Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  In his memoir On Writing, King compares fiction writing to “creative sleep,” and his writing routine to getting ready for bed each night:

  Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.

  Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943)

  “I really am incapable of discipline,” Robinson told The Paris Review in 2008.

  I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don’t feel like writing, I absolutely don’t feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can’t say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there’s not something on my mind that I really want to write about, I tend to write something that I hate. And that depresses me. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to live through the time it takes for it to go up the chimney. Maybe it’s a question of discipline, maybe temperament, who knows?

  Not surprisingly, Robinson does not stick to a particular writing schedule—but she does use her frequent sleeplessness to her advantage. “I have benevolent insomnia,” she said. “I wake up, and my mind is preternaturally clear. The world is quiet. I can read or write. It seems like stolen time. It seems like I have a twenty-eight-hour day.”

  Saul Bellow (1915–2005)

  “Someone once called me a bureaucrat (among writers) because my self-discipline seemed excessive,” Bellow told an interviewer in 1964. “It seemed excessive to me too.” Bellow wrote every day, beginning early in the morning and breaking off around lunchtime. In his 2000 biography, James Atlas described the novelist’s working habits in the 1970s, when he was living in Chicago and writing the novel Humboldt’s Gift:

  Rising promptly at six o’clock in the morning, he would fortify himself with two cups of strong coffee heated in a pan and get down to work. From his window, he looked out at a university playing field and, in the distance, the spires of Rockefeller Chapel. Often still in his ragged striped bathrobe when the typist arrived, he would sit down in a chair beside her and dictate from the notes he’d accumulated the night before—up to twenty pages a day. Like Dickens, who wrote his books with company in the living room, Bellow thrived on chaos. In the midst of composition, he fielded phone calls from editors and travel agents, friends and students; stood on his head to restore concentration; bantered with his son Daniel when he was staying at the house. He generally broke off at noon, did thirty push-ups, and had a simple lunch of tuna salad or smoked white-fish, accompanied—if the work had gone well—by a glass of wine or a shot of gin.

  In a 1968 letter, Bellow gave a more succinct description of his routine. “I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night,” he wrote. “Like Abe Lincoln.”

  Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

  Richter wakes at 6:15 every morning, makes breakfast for his family, and takes his daughter to school at 7:20. He’s in his backyard studio by 8:00, and he stays there until 1:00. Then he eats the lunch laid out for him in the dining room by the housekeeper: yogurt, tomatoes, bread, olive oil, and chamomile tea. After lunch, he goes back to the studio and works into the evening—although he admits that it’s not all focused work. “I go to the studio every day, but I don’t paint every day,” he told a reporter in 2002.

  I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don’t paint until finally I can’t stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don’t want to talk about it, because I don’t want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

  Jonathan Franzen (b. 1959)

  Shortly after graduating from college, Franzen married his girlfriend, also an aspiring novelist, and the pair settled down to work in classic starving-artist fashion. They found an apartment outside Boston for $300 a month, stocked up on ten-pound bags of rice and enormous packages of frozen chicken, and allowed themselves to eat out only once a year, on their anniversary. When their savings ran out, Franzen got a weekend job as a research assistant at Harvard University’s seismology department, which paid the bills for them both. Five days a week, the couple wrote for eight hours a day, ate dinner, and then read for four or five more hours. “I was frantically driven,” Franzen said. “I got up after breakfast, sat down at the desk and worked till dark, basically. One of us would work in the dining room, and the kitchen was interposed, and then the bedroom was on the other side. It was workable, for newlyweds.” It wasn’t workable forever. Eventually the marriage dissolved, in part due to the lopsidedness of their creative venture: as Franzen’s first two books came out to positive reviews, his wife’s first manuscript failed to find a publisher and her second one stalled midway.

  But Franzen’s subsequent literary efforts didn’t come any easier. To force himself to concentrate on his 2001 novel, The Corrections, he would seal himself in his Harlem studio with the blinds drawn and the lights off, sitting before the computer keyboard wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold. It still took him four years, and thousands of discarded pages, to complete the book. “I was in such a harmful pattern,” he told a reporter afterward. “In a way, it would begin on a Friday, when I would realize what I’d been working on all week was bad. I would polish it all day to bring up the gloss, until by four in the afternoon I’d have to admit it was bad. Between five and six, I’d get drunk on vodka—shot glasses. Then have dinner, much too late, consumed with a sick sense of failure. I hated myself the entire time.”

