Daily Rituals: How Artists Work Page 5

  Ernest Hemingway (1399-1961)

  Throughout his adult life Hemingway rose early, at 5:30 or 6:00, woken by the first light of day. This was true even when he had been up late drinking the night before; his son Gregory recalled that the author seemed immune to hangovers: “My father would always look great, as if he’d slept a baby’s sleep in a soundproof room with his eyes covered by black patches.” In a 1958 interview with The Paris Review, Hemingway explained the importance of those early-morning hours:

  When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until that next day that is hard to get through.

  Contrary to popular lore, Hemingway did not begin each session by sharpening twenty number-two pencils—“I don’t think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time,” he told The Paris Review—but he did have his share of writing idiosyncrasies. He wrote standing up, facing a chest-high bookshelf with a typewriter on top, and on top of that a wooden reading board. First drafts were composed in pencil on onionskin typewriter paper laid slantwise across the board; when the work was going well, Hemingway would remove the board and shift to the typewriter. He tracked his daily word output on a chart—“so as not to kid myself,” he said. When the writing wasn’t going well, he would often knock off the fiction and answer letters, which gave him a welcome break from “the awful responsibility of writing”—or, as he sometimes called it, “the responsibility of awful writing.”

  Henry Miller (1891-1980)

  As a young novelist, Miller frequently wrote from midnight until dawn—until he realized that he was really a morning person. Living in Paris in the early 1930s, Miller shifted his writing time, working from breakfast to lunch, taking a nap, then writing again through the afternoon and sometimes into the night. As he got older, though, he found that anything after noon was unnecessary and even counterproductive. As he told one interviewer, “I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.” Two or three hours in the morning were enough for him, although he stressed the importance of keeping regular hours in order to cultivate a daily creative rhythm. “I know that to sustain these true moments of insight one has to be highly disciplined, lead a disciplined life,” he said.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

  At the outset of his literary career, Fitzgerald demonstrated remarkable self-discipline. When he enlisted in the army in 1917 and was sent to training camp in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the barely twenty-one-year-old Princeton dropout composed a 120,000-word novel in only three months. He initially worked during evening study periods, scribbling on a pad of paper concealed behind a copy of Small Problems for Infantry; when that ruse was detected, Fitzgerald switched to the weekends, writing in the officer’s club from 1:00 P.M. to midnight on Saturdays and from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. on Sundays. By early 1918, he had mailed off the manuscript that would eventually become, with major revisions, This Side of Paradise.

  But in his post-military writing life, Fitzgerald always had trouble sticking to a regular schedule. Living in Paris in 1925, he generally rose at 11:00 A.M. and tried to start writing at 5:00 P.M., working on and off until 3:30 in the morning. In reality, however, many of his nights were spent on the town, making the rounds of the cafés with Zelda. The real writing usually happened in brief bursts of concentrated activity, during which he could manage seven thousand or eight thousand words in one session. This method worked pretty well for short stories, which Fitzgerald preferred to compose in a spontaneous manner. “Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to the length,” he once explained. “The three-jump story should be done in three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes.”

  Novels were trickier, especially since Fitzgerald increasingly believed that alcohol was essential to his creative process. (He preferred straight gin—it worked fast and was, he thought, difficult to detect on one’s breath.) When he was working on Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald tried to reserve a portion of each day for sober composition. But he went on regular binges and later admitted to his editor that alcohol had interfered with the novel. “It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor,” he wrote.

  William Faulkner (1897-1962)

  Faulkner usually wrote best in the morning, although throughout his life he was able to adapt to various schedules as necessary. He wrote As I Lay Dying in the afternoons before clocking in on the night shift as a supervisor at a university power plant. He found the nocturnal schedule easy enough to manage: he would sleep in the morning for a few hours, write all afternoon, visit his mother for coffee on the way to work, and take catnaps throughout his undemanding shift.

