Authors and Their Daily Routines: A Thread

[Anonymous No.19599068]

>James Joyce
“A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is how the Irish novelist once described himself. In his daily habits, at least, he was not given to self-control or even much regularity. Left to his own devices, Joyce would typically rise late in the morning and use the afternoon (when, he said, “the mind is at its best”) to write or to fulfill whatever professional obligations he might be under—often, teaching English or giving piano lessons to pay the bills. His evenings were spent socializing at cafés or restaurants, and they sometimes ended early the next morning with Joyce, who was proud of his tenor singing voice, belting out old Irish songs at the bar.

A more detailed glimpse of Joyce’s routine comes from 1910, when he was living in Trieste, Italy, with his wife, Nora, their two children, and his more responsible younger brother, Stanislaus, who bailed the family out of financial straits numerous times. Joyce was struggling to find a publisher for 'Dubliners,' and was teaching private piano lessons at home. The biographer Richard Ellmann describes his day:
>He woke about 10 o’clock, an hour or more after Stanislaus had breakfast and left the house. Nora gave him coffee and rolls in bed, and he lay there, as Eileen [his sister] described him, “smothered in his own thoughts” until about eleven o’clock. Sometimes his Polish tailor called, and would sit discoursing on the edge of the bed while Joyce listened and nodded. About eleven he rose, shaved, and sat down at the piano (which he was buying slowly and perilously on the installment plan). As often as not his singing and playing were interrupted by the arrival of a bill collector. Joyce was notified and asked what was to be done. “Let them all come in,” he would say resignedly, as if an army were at the door. The collector would come in, dun him with small success, then be skillfully steered off into a discussion of music or politics. That visit over, Joyce returned to the piano, until Nora interrupted. “Do you know there’s a lesson?” or “You’ve put on a filthy shirt again,” to which he would calmly reply, “I’ll not take it off.”
There was lunch at 1:00, followed by lessons from 2:00 until 7:00 or later. At the lessons, Joyce smoked long cheroots called Virginias; between pupils, he drank black coffee. About twice a week, Joyce stopped his lessons early so he and Nora could go to an opera or a play. On Sundays, he occasionally attended service at the Greek Orthodox church.

[Anonymous No.19599089]

>Franz Kafka
In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Although this was a distinct improvement over his previous job at a different insurance firm, which required long hours and frequent overtime, Kafka still felt stymied; he was living with his family in a cramped apartment, where he could muster the concentration to write only late at night, when everyone else was asleep. As Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” In the same letter, he goes on to describe his timetable:
>from 8 to 2 or 2:30 in the office, then lunch till 3 or 3:30, after that sleep in bed (usually only attempts; for a whole week I saw nothing but Montenegrins in my sleep, in extremely disagreeable clarity, which gave me headaches, I saw every detail of their complicated dress) till 7:30, then ten minutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk—alone, with Max [Brod], or with another friend, then dinner with my family (I have three sisters, one married, one engaged; the single one, without prejudicing my affection for the others, is easily my favorite); then at 10:30 (but often not till 11:30) I sit down to write, and I go on, depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 o’clock, once even till 6 in the morning. Then again exercises, as above, but of course avoiding all exertions, a wash, and then, usually with a slight pain in my heart and twitching stomach muscles, to bed. Then every imaginable effort to get to sleep—i.e., to achieve the impossible, for one cannot sleep (Herr K. even demands dreamless sleep) and at the same time be thinking about one’s work and trying to solve with certainty the one question that certainly is insoluble, namely, whether there will be a letter from you the next day, and at what time. Thus the night consists of two parts: one wakeful, the other sleepless, and if I were to tell you about it at length and you were prepared to listen, I should never finish. So it is hardly surprising if, at the office the next morning, I only just manage to start work with what little strength is left. In one of the corridors along which I always walk to reach my typist, there used to be a coffinlike trolley for the moving of files and documents, and each time I passed it I felt as though it had been made for me, and was waiting for me.

[Anonymous No.19599101]

>Herman Melville
Only a few records of Melville’s daily routines have survived. Perhaps the best one comes from a December 1850 letter he wrote to a friend shortly after the Melville family moved to Arrowhead, a one-hundred-sixty-acre farm in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. There, the thirty-one-year-old author raised corn, turnips, potatoes, and pumpkins; he enjoyed working in the fields as a way to relieve the stress of writing six to eight hours a day. Melville wrote:
>I rise at eight—thereabouts—& go to my barn—say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast. (It goes to my heart to give him a cold one, but it can’t be helped.) Then, pay a visit to my cow—cut up a pumpkin or two for her, & stand by to see her eat it—for it’s a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws—she does it so mildly & with such a sanctity.—My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire—then spread my M.S.S. on the table—take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will. At 2½ P.M. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be. My friends the horse & cow now demand their dinner—& I go & give it to them. My own dinner over, I rig my sleigh & with my mother or sisters start off for the village—& if it be a Literary World day, great is the satisfaction thereof. —My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmeric state in my room—not being able to read—only now & then skimming over some large-printed book.
He was by then a few months into Moby-Dick, for which his Arrowhead workroom proved an ideal setting. “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow,” he wrote. “I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”

[Anonymous No.19599121]

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.”