  Maira Kalman (b. 1949)

  The New York illustrator, artist, and designer wakes up early, about 6:00 A.M., makes the bed, and reads the obituaries. Then she goes for a walk with a friend, returns home to eat breakfast, and—if she’s on deadline—heads to her studio, in the same building as her apartment. “I have no phone, or email, no food or anything to distract [in the studio],” she said in a recent e-mail. “I have music and work. There is a green chaise there if a nap is needed. And in the late afternoon it is often needed.”

  If she is bored being alone in the studio, Kalman will head to a café to listen to the buzz of conversation, take the subway to a museum, or go for a walk through Central Park. “I procrastinate just the right amount,” she said. “There are things which help me get in the mood to work. Cleaning for one. Ironing is great. Taking a walk is always inspiring. Because my work is often based on what I see, I am happy to keep collecting and changing images until the last moment.”

  Sometimes Kalman doesn’t go into the studio for days at a time. On working days, she is done by 6:00 P.M. She never works at night. “It will appear like a calm existence,” Kalman said. “The turmoil is invisible.”

  Georges Simenon (1903-1939)

  Simenon was one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century, publishing 425 books in his career, including more than 200 works of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, as well as 220 novels in his own name and three volumes of autobiography. Remarkably, he didn’t write every day. The Belgian-French novelist worked in intense bursts of literary activity, each lasting two or three weeks, separated by weeks or months of no writing at all.

  Even during his productive weeks, Simenon didn’t write for very long each day. His typical schedule was to wake at 6:00 A.M., pr
ocure coffee, and write from 6:30 to 9:30. Then he would go for a long walk, eat lunch at 12:30, and take a one-hour nap. In the afternoon he spent time with his children and took another walk before dinner, television, and bed at 10:00 P.M.

  Simenon liked to portray himself as a methodical writing machine—he could compose up to eighty typed pages in a session, making virtually no revisions after the fact—but he did have his share of superstitious behaviors. No one ever saw him working; the “Do Not Disturb” sign he hung on his door was to be taken seriously. He insisted on wearing the same clothes throughout the composition of each novel. He kept tranquilizers in his shirt pocket, in case he needed to ease the anxiety that beset him at the beginning of each new book. And he weighed himself before and after every book, estimating that each one cost him nearly a liter and a half of sweat.

  Georges Simenon steps into his home office in Paris. The “Do Not Disturb” was to be taken seriously. (photo credit 159.1)

  Simenon’s astonishing literary productivity was matched, or even surpassed, in one other area of his daily life—his sexual appetite. “Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically,” Patrick Marnham notes in his biography of the writer. “Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work.” When living in Paris, Simenon frequently slept with four different women in the same day. He estimated that he bedded ten thousand women in his life. (His second wife disagreed, putting the total closer to twelve hundred.) He explained his sexual hunger as the result of “extreme curiosity” about the opposite sex: “Women have always been exceptional people for me whom I have vainly tried to understand. It has been a lifelong, ceaseless quest. And how could I have created dozens, perhaps hundreds, of female characters in my novels if I had not experienced those adventures which lasted for two hours or ten minutes?”

  Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)

  “I work all the time,” the evolutionary biologist and writer told an interviewer in 1991.

  I work every day. I work weekends, I work nights.… [S]ome people looking at that from the outside might use that modern term “workaholic,” or might see this as obsessive or destructive. But it’s not work to me, it’s just what I do, that’s my life. I also spend a lot of time with my family, and I sing, and go to ball games, and you can find me in my season seat at Fenway Park as often as—well, I don’t mean I have a one-dimensional life. But I basically do work all the time. I don’t watch television. But it’s not work, it’s not work, it’s my life. It’s what I do. It’s what I like to do.

  Asked to account for his formidable work ethic, Gould said he thinks it’s ultimately a question of temperament—“some odd and inextricable mixture of lucky accidents of birth and inheritance and an encouraging environment.”

  You have to have high levels of bodily energy and not everybody has it. I’m not physically strong, but I have very great intellectual energy, I always have. I’ve been able to work all day. I don’t have to get up and get a drink of water or watch TV for half an hour. I can literally sit and work all day once I get going, not everybody can do that. It’s not a moral issue. Some people seem to see that as a moral question. It isn’t. It’s a question of body type and temperament and energy levels. I don’t know what makes us what we are.

