Read Daily Rituals: How Artists Work Online
Authors: Mason Currey
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Biography, #Writing, #Art, #History
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (14 page)
(1865–1939)
In 1912, Yeats described his routine in a letter to his fellow poet Edwin Ellis: “
I read from 10 to 11. I write from 11 till 2, then after lunch I read till 3:30. Then I go into the woods or fish in the lake till 5. Then I write letters or work a little till 7 when I go out for an hour before dinner.”
According to another literary friend, 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—“
Every change upsets my never very resolute habits of work”—and because he worked at a snail’s pace. “
I am a very slow writer,” he noted in 1899.
“I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” This meant that a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took 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.”
(1879–1955)
In 1916, when he was thirty-six years old, Stevens accepted a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed as an insurance lawyer until his death. Far from stifling his creativity, 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. Most days, he took an additional hour-long walk on his lunch break. It was on these walks that he composed his poetry, stopping now and then to scribble lines on one of the half-dozen or so envelopes he always had stuffed in his pocket. At work, too, he would occasionally pause to
write down fragments of poems, which he kept filed in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, and he would routinely hand his secretary these various scraps of verse for typing. Although his colleagues were aware of his poetry, Stevens assiduously avoided talking about it, preferring to maintain the face of a mild-mannered, somewhat aloof businessman in all his public dealings with the world.
(1922–1995)
“Do you have a daily routine?” an interviewer asked Amis in 1975.
Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a
cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”
As he reached his seventies,
Amis’s routine shifted somewhat, with the drinking taking a more prominent role even as he continued to write daily. He would rise a little before 8:00, shower and shave, eat breakfast (grapefruit, cereal, banana, tea), read the newspaper, and sit down in his study by about 9:30. Picking up where he left off the previous evening—he always made sure to stop writing when he knew what would come next, making it easier to begin the next day—Amis would work at his typewriter for a few hours, shooting for his minimum daily requirement of five hundred words, which he usually managed by 12:30. Then a taxi would take him to the pub or to the all-male Garrick Club, where he would have his first drink of the day (a Macallan malt with a splash of water). He might have one drink before lunch, or he might have two or three. Then there was wine with lunch, followed by coffee, and, perhaps, a glass or two of claret or burgundy.
All this over—it’s now somewhere between 3:15 and 3:45—Amis took a taxi back home for a thirty-minute nap in his favorite armchair. Then he returned to his study for a final stint at the typewriter, beginning at 5:00 and lasting for an hour or two. With his writing day now over, Amis poured himself another Scotch-and-water and settled down to watch his favorite television programs
before dinner with the family, followed by more television or perhaps a video. Amis’s final Scotch-and-water came at about 11:00; it would last him until half-past midnight, when some sleeping pills would finally put him out. If he woke in the middle of the night with a full bladder, he needn’t travel all the way to the bathroom; he kept a bucket by the bed for just these occasions.
(b. 1949)
Unlike his father, Martin Amis does not approach his writing with a feeling of dread: “I seldom have that kind of squeamishness,” he told
The Paris Review
in 1998. 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. “Everyone assumes I’m a systematic and nose-to-the-grindstone kind of person,” he said. “But to me it seems like a part-time job, really, in that writing from eleven to one continuously is a very good day’s work. Then you can read or play tennis or snooker. Two hours. I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.”
(b. 1932)
The Italian philosopher and novelist—who is perhaps best known for his first novel,
The Name of the Rose
, published
when he was forty-eight years old—claims that he follows no set writing routine. “There is no rule,” he said in 2008. “For me it would be impossible to have a schedule. It can happen that I start writing at seven o’clock in the morning and I finish at three o’clock at night, stopping only to eat a sandwich. Sometimes I don’t feel the need to write at all.” When pressed by the interviewer, however, Eco admitted that his writing habits are not always so variable.
If I am in my countryside home, at the top of the hills of Montefeltro, then I have a certain routine. I turn on my computer, I look at my e-mails, I start reading something, and then I write until the afternoon. Later I go to the village, where I have a glass at the bar and read the newspaper. I come back home and I watch TV or a DVD in the evening until eleven, and then I work a little more until one or two o’clock in the morning. There I have a certain routine because I am not interrupted. When I am in Milan or at the university, I am not master of my own time—there is always somebody else deciding what I should do.
Even without blocks of free time, however, Eco says that he is able to be productive during the brief “interstices” in the day. He told
The Paris Review
’s interviewer: “This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.”
(b. 1935)
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. To keep from getting stuck in a rut, he’s developed a few reliable tricks.
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 a creative stint. So I’ll take off some of my clothes and make myself an English muffin or something and try to give myself a little chill so I want to get in the shower. I’ll stand there with steaming hot water coming down for thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, just thinking out ideas and working on plot. Then I get out and dry myself and dress and then flop down on the bed and think there.
Going out for a walk works just as well, although Allen can no longer walk the streets without being recognized and approached, which ruins his concentration. He’ll often pace the terrace of his apartment as a substitute. And he uses any little free moments in the day to return to the story he’s working on. “
I think in the cracks all the time,” he has said. “I never stop.”
(b. 1946)
“
I like things to be orderly,” Lynch told a reporter in 1990.
For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee—with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.
Lynch’s other means of getting ideas is Transcendental Meditation, which he has practiced daily since 1973. “
I have never missed a meditation in thirty-three years,” he wrote in 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. “
We waste so much time on other things, anyway,” he writes. “Once you add this and have a routine, it fits in very naturally.”
(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. She described her routine in a 1983 interview:
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. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon. If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvelous. I edit while I’m working. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind. I shower, prepare dinner, so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work. We have a semblance of a normal life. We have a drink together and have dinner. Maybe after dinner I’ll read to him what I’ve written that day. He doesn’t comment. I don’t invite comments from anyone but my editor, but hearing it aloud is good. Sometimes I hear the dissonance; then I try to straighten it out in the morning.
Maya Angelou at work, 1974
(
photo credit 78.1
)
In this manner, Angelou has managed to write not only her acclaimed series of autobiographies but numerous poems, plays, lectures, articles, and television scripts. Sometimes the intensity of the work brings on strange physical reactions—her back goes out, her knees swell, and her eyelids once swelled completely shut. Still, she enjoys pushing herself to the limits of her ability. “
I have always got to be the best,” she has said. “I’m absolutely compulsive, I admit it. I don’t see that’s a negative.”