[Anonymous No.19599143]

>Marcel Proust
Upon waking in the late afternoon—typically about 3:00 or 4:00 P.M., although sometimes not until as late as 6:00—Proust first lit a batch of the opium-based Legras powders that he used to relieve his chronic asthma. Sometimes he lit just a few pinches; other times he “smoked” for hours, until the entire bedroom was thick with fumes. Then he would ring for his longtime housekeeper and confidante, Celeste, to serve the coffee. This was an elaborate ritual in its own right. Celeste would bring in a silver coffeepot holding two cups of strong black coffee; a lidded porcelain jug with a large quantity of boiled milk; and a croissant, always from the same bakery, served on its own saucer. Wordlessly, she would place these items on a bedside table and leave Proust alone to prepare his own café au lait. Celeste then waited in the kitchen in case Proust rang a second time, which signaled that he was ready to receive a second croissant (always kept at the ready) and a fresh jug of boiled milk to mix with the remaining coffee.

This was sometimes Proust’s only sustenance for the entire day. “It isn’t an exaggeration to say that he ate virtually nothing,” Celeste recalled in a memoir of her life with the author. “I’ve never heard of anyone else living off two bowls of café au lait and two croissants a day. And sometimes only one croissant!” (Unbeknownst to Celeste, Proust did sometimes dine at a restaurant on the evenings he went out, and there are reports that he ate huge quantities at these occasions.) Not surprisingly, given his meager diet and sedentary habits, Proust suffered constantly from feeling cold, and he relied on an endless succession of hot water bottles and “woolies”—soft wool jumpers that he draped over his shoulders, one on top of another—to stave off the chills while he worked.

Along with the first coffee service, Celeste brought Proust his mail on a silver tray. As he dipped his croissant in his coffee, Proust would open the mail and sometimes read choice passages aloud to Celeste. Then he carefully worked his way through several daily newspapers, displaying a keen interest not only in literature and the arts but politics and finance as well. Afterward, if Proust had decided to go out that evening, he would begin the many preparations that entailed: making telephone calls, ordering the car, getting dressed. Otherwise, he began work soon after finishing with the newspaper, writing for a few hours at a stretch before ringing for Celeste to bring him something or join him for a chat. Sometimes these chats could go on for hours, particularly if Proust had recently gone out or received an interesting visitor—he seemed to use the chats as a rehearsal ground for his fiction, drawing out the nuances and hidden meaning of a conversation or encounter until he was ready to capture it on the page.

[Anonymous No.19599152]

>Thomas Wolfe
Wolfe’s prose has been criticized for its overindulgence and adolescent character, so it’s interesting to note that the novelist practiced a writing ritual that was almost literally masturbatory. One evening in 1930, as he was struggling to recapture the feverish spirit that had fueled his first book, Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe decided to give up on an uninspired hour of work and get undressed for bed. But, standing naked at his hotel-room window, Wolfe found that his weariness had suddenly evaporated and that he was eager to write again. Returning to the table, he wrote until dawn with, he recalled, “amazing speed, ease, and sureness.” Looking back, Wolfe tried to figure out what had prompted the sudden change—and realized that, at the window, he had been unconsciously fondling his genitals, a habit from childhood that, while not exactly sexual (his “penis remained limp and unaroused,” he noted in a letter to his editor), fostered such a “good male feeling” that it had stoked his creative energies. From then on, Wolfe regularly used this method to inspire his writing sessions, dreamily exploring his “male configurations” until “the sensuous elements in every domain of life became more immediate, real, and beautiful.”

Wolfe typically began writing around midnight, “priming himself with awesome quantities of tea and coffee,” as one biographer noted. Since he could never find a chair or table that was totally comfortable for a man of his height (Wolfe was 6’6″), he usually wrote standing up, using the top of the refrigerator as his desk. He would keep at it until dawn, taking breaks to smoke a cigarette at the window or pace through the apartment. Then he would have a drink and sleep until around 11:00. In the late morning Wolfe would begin another stretch of work, sometimes aided by a typist who would arrive to find the previous night’s pages scattered all over the kitchen floor.

[Anonymous No.19599166]

>William Faulkner
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.”

[Anonymous No.19599181]

>Honore de Balzac
Balzac drove himself relentlessly as a writer, motivated by enormous literary ambition as well as a never-ending string of creditors and endless cups of coffee; as Herbert J. Hunt has written, he engaged in “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure.” When Balzac was working, his writing schedule was brutal: He ate a light dinner at 6:00 P.M., then went to bed. At 1:00 A.M. he rose and sat down at his writing table for a seven-hour stretch of work. At 8:00 A.M. he allowed himself a ninety-minute nap; then, from 9:30 to 4:00, he resumed work, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. (According to one estimate, he drank as many as fifty cups a day.) At 4:00 P.M. Balzac took a walk, had a bath, and received visitors until 6:00, when the cycle started all over again. “The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun,” he wrote in 1830. “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion—but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.”

[Anonymous No.19599193]

>Vladimir Nabokov
The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since, Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased; by shuffling the cards around, he could quickly rearrange paragraphs, chapters, and whole swaths of the book. (His file box also served as portable desk; he started the first draft of Lolita on a road trip across America, working nights in the backseat of his parked car—the only place in the country, he said, with no noise and no drafts.) Only after months of this labor did he finally relinquish the cards to his wife, Vera, for a typed draft, which would then undergo several more rounds of revisions.

