Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  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.

  Martin Amis (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.”

  Umberto Eco (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.”

  Woody Allen (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.”

  David Lynch (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.”

  Maya Angelou (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.”

  George Balanchine (1904–1983)

  Balanchine liked to do his own laundry. “When I’m ironing, that’s when I do most of my work,” he once said. The choreographer rose early, before 6:00 A.M., made a pot of tea, and read a little or played a hand of Russian solitaire while he gathered his thoughts. Then he did his ironing for the day (he did his own washing too, in a portable machine in his Manhattan apartment) and, between 7:30 and 8:00, phoned his longtime assistant for a rundown of the day’s schedule. Most weekdays he would make the five-minute walk from his apartment to Lincoln Center, where he kept an office in the State Theater. He often taught a class there at 11:00, then spent the better part of the afternoon in the rehearsal studio, choreographing his latest ballet. The work went slowly; two hours of rehearsal might amount to only two minutes of actual ballet on stage. But Balanchine never lacked for inspiration. “My muse must come to me on union time,” he said.

  Al Hirschfeld (1903–2003)

  The great American caricaturist—who immortalized virtually all of the major Broadway and Hollywood stars of his era—continued to work right up to his death, at age ninety-nine, driving himself from his uptown Manhattan brownstone to the theater district most nights (and finding a parking spot on the street), using a system of personal shorthand to create preliminary sketches in the dark, and turning those sketches into finished drawings in his studio the next day. In 1999, Mel Gussow described Hirschfeld’s habits as a nonagenarian artist:

  In his 90s, he continues his daily routine, working a full day in his studio, breaking only for lunch and having tea at his worktable (with a supply of caramels for snacks). Except for the telephone, he remains isolated and seldom breaks his regimen to go out to eat or to a museum. Evenings are reserved for theatergoing and socializing. When he is not at the theater, he is usually having dinner at home with friends. After the theater, if he does not go to an opening night party, he is home in time to watch the news and Nightline on television. Then he reads from midnight to two, favoring philosophical works, often rereading Thoreau or Bertrand Russell.

  Al Hirschfeld at home, New York City, 1998 (photo credit 80.1)

  According to his second wife, Hirschfeld even worked on his drawings in his sleep. “Very often, when an assignment is difficult, he can’t fall asleep until the artistic problem is solved, or he dreams about various ways of designing his drawing,” she wrote in 1999. “Now that’s what I call a hard worker! Even his subconscious doesn’t give him any time off. The next morning, holding onto that dream, he rises at first light and races to his drawing board to jot down all those nocturnal notions. In his youth, he was called ‘the flash,’ which still describes not only his working habits, but how quickly he finds a parking space.”

  Truman Capote (1924–1984)

  “I am a completely horizontal author,” Capote told The Paris Review in 1957. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched out on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.” Capote typically wrote for four hours during the day, then revised his work in the evenings or the next morning, eventually doing two longhand versions in pencil before typing up a final copy. (Even the typing was done in bed, with the typewriter balanced on his knees.)

  Writing in bed was the least of Capote’s superstitions. He couldn’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray at once, and if he was a guest at someone’s house, he would stuff the butts in his pocket rather than overfill the tray. He couldn’t begin or end anything on a Friday. And he compulsively added numbers in his head, refusing to dial a telephone number or accept a hotel room if the digits made a sum he considered unlucky. “It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t,” he said. “But I derive some curious comfort from obeying these primitive concepts.”

  Richard Wright (1908–1960)

  Wright wrote the first draft of Native Son in 1938, completing 576 pages in a mere five months. Thanks to a program of the New York Writers’ Project, he was getting paid to work on his fiction full-time; he had only to sign in at the Project’s Midtown office once a week to continue collecting his stipend.

  At the time, he was living in the Brooklyn apartment of the Newton family, whom he had befriended years earlier in Chicago. Herbert Newton was a prominent black Communist busy with Party duties; he left the house at about 9:00 A.M. and did not come home until late. His wife, Jane, stayed home with their three children. As Hazel Rowley details in her 2001 biography, Wright got up by 6:00 A.M. and promptly left the house, to avoid the domestic chaos that erupted when the Newton children woke. Carrying his writing supplies—a yellow legal pad, a fountain pen, and a bottle of ink—Wright walked to nearby Fort Greene Park, where he would install himself on a bench at the top of the hill and write for four hours.

  He stuck to this routine in all weather, returning to the apartment at 10:00 A.M.—on rainy days, dripping wet from sitting outside—for breakfast and to read his morning’s work to Jane Newton. With the kids clamoring about them, they would discuss new developments in the plot, sometimes arguing about the direction Wright wanted to take the book. Then Wright would head upstairs to his bedroom to type what he had written in the morning. Afterward he visited the public library or saw friends, sometimes returning to the apartment for a 5:00 P.M. supper with Jane and the children. When, after six months, the family moved to a new apartment, Wright went with them, holing up in a back bedroom to revise his manuscript, working as many as fifteen hours a day. “I never intend to work that long and hard again,” he wrote to a friend.

  H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)

  Mencken’s routine was simple: work for twelve or fourteen hours a day, every day, and in the late evening, enjoy a drink and conversation. This was his lifestyle as a young bachelor—when he belonged to a drinking club and often met his fellow members at a saloon after work—and it hardly changed when he got married, at age fifty, to a fellow writer. Then the couple worked for three or four hours in the morning, ate lunch, took naps, worked for another few hours, ate dinner, and returned to work until 10:00, when they would meet in the drawing room to talk and have a drink.

  Mencken typically divided his working day as follows: reading manuscripts and answering mail in the morning (he replied to every letter he received on the same day, firing off at least one hundred thousand missives in his life), editorial chores in the afternoon, and concentrated writing in the evening. Unbelievably, he claimed to have a lazy temperament. “Like most men, I am lazy by nature and seize every opportunity to loaf,” he wrote in a 1932 letter. But this only made him work harder; believing that he was inclined to indolence, Mencken didn’t allow himself the luxury of free time. His compulsiveness meant that he was astonishingly productive throughout his life—and yet, at age sixty-four, he could nevertheless write, “Looking back over a life of hard work … my only regret is that I didn’t work even harder.”

  Philip Larkin (1922–1985)

  “I work all day, and get half drunk at night,” Larkin wrote in his 1977 poem “Aubade.” A few years later he described his real-life (and not so dissimilar) routine to The Paris Review:

  My life is as simple as I can make
it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time—some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next. Or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

  Larkin worked as a librarian for almost his entire adult life, realizing early on that he would never be able to make a living from his writing alone. “I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare time, like Trollope,” he said. Although he admitted to wondering what would have happened had he been able to write full-time, he also thought that two hours of composition in the evenings, after dinner and the dishes, was plenty: “After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on.”

  Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)

  A friend of Wright’s once observed that as long as she had known him, the architect seemed to spend the entire day doing everything but actually working on his building designs. He held meetings, took phone calls, answered letters, supervised students—but was rarely seen at the drafting table. The friend wanted to know: When did Wright conceive the ideas and make the sketches for his buildings? “Between 4 and 7 o’clock in the morning,” he told her. “I go to sleep promptly when I go to bed. Then I wake up around 4 and can’t sleep. But my mind’s clear, so I get up and work for three or four hours. Then I go to bed for another nap.” During the afternoon he would often take an additional nap, lying down on a thinly padded wooden bench or even a concrete ledge; the uncomfortable perch, he said, prevented him from oversleeping.