Victor Hugo, the 19th-century author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, struggled so hard to get words out of his head and onto the page that in order to motivate himself, he instructed his servant to lock him naked inside the bathroom each morning with nothing but a candle, quill, ink, and paper. When he had ‘darkened the page’ sufficiently to pass three pages of writing underneath the bathroom door, his servant would let him out and help him to dress and begin the day.