As a young man, Nabokov preferred to write in bed while chain-smoking, but as he grew older (and quit smoking) his habits changed. He described his routine in a 1964 interview: “I generally start the day at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study.” By this time he had settled with his wife in a six-room apartment at the top floor of the Palace Hotel, in Montreux, Switzerland, where he could look down on Lake Geneva from his lectern. In the same interview, Nabokov elaborated on his daily schedule:
>I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an Alpine chough—big, glossy, black thing with big yellow beak—which visits the balcony and emits a most melodious chuckle. For a while I lie in bed mentally revising and planning things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, enthroned meditation, and bath—in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out for a short stroll with my wife along the lake.… We lunch around one P.M., and I am back at my desk by half-past one and work steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll to a newsstand for the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after dinner. And bed around nine. I read till half-past eleven, and then tussle with insomnia till one A.M.
“My habits are simple, my tastes banal,” he later wrote. His keenest pleasures were “soccer matches on the TV, an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer, sunbaths on the lawn, and composing chess problems.” And, of course, pursuing his beloved butterflies, which he did in summer on the Alpine slopes, often hiking fifteen miles or more a day—after which, he grumpily noted, “I sleep even worse than in winter.”

[Anonymous No.19599204]

>Saul Bellow
“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.”

[Anonymous No.19599221]

>Leo Tolstoy
“I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.” This is Tolstoy in one of the relatively few diary entries he made during the mid-1860s, when he was deep into the writing of War and Peace. Although he does not describe his routine in the diary, his oldest son, Sergei, later recorded the pattern of Tolstoy’s days at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region of Russia.
>From September to May we children and our teachers got up between eight and nine o’clock and went to the hall to have breakfast. After nine, in his dressing-gown, still unwashed and undressed, with a tousled beard, Father came down from his bedroom to the room under the hall where he finished his toilet. If we met him on the way he greeted us hastily and reluctantly. We used to say: “Papa is in a bad temper until he has washed.” Then he, too, came up to have his breakfast, for which he usually ate two boiled eggs in a glass.
>He did not eat anything after that until five in the afternoon. Later, at the end of 1880, he began to take luncheon at two or three. He was not talkative at breakfast and soon retired to his study with a glass of tea. We hardly saw him after that until dinner.
According to Sergei, Tolstoy worked in isolation—no one was allowed to enter his study, and the doors to the adjoining rooms were locked to ensure that he would not be interrupted. (An account by Tolstoy’s daughter Tatyana disagrees on this point—she remembers that their mother was allowed in the study; she would sit on the divan sewing quietly while her husband wrote.) Before dinner, Tolstoy would go for a walk or a ride, often to supervise some work on the estate grounds. Afterward he rejoined the family in a much more sociable mood. Sergei writes:
>At five we had dinner, to which Father often came late. He would be stimulated by the day’s impressions and tell us about them. After dinner he usually read or talked to guests if there were any; sometimes he read aloud to us or saw to our lessons. About 10 P.M. all the inhabitants of [Yasnaya] foregathered again for tea. Before going to sleep he read again, and at one time he played the piano. And then retired to his bed about 1 A.M.

[Anonymous No.19599234]

>Charles Dickens
Dickens was prolific—he produced fifteen novels, ten of which are longer than eight hundred pages, and numerous stories, essays, letters, and plays—but he could not be productive without certain conditions in place. First, he needed absolute quiet; at one of his houses, an extra door had to be installed to his study to block out noise. And his study had to be precisely arranged, with his writing desk placed in front of a window and, on the desk itself, his writing materials—goose-quill pens and blue ink—laid out alongside several ornaments: a small vase of fresh flowers, a large paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit perched upon it, and two bronze statuettes (one depicting a pair of fat toads dueling, the other a gentleman swarmed with puppies).

Dickens’s working hours were invariable. His eldest son recalled that “no city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business-like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.” He rose at 7:00, had breakfast at 8:00, and was in his study by 9:00. He stayed there until 2:00, taking a brief break for lunch with his family, during which he often seemed to be in a trance, eating mechanically and barely speaking a word before hurrying back to his desk. On an ordinary day he could complete about two thousand words in this way, but during a flight of imagination he sometimes managed twice that amount. Other days, however, he would hardly write anything; nevertheless, he stuck to his work hours without fail, doodling and staring out the window to pass the time.

Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” Returning home, his brother-in-law remembered, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.” Dickens’s nights, however, were relaxed: he dined at 6:00, then spent the evening with family or friends before retiring at midnight.

[Anonymous No.19599249]

>P.G. Wodehouse
The eighty-nine-year-old author rose each day at 7:30 sharp and stepped out onto the back porch for the “daily dozen” series of calisthenic exercises, which he had performed every day since they were introduced in the United States in 1919. Then, his wife still asleep upstairs, Wodehouse fixed himself toast, coffee cake, and tea and, as he ate, read what he called a “breakfast book”—a mystery novel by someone like Ngaio Marsh or Rex Stout, or a light, humorous book. Afterward, he smoked a pipe, took a short walk with the dogs, and, by 9:00, settled down to work. Wind writes:
>Wodehouse does his writing in his study—a fairly large, pine-walled room on the ground floor, overlooking the back garden. The principal pieces of furniture are a leather armchair (for lounging and thinking) and a plain wooden desk about three feet by five. On top of the desk are a dictionary, a knife for cleaning out pipes, and a bulky Royal typewriter, which Wodehouse has used since 1934. His method of composition has remained virtually unchanged through the years. He does the first draft in longhand, in pencil. Then he sits down at the Royal and does a moderate amount of revising and polishing as he types. At present, his average output on a good working day is about a thousand words, but when he was younger it was closer to twenty-five hundred. He had his most productive day in 1933, when, to his own astonishment, he knocked off the last eight thousand words of “Thank You, Jeeves.” Once, when he was beginning a Wooster-Jeeves novel, he experimented with using a Dictaphone. After he had dictated the equivalent of a page, he played it back to check it over. What he heard sounded so terribly unfunny that he immediately turned off the machine and went back to his pad and pencil.
Lunch at home was followed, at about 2:00, with another walk—Wodehouse’s neighbor and longtime friend Guy Bolton would pick him up and they would take an hour’s constitutional, with the dogs in tow. Wodehouse had to be back in his study by 3:30 for the soap opera The Edge of Night, which he never missed. Then he had a traditional English tea with his wife. After this, according to the biographer Robert McCrum, “he might snooze a bit in his armchair, have a bath, and do some more work, before the evening cocktail (sherry for her, a lethal martini for him) at six, which they took in the sun parlour, overlooking the garden. This was followed by dinner, alone with Ethel, and eaten early to allow the cook to get home to her family. After dinner, Wodehouse would usually read, but occasionally he would play two-handed bridge with Ethel, a habit, he joked, that doubtlessly suggested he was senile.”