  This was 1929. In the summer of 1930, the Faulkners purchased a large, dilapidated family estate, and Faulkner quit his job in order to repair the house and grounds. Then he would wake early, eat breakfast, and write at his desk all morning. (Faulkner liked to work in the library, and since the library door had no lock, he would remove the doorknob and take it with him.) After a noon lunch, he would continue repairs on the house and take a long walk or go horseback riding. In the evenings Faulkner and his wife would relax on the porch with a bottle of whiskey.

  As for the popular conception that Faulkner drank while writing, it’s unclear whether this is true. Several of his friends and acquaintances reported the habit, but his daughter emphatically denied it, insisting that he “always wrote when sober, and would drink afterwards.” In any case, he did not seem to need an inducement for his creativity. During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early ’40s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10:00 A.M. and midnight—a personal record.) “I write when the spirit moves me,” Faulkner said, “and the spirit moves me every day.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005)

  “I wish I had a routine for writing,” Miller told an interviewer in 1999. “I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That’s the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.”

  Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)

  The English composer and conductor hated the Romantic cliché of the creative artist waiting for inspiration to strike. He said in a 1967 television interview:

  That isn’t the way I work. I like working to an exact timetable. I often thank my stars that I had a rather conventional upbringing, that I went to a rather strict school where one was made to work. And I can without much difficulty sit down at nine o’clock in the morning and work straight through the morning until lunchtime, then in the afternoon letters—or, rather more important, is that I go for a walk, where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk. I then come back. After tea, up to my studio and work through until about eight o’clock. After dinner I usually find I’m too sleepy to do much more than read a little bit, and then go to bed rather early.

  I
n the morning Britten had a cold bath; in the evening, a hot one. In the summer he liked to swim, and he would play tennis on the weekends when he could. Around the house, he was hopeless. Britten’s longtime partner and collaborator, Peter Pears, remembers, “He could make a cup of tea, boil an egg and wash up, but not much more. If he made his bed, he usually made a mess of it.” Britten’s life was his work—a fact that alienated some of his colleagues over the years. “Functioning as a composer was his whole world,” Donald Mitchell recalled. “The creativity had to come first.… Everyone, including himself, had to be sacrificed to the creative act.”

  Ann Beattie (b. 1947)

  Beattie works best at night. “I really believe in day people and night people,” she told an interviewer in 1980.

  I really think people’s bodies are on different clocks. I even feel now like I just woke up and I’ve been awake for three or four hours. And I’ll feel this way until seven o’clock tonight when I’ll start to pick up and then by nine it will be O.K. to start writing. My favorite hours are from 12:00 to 3:00 A.M. for writing.

  She doesn’t write every night, however. “I really don’t adhere to schedules at all, and don’t have the slightest desire to do that,” she said. “The times that I’ve tried that, when I have been in a slump and I try to get out of it by saying, ‘Come on, Ann, sit down at that typewriter,’ I’ve gotten in a worse slump. It’s better if I just let it ride.” As a result, she often won’t write anything for months. “I’ve learned I can’t force it,” she said. But that doesn’t mean that she is able to relax and enjoy herself during these fallow periods; rather, she says it’s like having an almost permanent case of writer’s block. As she told an interviewer in 1998, “I certainly am a moody and, I would say, not very happy person.”

  Günter Grass (b. 1927)

  Asked if he writes during the day or at night, Grass seemed to shudder at the latter notion: “Never, never at night. I don’t believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it’s not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o’clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music. After breakfast I work, and then take a break for coffee in the afternoon. I start again and finish at seven o’clock in the evening.”

  Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)

  The playwright has struggled with chronic disorganization and procrastination throughout his career. He once noted that the only thing that really got him to write was fear—he had to get “frightened enough to discipline myself to the typewriter for successive bouts.” Then he would sit up all night writing and smoking, usually working in the kitchen while the rest of the household was asleep. His biographer, Ira Nadel, notes that Stoppard’s smoking habits were unusual as well: “An inveterate chain-smoker, he was notorious for stubbing out a cigarette after one or two puffs and then lighting another. This, he calculated, was equivalent to smoking with a very long filter.”

  At various times, Stoppard attempted to reform his “ineffectual inefficiency” as a writer; in the early 1980s he even succeeded in chaining himself to the desk from roughly 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. daily. But he gradually slipped back into old habits. In 1997, he told a reporter that he generally worked from midday to midnight, adding, “I never work in the mornings unless I’m in real trouble.”

