Hey,

I’m fascinated with the daily routines of successful artists, and how wildly different they can be.

Some keep going until inspiration runs dry. But others work by the clock, or until they hit a certain number of words or pages, or get to the end of a chapter, or finally nail a tricky scene.

Dickens was one who religiously stuck to a schedule – whether he was having a good day and pumping out 4,000 words, or a bad one and producing nearly nothing, he stayed at his writing desk from 9:00am until 2:00pm without fail, after which he would commence a three hour walk where he ruminated on his WIP. Hemingway urged leaving something in the tank instead, to stop at a point where you knew what was going to happen next – and that way you could be sure you would keep going the next day.

Some authors have gone further and suggested stopping mid-sentence so that dreaded writer’s block had no chance the following morning. A hardy few like Beckett and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace have even ended a book mid-sentence, although whether that was because they had hit their word count, or it was five o’clock somewhere, is lost to the sands of time.

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Famous Routines

Robert Rauschenberg couldn't get to work without having a triple espresso and watching The Young and the Restless. Louise Bourgeois wouldn't start her day without her prized sugar high from eating jam straight out of the jar… although she devoted her mornings to prep and only got creative after lunch.

Beethoven was said to be another exacting caffeine fiend, grinding exactly sixty beans for his morning fix. But David Lynch tops them all, going to Bob’s Big Boy after the lunch rush for seven straight years, pairing a sweet chocolate shake with six or seven cups of sugar-filled coffee, downing them one after another, and then filling a table full of napkins scrawled over with ideas, until the rush finally faded.

Maya Angelou liked to write in a hotel room, but never sleep there. Balthus had his studio in another village - which he walked to every day after a leisurely breakfast, if he felt the light was just right – and before he even touched the canvas, he would meditate in front of it for hours, chain-smoking the entire time. Picasso was another who would stand before his work for hours before commencing, and that after rolling out of bed at some point during the afternoon.

Whereas Joan Miró couldn’t get to his brushes quickly enough – desperate to keep depression at bay – rising at 6am every morning, then racing through breakfast, painting without a break until noon, only stopping to swim, jog, box, or jump rope.

Less active was Truman Capote, who could only work lying down – either in bed or stretched out on a couch – and always wrote his first two drafts longhand, with a pencil. Haruki Murakami can’t wait to get up each day and had several hours in the bank before most people opened their eyes – penning the first drafts in English rather than Japanese, trying to force himself to write in a simpler style. Joseph Heller wrote in the evenings instead, partly as an escape from the awful quality of American television. And Kafka wrote late at night – starting at 11pm and sometimes not finishing until after sunrise.

Eminem brings notebooks with him everywhere… except the studio, where he instinctively draws from the well that his incessant scribblings have filled. On the other hand, Jay-Z writes nothing down, simply improvising the lyrics on the spot, after running the beat through his head for fifteen minutes, while lying on a couch, humming aloud the entire time.

Martin Amis swore by restricting himself to two solid hours of proper, focused work each day. Matisse painted seven days a week. John Updike only worked weekdays and only in the mornings, which he felt helped him stick with it on the duller days. But Tolstoy had to write every single day or felt he’d never get anything finished –only after scoffing a couple of boiled eggs from a glass.

Vonnegut always wrote first thing, even before eating breakfast. Jane Austen preferred to start each day on the piano. But WH Auden liked getting his mind going with the crossword instead.

William Gibson mowed the lawn when he got stuck. Hillary Mantel jumps in the shower when she hits a wall. Dan Brown got even more creative in his early days, hanging upside down in a pair of gravity boots when he got stuck creating his first puzzles within puzzles.

Tchaikovsky felt the real trick was patience, however, that inspiration comes to those who truly master themselves. Barbara Kingsolver certainly seems to have mastered herself as she has the opposite problem: “For me, discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.”

Joan Didion learned to write by carting around a typewriter as a teenager and copying out her favorite columns to “learn how the sentences worked.” Bradbury told beginning writers to pen a short story every week for a year instead of first tackling a novel – on the basis that anyone could write a bad novel, but it was simply impossible to write fifty-two bad stories in a row. Steinback recommended never looking back on anything you had written, until the draft was done.

Toni Morrison has an ideal writing routine “which she has never experienced.” Jack Kerouac loaded his typewriter with a 120-foot-long sheet of paper so he could work uninterrupted. But the last word must go to EB White, who set himself up in a passageway in his house to remind himself that one cannot wait for perfect conditions to commence writing.

Each artist found a mode which worked for them. And then they doubled down. As with writing, as with selling.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Teleman with Cristina.