[Anonymous No.19599278]

>Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert began writing Madame Bovary in September 1851, shortly after returning to his mother’s house in Croisset, France. He had spent the previous two years abroad, traveling through the Mediterranean region, and the long journey seems to have satisfied his youthful yearning for adventure and passion. Now, just shy of his thirtieth birthday—and already looking middle-aged, with a large paunch and rapidly thinning hair—Flaubert felt capable of the discipline necessary for writing his new book, which would marry a humble subject matter to a rigorous and exacting prose style.

Flaubert woke at 10:00 each morning and rang for the servant, who brought him the newspapers, his mail, a glass of cold water, and his filled pipe. The servant’s bell also served as notice for the rest of the family that they could cease creeping about the house and speaking in low voices in order not to disturb the slumbering author. After Flaubert had opened his letters, drank his water, and taken a few puffs of his pipe, he would pound on the wall above his head, a signal for his mother to come in and sit on the bed beside him for an intimate chat until he decided to get up. Flaubert’s morning toilet, which included a very hot bath and the application of a tonic that was supposed to arrest hair loss, would be completed by 11:00, at which time he would join the family in the dining room for a late-morning meal that served as both his breakfast and his lunch. The author didn’t like to work on a full stomach, so he ate a relatively light repast, typically consisting of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. Then the family moved outdoors for a stroll, often ascending a hill behind the house to a terrace that overlooked the Seine, where they would gossip, argue, and smoke under a stand of chestnut trees.

At 1:00, Flaubert commenced his daily lesson to Caroline, which took place in his study, a large room with bookcases crammed with books, a sofa, and a white bearskin rug. The governess was in charge of Caroline’s English education, so Flaubert limited his lessons to history and geography, a role that he took very seriously. After an hour of instruction, Flaubert dismissed his pupil and settled into the high-backed armchair in front of his large round table and did some work—mostly reading, it seems—until dinner at 7:00. After a meal, he sat and talked with his mother until 9:00 or 10:00, when she went to bed. Then his real work began. Hunched over his table while the rest of the household slept, the “hermit of Croisset” struggled to forge a new prose style, one stripped of all unnecessary ornament and excessive emotion in favor of merciless realism rendered in precisely the right words.

[Anonymous No.19600308]

bump

[Anonymous No.19600323]

Thanks for posting these, anon

[J.Kimball No.19600343]

You lack discipline!

[Anonymous No.19600363]

>>19600343
Yeah but apparently so did Joyce, I’ll make it.

[Anonymous No.19600371]

>>19599068
great thread friend.

[Anonymous No.19600420]

>>19599068
fun thread. thanks

[Anonymous No.19600524]

>>19599143
Literally me

[Anonymous No.19600729]

>>19599234
How come one anecdote before said Dickens wrote with guests in the room, but this one says he needed absolute quiet?

[Anonymous No.19601252]

>>19599143
>a second croissant
Not a second madeleine? How disillusioning.

[Anonymous No.19601265]

Splendid thread. Thanks OP. Incredibly Based.

What's your source?

[Anonymous No.19601299]

>>19599143
>wakes up at 4PM
>smokes opium indefinitely
Amazing, just amazing.

[Anonymous No.19601334]

Interesting how basically all of them aside from the one bipolar guy all “only” worked 5-6 hours a day. The eight-hour workday is nonsense.

[Anonymous No.19601396]

Amazing thread. Its wonderful to see the process behind these master authors. Thanks for sharing OP.

[Anonymous No.19601483]

>>19599068
I honestly can't tell how many of these are real v.s shitposts.

[Anonymous No.19601501]

>>19599068
>>19599143
>tfw I haven't gotten up before noon in over a year

I'm fucking Joyce and Proust.

[Anonymous No.19601529]

late to bed and early to rise, and absolute uninterrupted quiet, that's why I got from this

[Anonymous No.19601538]

>>19599143
There’s something mesmerizing about such a genius living as close to possible as a modern day NEET as was possible to him

[Anonymous No.19601540]

Anybody else noticed the running theme that tons of these guys seem to never have any money? It's particularly glaring with Joyce. The exception are people who hit it big, like Hemingway, or people born into money, like Tolstoy. I've read other instances of this. Authors are fucking shit at earning money, keeping money, and managing money.

[Anonymous No.19601552]

>>19601540
Stephen King is absolutely fucking loaded, which is I guess what allows him to be so prolific in writing new books

[Anonymous No.19601565]

>>19601552
Stephen King is a fucking hack who has openly admitted that he writes the literary equivalent of McDonald's. Meanwhile tons of great geniuses died penniless. Joyce died with almost no money. So did Proust and Melville.

[Anonymous No.19601592]

>>19601540
The arts don’t exactly pay well.

