Status Updates From Daily Rituals: How Artists ...

Day 71: WB Yeats. “I am a very slow writer. I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” So, a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took Yeats about three months of hard labor. Fortunately, Yeats was not so careful about his other writing, like the literary criticism he did to earn extra money. “One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”

Day 70: Louis Armstrong. “It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off.… I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.”

Day 69: John Cheever. “I must convince myself that writing is not, for a man of my disposition, a self-destructive vocation,” he wrote in his journal in 1968. “I hope and think it is not, but I am not genuinely sure.”

Day 68: Sylvia Plath. She wrote to her mother in October 1962, four months before she would take her own life, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” The darkness and ache in her poetry is felt. It functions like a dagger through one's heart, especially the self-reports of her mood from the times just before she took her life.

Day 67: Joseph Cornell. The solitary artist's life.

Day 66: Graham Greene. At one point he was writing 2000+ words every morning, working on two books at a time. But by the time he reached his sixties, he was no longer as ambitious about his daily writing goals. In 1968, an interviewer asked if he was “a nine-to-five man.” “No,” Greene replied. “Good heaven, I would say I was a nine-to-a-quarter-past-ten man.” He became content with just 200 words each morning.

Day 65: Somerset Maugham. “When you’re writing, when you’re creating a character, it’s with you constantly, you’re preoccupied with it, it’s alive,” he said, adding that when you “cut that out of your life, it’s a rather lonely life.”

Day 64: Agatha Christie. Even after she had written ten books, Christie didn’t really consider herself a “bona fide author.” When filling out forms that asked for her occupation, it never occurred to her to put down anything other than “married woman.” “I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write.”

Day 63: Henry Green. Green led a double life. He was born and lived his working life as an aristocrat, under the covers he wrote with a different name, and with originality.