  Haruki Murakami (b. 1949)

  When he is writing a novel, Murakami wakes at 4:00 A.M. and works for five to six hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), runs errands, reads, and listens to music; bedtime is 9:00. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

  Murakami has said that maintaining this repetition for the time required to complete a novel takes more than mental discipline: “Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” When he first hung out his shingle as a professional writer, in 1981, after several years running a small jazz club in Tokyo, he discovered that the sedentary lifestyle caused him to gain weight rapidly; he was also smoking as many as sixty cigarettes a day. He soon resolved to change his habits completely, moving with his wife to a rural area, quitting smoking, drinking less, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and fish. He also started running daily, a habit he has kept up for more than a quarter century.

  The one drawback to this self-made schedule, Murakami admitted in a 2008 essay, is that it doesn’t allow for much of a social life. “People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations,” he wrote. But he decided that the indispensable relationship in his life was with his readers. “My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist?”

  Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

  “I am not able to write regularly,” Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993. “I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.” Indeed, for much of her writing career, Morrison not only worked a day job—as an editor at Random House—but taught university literature courses and raised her two sons as a single parent. “It does seem hectic,” she admitted in 1977.

  But the important thing is that I don’t do anything else. I avoid the social life normally associated with publishing. I don’t go to the cocktail parties, I don’t give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can’t afford it. I brood, thinking of ideas, in the automobile when I’m driving to work or in the subway or when I’m mowing the lawn. By the time I get to the paper something’s there—I can produce.

  Morrison’s writing hours have varied over the years. In interviews in the 1970s and ’80s, she frequently mentions working on her fiction in the evenings. But by the ’90s, she had switched to the early morning hours, saying, “I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” For the morning writing, her ritual is to rise around 5:00, make coffee, and “watch the light come.” This last part is crucial. “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process,” Morrison said. “For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

  Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

  The famously prolific American writer—Oates has published more than fifty novels, thirty-six collections of short stories, and dozens of volumes of poetry, drama, and essays—generally writes from 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning until 1:00 P.M. Then she eats lunch and allows herself an afternoon break before resuming work from 4:00 P.M. until dinner at around 7:00. Sometimes she will continue writing after dinner, but more often she reads in the evening. Given the number of hours she spends at the desk, Oates has pointed out, her productivity is not really so remarkable. “I write and write and write, and rewrite, and even if I retain only a single page from a full day’s work, it is a single page, and these pages add up,” she told one interviewer. “As a result I have acquired the reputation over the years of being prolix when in fact I am measured against people who simply don’t work as hard or as long.” This doesn’t mean that she always finds the work pleasant or easy; the first several weeks of a new novel, Oates has said, are particularly difficult and demoralizing: “Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”

  Chuck Close (b. 1940)

  “In an ideal world, I would work six hours a day, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon,” Close said recently.

  That’s what I alw
ays liked to do. Especially since my kids were born. I used to work at night, but when my kids were born I couldn’t just work at night and sleep during the day. So that’s when I started having a kind of regular, nine-to-five work schedule. And if I work more than three hours at a time, I really start screwing up. So the idea is to work for three hours, break for lunch, go back and work for three hours, and then, you know, break. Sometimes I could go back and work in the evening, but basically it was counterproductive. At a certain point, I’d start making enough mistakes that I would spend the next day trying to correct them.

  Unfortunately, Close says, his life now has so many obligations that he is often unable to stick to this routine. (He tries to schedule all meetings and phone calls for after 4:00 P.M., but has found that this is not always possible.) When he does find the time to work, he never lacks for ideas. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.” While he paints, he likes to have the TV or the radio playing in the background—particularly if there’s a juicy political scandal happening. “My finest hours were Watergate, Iran-Contra, the impeachment,” he says. The constant chatter can be distracting, he admits, but he claims that this is actually a good thing: “I like a certain amount of distraction. It keeps me from being anxious. It keeps things at a little bit more of an arm’s length.”