[Anonymous No.19601711]

These were excellent and I wish there was more

[Anonymous No.19601781]

>>19601565
S.K. fell off a long time ago, 70s80s90s was his time... now his son Owen is trying to fill his shoes and its totally sad.

[Anonymous No.19601890]

>>19601538
I truly believe they foresaw how NEETs would live in 2021 and wanted to experience the life style.

[Anonymous No.19601949]

>>19599068
>>19599143
>>19601538

Is NEETdom without an internet connection the best environment for literary genius?

[Anonymous No.19602139]

What's the source for these?

[Anonymous No.19602146]

>>19601949

Having been a NEET for ten years I can say yes

[Anonymous No.19602151]

>>19599068
test

[Anonymous No.19602154]

>>19601265
>>19601483
>>19602139
sorry guys, I went to bed after nobody responded and I thought the thread was dead, to my surprise I come back the next morning and its still going!
My source is pic rel, I've been reading it and I found it very interesting, so I went through and posted all the ones specifically about authors

[Anonymous No.19602167]

>>19601565
Money doesn't matter all that much as long as you can survive. Do you think any of those great writers on their deathbed said, "man, I really wish I'd worked harder at earning money"? Fuck no. When you give a shit about something, you work at it regardless of how contemporary society rewards you for it. The real reward is the work itself.

[Anonymous No.19602172]

>>19601890
I fear that this may end soon and that we may have to eat the bugs.

[Anonymous No.19602177]

There are a few more I didn't get to, here

>Jane Austen
Austen never lived alone and had little expectation of solitude in her daily life. Her final home, a cottage in the village of Chawton, England, was no exception: she lived there with her mother, her sister, a close friend, and three servants, and there was a steady stream of visitors, often unannounced. Nevertheless, between settling in Chawton in 1809 and her death, Austen was remarkably productive: she revised earlier versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication, and wrote three new novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.

Austen wrote in the family sitting room, “subject to all kinds of casual interruptions,” her nephew recalled.
>She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.
Austen rose early, before the other women were up, and played the piano. At 9:00 she organized the family breakfast, her one major piece of household work. Then she settled down to write in the sitting room, often with her mother and sister sewing quietly nearby. If visitors showed up, she would hide her papers and join in the sewing. Dinner, the main meal of the day, was served between 3:00 and 4:00. Afterward there was conversation, card games, and tea. The evening was spent reading aloud from novels, and during this time Austen would read her work-in-progress to her family.

Although she did not have the independence and privacy that a contemporary writer might expect, Austen was nonetheless fortunate with the arrangements at Chawton. Her family was respectful of her work, and her sister Cassandra shouldered the bulk of the house-running burden—a huge relief for the novelist, who once wrote, “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb.”

[Anonymous No.19602181]

>Thomas Mann
Mann was always awake by 8:00 A.M. After getting out of bed, he drank a cup of coffee with his wife, took a bath, and dressed. Breakfast, again with his wife, was at 8:30. Then, at 9:00, Mann closed the door to his study, making himself unavailable for visitors, telephone calls, or family. The children were strictly forbidden to make any noise between 9:00 and noon, Mann’s prime writing hours. It was then that his mind was freshest, and Mann placed tremendous pressure on himself to get things down during that time. “Every passage becomes a ‘passage,’” he wrote, “every adjective a decision.” Anything that didn’t come by noon would have to wait until the next day, so he forced himself to “clench the teeth and take one slow step at a time.”

His morning grind over, Mann had lunch in his studio and enjoyed his first cigar—he smoked while writing, but limited himself to twelve cigarettes and two cigars daily. Then he sat on the sofa and read newspapers, periodicals, and books until 4:00, when he returned to bed for an hour-long nap. (Once again, the children were forbidden to make noise during this sacred hour.) At 5:00, Mann rejoined the family for tea. Then he wrote letters, reviews, or newspaper articles—work that could be interrupted by telephone calls or visitors—and took a walk before dinner at 7:30 or 8:00. Sometimes the family entertained guests at this time. If not, Mann and his wife would spend the evening reading or playing gramophone records before retiring to their separate bedrooms at midnight.

[Anonymous No.19602184]

>F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

[Anonymous No.19602186]

>Haruki Murakami
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?”

[Anonymous No.19602189]

>Samuel Beckett
In 1946, Beckett began a period of intense creative activity that he would later refer to as “the siege in the room.” Over the next few years he would produce his finest work—the novels Molloy and Malone Dies, and the play that would make him famous, Waiting for Godot. Paul Strathern describes Beckett’s life during the siege:
>It was spent largely in his room, isolated from the world, coming face to face with his own demons, attempting to explore the workings of his mind. His routine was for the most part simple enough. He would rise around the early hours of the afternoon, make himself scrambled eggs, and retire to his room for as many hours as he could bear. He would then leave for his late-night perambulation of the bars of Montparnasse, drinking copious amounts of cheap red wine, returning before dawn and the long attempt to sleep. His entire life revolved around his almost psychotic obsession to write.
The siege began with an epiphany. On a late-night walk near Dublin harbor, Beckett found himself standing on the end of a pier in the midst of a winter storm. Amid the howling wind and churning water, he suddenly realized that the “dark he had struggled to keep under” in his life—and in his writing, which had until then failed to find an audience or meet his own aspirations—should, in fact, be the source of his creative inspiration. “I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”

[Anonymous No.19602196]

>Henry James
Unlike his restless, compulsive older brother, Henry James always maintained regular working habits. He wrote every day, beginning in the morning and usually ending at about lunchtime. In his later years, severe wrist pain forced him to abandon his pen for dictation to a secretary, who would arrive each day at 9:30 A.M. After dictating all morning, James would read in the afternoon, have tea, go for a walk, eat dinner, and spend the evening making notes for the next day’s work. (For a while he asked one of his secretaries to return in the evenings for further dictation; to keep her alert, he would lay bars of chocolate beside her typewriter as she worked.) Like Anthony Trollope (this page), James started a new book the instant the old one was finished. Asked once when he found the time to form the design of a new book, James rolled his eyes, patted the questioner on the knee, and said, “It’s all about, it’s about—it’s in the air—it, so to speak, follows me and dogs me.”