  Bernard Malamud (1914-1936)

  The novelist and short-story writer was, in the words of his biographer, Philip Davis, a “time-haunted man.” Malamud’s daughter remembers him being “absolutely, compulsively prompt” throughout his life, and notes that he could become extremely agitated when made late. This obsessive punctuality served him well as a writer. Although he made his living as a teacher for most of his life, Malamud always found time to write and apparently never lacked for discipline. “Discipline is an ideal for the self,” he once said. “If you have to discipline yourself to achieve art, you discipline yourself.”

  Malamud began writing seriously in 1940, when he was twenty-six, and soon after landed a job teaching night school in Brooklyn. His classes were from 6:00 until 10:00 in the evening, so he was able to write for five hours during the day, typically between 10:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. with a break at 12:30 to eat lunch, shave, and read for an hour. After eight years of this schedule, Malamud accepted a university teaching position in Oregon, moving there in 1949 with his wife and their young son. At the time, he had yet even to sell a story. But over the next dozen years he wrote four books, thanks in part to a favorable teaching schedule. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were devoted to classes, office hours, and grading papers; Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Malamud spent on his novels and short stories (“and I sneak parts of Sundays,” he said).

  On writing days in Oregon, Malamud rose at 7:30, exercised for ten minutes, ate breakfast, and arrived at his office by 9:00. A full morning of writing usually amounted to only a page, two at best. After lunch, he revised the morning’s output, then returned home around 4:00. A short nap preceded domestic activities: dinner at 6:15, conversation with the family, help with the children’s homework. After the kids went to sleep, Malamud read for three hours—he usually spent half the time on fiction, half on nonfiction connected to his stories and novels—before going to sleep at midnight.

  Although he was a creature of habit, Malamud was wary of placing too much importance on his particular work rituals. He told an interviewer:

  There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

  A Note About the Author

  Mason Currey was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Currey’s writing has appeared in Slate, Metropolis, and Print, where he is an editor. He lives in Brooklyn.

  For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My first debt is to the hundreds of writers and editors whose works I consulted for this collection; without their original scholarship, this book would have been impossible. In addition, several creative professionals took time out of their busy schedules to answer my questions about their routines and working habits (and, in the end, I was unable to include all of their contributions). I am grateful to them for their generosity.

  This book may never have happened without my agent, Megan Thompson, who e-mailed me out of the blue, convinced me that my Daily Routines blog could be a successful book, and found a perfect home for it at Knopf. Her colleagues Sandy Hodgman and Molly Reese have been extremely helpful along the way. I would also like to thank Laurence Kirshbaum for his support.

  At Knopf, I was fortunate to have Victoria Wilson as my editor. She gave me the freedom to do this book exactly as I wanted to but then did not let it move forward until it met her high standards. The results are greatly improved by her good judgment. Her colleagues Carmen Johnson and Daniel Schwartz took care of countless details with unflagging patience and aplomb. Many thanks to the jacket designer, Jason Booher; the text designer, Maggie Hinders; and the production editor, Victoria Pearson.

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to Martin Pedersen, who helped me hang on to my day job and did me the great kindness of constantly asking how the book was coming along. Belinda Lanks, James Ryerson, and Michael Silverberg were among the first people to see the Daily Routines blog, and their enthusiasm and suggestions were vital to its success. Many readers of the blog also wrote with leads, some of which proved invaluable; I was lucky to have such an intelligent and engaged audience. Lindy Hess gave me advice on the publishing business. Stephen Kozlowski lent his superior eye for the author
photo.

  All of my friends and family have been incredibly encouraging during this long process. I would particularly like to thank my mom; my dad; my stepmom, Barbee; and my brother, Andrew, for their total, unwavering support. Finally, my own daily routine would be very dull without my wife, Rebecca, who is a constant source of joy and inspiration.

  NOTES

  For each entry in the book, I have provided reference information for my source or sources, keyed to the subject’s name. When there are multiple sources, I have listed them in approximate order of their importance—that is, in how much I relied upon them for the entry. After that, I have also provided the exact location of all quotes and a number of specific details and assertions. I hope that this will make it easy for readers to find more information on particular subjects’ routines, habits, quirks, and foibles.

  1. “Who can unravel”: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Ecco, 2005), 88.

  2. “Tell me what”: Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (1949; repr. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999), 3.

  3. “free our minds”: Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 121.