless of the weather. His brother writes, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health,
Tchaikovsky’s superstition may have been justified—his walks were essential to his creativity, and he often stopped to jot down ideas that he would later flesh out at the piano.
N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945) The American painter and illustrator woke at 5:00 A.M. every day and chopped wood until 6:30. Then, “fortified by grapefruit, eggs, pancakes, and coffee,” the biographer David Michaelis writes, Wyeth climbed the hill to his studio. Before painting he liked to settle his breakfast by writing a letter,
If the work wasn’t going well, Wyeth would tape a piece of cardboard to the side of his glasses, blocking his view of the studio’s large north window in an effort to improve his concentration.
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.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) “I like to get up when the dawn comes,” O’Keeffe told an interviewer in 1966. “The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.” Living in the New Mexico desert,
O’Keeffe’s last meal of the day was a light supper at 4:30 in the afternoon—she ate early in order to leave plenty of time for an evening drive through her beloved countryside.
The Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—who reinvented himself as Le Corbusier in the early 1920s—maintained a rigid schedule throughout his professional life, yet it was hardly a punishing one. After waking at 6:00 A.M., he did forty-five minutes of calisthenics. Then he served his wife her morning coffee and, at 8:00, the couple ate breakfast together. The rest of Corbusier’s morning was devoted to painting, drawing, and writing. This was the most creative part of his day,
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.
the British essayist and short-story
Following a bath, Pritchett finally “clocked on” to work in his study, a steep climb to the fourth floor of the house, far from the noise of the London streets below.
For much of his career, Updike rented a small office above a restaurant in downtown Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he would write for three or four hours each morning, netting about three pages per day.
But I’ve never been a night writer, unlike some of my colleagues, and I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. So, I try to be a regular sort of fellow—much like a dentist drilling his teeth every morning—except Sunday, I don’t work on Sunday,
A solid routine, he added, “saves you from giving up.”
I always have a pencil and paper by my bed, I do not use light, but start writing immediately in the dark if I feel something is streaming through me. It has become a habit and I have no difficulty in deciphering my writing in the morning.
he would seize on whatever flashes of inspiration came to him, scribbling them down immediately on scraps of paper. Later, he would spread his slips of paper out on a table, sifting through them for clues to a story or character.
Oliver Sacks (b. 1933)
I get up around 5 A.M. or so—not out of virtue, but because this is the way my sleep-wake cycle goes. Twice a week, I visit my analyst at 6 A.M., as I have been doing for forty years. Then I go for a swim. Swimming gets me going as nothing else can, and I need to do it at the start of the day, otherwise I will be deflected by busyness or laziness.
I sometimes fall asleep, or into a deep reverie, lying on my couch, and this may put my brain in an “idling” or “default” mode. I let it play with images and thoughts on its own; I come to from these altered states, if I am lucky, with energy renewed and confused thoughts clarified.
I keep a notebook by my bed for memories of dreams, or night thoughts—many unexpected thoughts seem to come in the middle of the night.
By automatically getting up and getting into the cab every morning, she avoids the question of whether or not she feels like going to the gym; the ritual is one less thing for her to think about, as well as “a friendly reminder that I’m doing the right thing.” But the 5:30 cab is only one item in her “arsenal of routines.”
Stephen King (b. 1947) King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30. Some days he finishes up as early as 11:30, but more often it takes him until about 1:30 to meet his goal.