[Anonymous No.19602198]

>Richard Wright
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.

[Anonymous No.19602206]

>Flannery O'Connor
After being diagnosed with lupus in 1951 and told she would live only another four years, O’Connor returned to her native Georgia and moved in with her mother at the family farm in rural Andalusia. Years earlier, a writing instructor had advised O’Connor to set aside a certain number of hours each day to write, and she had taken his advice to heart; back in Georgia she came to believe, as she wrote to a friend, that “routine is a condition of survival.”

A devout Catholic, O’Connor began each day at 6:00 A.M. with morning prayers from her copy of A Short Breviary. Then she joined her mother in the kitchen, where they would share a Thermos of coffee while listening to the weather report on the radio. Morning mass was at 7:00, a short drive into town at the Sacred Heart. Her religious obligations fulfilled, O’Connor would turn to her writing, shutting herself away between 9:00 and noon for her daily three hours, which would typically yield three pages—although, she told a reporter, “I may tear it all to pieces the next day.”

By the afternoon, O’Connor’s energy was spent—the lupus caused her to tire early and experience flulike symptoms and mental fogginess as the day wore on. She passed these hours receiving visitors on the porch and pursuing her hobbies of painting and raising birds—peacocks, which she loved and often incorporated into her stories, as well as ducks, hens, and geese. By sundown she was ready for bed; “I go to bed at nine and am always glad to get there,” she wrote. Before bedtime she might recite another prayer from her Breviary, but her usual nighttime reading was a seven-hundred-page volume of Thomas Aquinas. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she said.

[Anonymous No.19602213]

>>19599101
>My friends the horse & cow now demand their dinner—& I go & give it to them.
lol

[Anonymous No.19602216]

>Victor Hugo
When Napoléon III seized control of France in 1851, Hugo was forced into political exile, eventually settling with his family on Guernsey, a British island off the coast of Normandy. In his fifteen years there Hugo would write some of his best work, including three collections of poetry and the novel Les Misérables. Shortly after arriving on Guernsey, Hugo purchased Hauteville House—locals believed it was haunted by the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide—and set about making several improvements to the property. Chief among them was an all-glass “lookout” on the roof that resembled a small, furnished greenhouse. There Hugo wrote each morning, standing at a small desk in front of a mirror.

He rose at dawn, awakened by the daily gunshot from a nearby fort, and received a pot of freshly brewed coffee and his morning letter from Juliette Drouet, his mistress, whom he had installed on Guernsey just nine doors down from Hauteville House. After reading the passionate words of “Juju” to her “beloved Christ,” Hugo swallowed two raw eggs, enclosed himself in his lookout, and wrote until 11:00 A.M. Then he stepped out onto the rooftop and washed from a tub of water left out overnight, pouring the icy liquid over himself and rubbing his body with a horsehair glove. Townspeople passing by could watch the spectacle from the street—as could Juliette, looking out the window of her room.

At noon Hugo headed downstairs for lunch. After lunch he embarked on a two-hour walk or performed a series of strenuous exercises on the beach. Later he would make his daily visit to the barber (he insisted on keeping the trimmings in an unexplained act of superstition), go for a carriage ride with Juliette, and do more writing at home, often using the afternoon to answer some of the satchel-loads of letters that arrived each day.

As the sun set Hugo spent either a boisterous evening at Juliette’s, joined by friends for dinner, conversation, and cards, or a rather gloomy one at home. At family dinners Hugo felt compelled to hold forth on philosophical subjects—pausing only to make sure his wife had not fallen asleep, or to write something down in one of the little notebooks he carried everywhere he went. Hugo’s son Charles—one of the three Hugo children who became writers themselves—described the scene: “As soon as he has uttered the slightest ideas—anything other than ‘I slept well’ or ‘Give me something to drink’—he turns away, takes out his notebook and jots down what he has just said. Nothing is lost. Everything ends up in print. When his sons try to use something they heard their father say, they are always caught out. When one of his books appears, they find that all the notes they took have been published.”

[Anonymous No.19602218]

>Mark Twain
In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study—they would blow a horn if they needed him—he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. “On hot days,” he wrote to a friend, “I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.”

After dinner, Twain would read his day’s work to the assembled family. He liked to have an audience, and his evening performances almost always won their approval. On Sundays, Twain skipped work to relax with his wife and children, read, and daydream in some shady spot on the farm. Whether or not he was working, he smoked cigars constantly. One of his closest friends, the writer William Dean Howells, recalled that after a visit from Twain, “the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.” Howells also records Twain’s difficulties getting to sleep at night:
>In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and he had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.

[Anonymous No.19602220]

>Carson McCullers
McCullers’s first novel was written thanks to a pact with her husband, Reeves, whom she married in 1937. The young newlyweds—Carson was twenty; Reeves twenty-four—both aspired to be writers, so they struck a deal: one of them would work full-time and earn a living for the couple while the other wrote; after a year, they would switch roles. Since McCullers already had a manuscript in progress, and Reeves had lined up a salaried position in Charlotte, North Carolina, she began her literary endeavors first.

