Status Updates From Daily Rituals: How Artists ...

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.

Day 62: Dmitry Shostakovich. "I always found it amazing that he never needed to try things out on the piano," his younger sister recalled. "He just sat down, wrote out whatever he heard in his head, and then played it through complete on the piano." But this was preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he "appeared to be a man of great inner tensions."

Day 61: TS Eliot. "I am sojourning among the termites."