McCullers wrote every day, sometimes escaping their drafty apartment to work in the local library, taking sips from the Thermos full of sherry that she would sneak inside. She typically worked until the middle of the afternoon, then went for a long walk. Back at the apartment, she might attempt to do some cooking or cleaning, tasks she was unused to, having grown up with servants. (McCullers later recalled trying to roast a chicken, not realizing that she had to clean the bird first. When Reeves came home, he asked her about the awful smell in the house; Carson, absorbed in her writing, hadn’t even noticed.) After dinner, Carson read her day’s work to Reeves, who offered his suggestions. Then the couple ate dinner, read in bed, and listened to the electric phonograph before going to sleep early.

After a year, Carson had landed a contract for her novel, so Reeves continued to put his own literary aspirations on hold and earn a salary for the both of them. Despite the pact, he would never get to try his luck as the full-time writer in their marriage. When Carson’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940, it vaulted her into the literary limelight; after that, there was never any question of her sacrificing her writing for a day job and a steady paycheck.

[Anonymous No.19602224]

>David Foster Wallace
“I usually go in shifts of three or four hours with either naps or, like, you know, fairly diverting do-something-with-other-people things in the middle,” Wallace said in 1996, shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest. “So, like, I’ll get up at eleven or noon, work till two or three.” In later interviews, however, Wallace said that he followed a regular writing routine only when the work was going badly. From a 1999 radio interview:
>Things are either going well or they’re not going well.… I’m working on something now and I just can’t seem to get it. I flounder and I flounder. And when I’m floundering I don’t want to work, so I invent draconian “All right, this morning I’ll work from seven-thirty to eight-forty-five with one five-minute break”—all this baroque b.s. And after five or ten or a dozen or, you know, as with some books, fifty tries, all of a sudden it will just, it will start to go. And once it starts to go, it requires no effort. And then actually the discipline’s required in terms of being willing to be away from it and to remember that, “Oh, I have a relationship that I have to nurture or I have to grocery shop or pay these bills” and stuff. So I have absolutely no routine at all, because the times I’m trying to build a routine are the times that the writing just seems futile and flagellating.

[Anonymous No.19602232]

>Jonathan Franzen
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.”

[Anonymous No.19602235]

>Stephen King
King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30. Some days he finishes up as early as 11:30, but more often it takes him until about 1:30 to meet his goal. Then he has the afternoons and evenings free for naps, letters, reading, family, and Red Sox games on TV.

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.

[Anonymous No.19602238]

>Gertrude Stein
After the outbreak of World War II, Stein and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, fled Paris for a country home in Ain, on the eastern edge of France. Stein had long depended on Toklas to take care of their living arrangements; in Ain, as Janet Malcolm writes in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Toklas “managed the practical details of Stein’s life almost to the point of parody.” A 1934 New Yorker piece by Janet Flanner, James Thurber, and Harold Ross described their lifestyle:
>Miss Stein gets up every morning about ten and drinks some coffee, against her will. She’s always been nervous about becoming nervous and she thought coffee would make her nervous, but her doctor prescribed it. Miss Toklas, her companion, gets up at six and starts dusting and fussing around.… Every morning Miss Toklas bathes and combs their French poodle, Basket, and brushes its teeth. It has its own toothbrush.
>Miss Stein has an outsize bathtub that was especially made for her. A staircase had to be taken out to install it. After her bath she puts on a huge wool bathrobe and writes for a while, but she prefers to write outdoors, after she gets dressed. Especially in the Ain country, because there are rocks and cows there. Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing. The two ladies drive around in their Ford till they come to a good spot. Then Miss Stein gets out and sits on a campstool with pencil and pad, and Miss Toklas fearlessly switches a cow into her line of vision. If the cow doesn’t seem to fit in with Miss Stein’s mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow. When the great lady has an inspiration, she writes quickly, for about fifteen minutes. But often she just sits there, looking at cows and not turning a wheel.
In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein confirmed that she had never been able to write much more than half an hour a day—but added, “If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.” Stein and Toklas had lunch at about noon and ate an early, light supper. Toklas went to bed early, too, but Stein liked to stay up arguing and gossiping with visiting friends—“I never go to sleep when I go to bed I always fool around in the evening,” she wrote. After her guests finally left, Stein would go wake Toklas, and they would talk over the entire day before both going to sleep.

[Anonymous No.19602240]

>William H. Gass
Gass is an early riser. In a 1998 interview, he said that he works mostly in the morning, finishing his serious writing by noon. Afternoons are spent on his academic duties—in addition to writing fiction, he has taught philosophy for most of his career—and “other kinds of work which is more mechanical.” A colleague once asked Gass if he had any unusual writing habits:
>“No, sorry to be boring,” he sighed.… “How does your day begin?” “Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,” he said. “What do you photograph?” “The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly,” he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand. “You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?” “Most days.” “And then you write?” “Yes.” “And you don’t think that’s unusual?” “Not for me.”
Gass has also said that he writes best when he’s angry, which can take a toll on his health over the course of long writing projects. (It took him twenty-five years to complete his 1995 novel, The Tunnel.) “I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house,” he said in 1976. “It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.”

[Anonymous No.19602243]

>>19601501
lies! they're both dead

[Anonymous No.19602244]

>>19601565
Joyce died with the same amount of money he always had, he was supported by an American sugar mommy the man lived in luxury the moment she started supporting him. She paid for his funeral as well

[Anonymous No.19602247]

>Ayn Rand
In 1942, under pressure to finish what would become her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead, Rand turned to a doctor to help her overcome her chronic fatigue. He prescribed Benzedrine, still a relatively new drug at the time, to boost her energy levels. It did the trick. According to the biographer Anne C. Heller, Rand had spent years planning and composing the first third of her novel; over the next twelve months, fueled by Benzedrine pills, she averaged a chapter a week. Her writing routine during this period was grueling: she wrote day and night, sometimes neglecting to go to bed for days (she took naps on the couch in her clothes instead). At one point she worked for thirty hours straight, pausing only to eat the meals prepared by her husband or to read him a new passage and discuss bits of dialogue. Even when she got stuck, Rand stayed at her desk. A typist who later worked with Rand recalled her habits:
>She was very disciplined. She seldom left her desk. If she had a problem with the writing—if she had what she called the “squirms”—she solved the problem at her desk; she didn’t get up and pace around the apartment, or wait for inspiration, or turn on the radio or television. She wasn’t writing every minute. Once I heard a flapping sound coming from the study—she was playing solitaire. She might read the newspaper. At times, I entered the study to find her sitting with her elbows on the desk and resting her chin on her hands, looking out the window, smoking, thinking.
The Benzedrine helped Rand push through the last stages of The Fountainhead, but it soon became a crutch. She would continue to use amphetamines for the next three decades, even as her overuse led to mood swings, irritability, emotional outbursts, and paranoia—traits Rand was susceptible to even without drugs.

[Anonymous No.19602253]

>John Updike
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” Updike told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.” For much of his career, Updike rented a small office above a restaurant in downtown Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he would write for three or four hours each morning, netting about three pages per day. “Around noon the smell of food would start to rise through the floor, but I tried to hold out another hour before I tumbled downstairs, dizzy with cigarettes, to order a sandwich,” Updike later recalled. In a 1978 interview, he described his routine in more detail:
>I try to write in the morning and then into the afternoon. I’m a later riser; fortunately, my wife is also a late riser. We get up in unison and fight for the newspaper for half an hour. Then I rush into my office around 9:30 and try to put the creative project first. I have a late lunch, and then the rest of the day somehow gets squandered. There is a great deal of busywork to a writer’s life, as to a professor’s life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don’t do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. But I’ve never been a night writer, unlike some of my colleagues, and I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. So, I try to be a regular sort of fellow—much like a dentist drilling his teeth every morning—except Sunday, I don’t work on Sunday, and there are of course some holidays I take.
He told another interviewer that he was careful to give at least three hours a day to the writing project at hand; otherwise, he said, there was a risk he might forget what it’s about. A solid routine, he added, “saves you from giving up.”

[Anonymous No.19602263]

>Toni Morrison
“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.”

[Anonymous No.19602271]

That's pretty much it for actual authors, but there are a couple political writers' and philosophers' routines detailed

>Søren Kierkegaard
The Danish philosopher’s day was dominated by two pursuits: writing and walking. Typically, he wrote in the morning, set off on a long walk through Copenhagen at noon, and then returned to his writing for the rest of the day and into the evening. The walks were where he had his best ideas, and sometimes he would be in such a hurry to get them down that, returning home, he would write standing up before his desk, still wearing his hat and gripping his walking stick or umbrella.

Kierkegaard kept up his energy with coffee, usually taken after supper and a glass of sherry. Israel Levin, his secretary from 1844 until 1850, recalled that Kierkegaard owned “at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort”—and that, before coffee could be served, Levin had to select which cup and saucer he preferred that day, and then, bizarrely, justify his choice to Kierkegaard. And this was not the end of the strange ritual. The biographer Joakim Garff writes:
>Kierkegaard had his own quite peculiar way of having coffee: Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid. The process was scarcely finished before the syrupy stimulant disappeared into the magister’s stomach, where it mingled with the sherry to produce additional energy that percolated up into his seething and bubbling brain—which in any case had already been so productive all day that in the half-light Levin could still notice the tingling and throbbing in the overworked fingers when they grasped the slender handle of the cup.

[Anonymous No.19602287]

>Immanuel Kant
Kant’s biography is unusually devoid of external events. The philosopher lived in an isolated Prussian province for his entire life, rarely venturing outside the walls of his native Königsberg and never traveling even so far as the sea, only a few hours away. A lifelong bachelor, he taught the same courses at the local university for more than forty years. His was a life of ordered regularity—which later gave rise to a portrait of the philosopher as a sort of characterless automaton. In actual fact, as Manfred Kuehn argues in his 2001 biography, Kant’s life was not quite as abstract and passionless as Heine and others have supposed. Kant loved to socialize, and he was a gifted conversationalist and a genial host. If he failed to live a more adventurous life, it was largely due to his health: the philosopher had a congenital skeletal defect that caused him to develop an abnormally small chest, which compressed his heart and lungs and contributed to a generally delicate constitution. In order to prolong his life with the condition—and in an effort to quell the mental anguish caused by his lifelong hypochondria—Kant adopted what he called “a certain uniformity in the way of living and in the matters about which I employ my mind.”

His routine was as follows: Kant rose at 5:00 A.M., after being woken by his longtime servant, a retired soldier under explicit orders not to let the master oversleep. Then he drank one or two cups of weak tea and smoked his pipe. According to Kuehn, “Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on.” After this period of meditation, Kant prepared his day’s lectures and did some writing. Lectures began at 7:00 A.M. and lasted until 11:00. His academic duties discharged, Kant would go to a restaurant or a pub for lunch, his only real meal of the day. He did not limit his dining company to his fellow academics but enjoyed mixing with townspeople from a variety of backgrounds. As for the meal itself, he preferred simple fare, with the meat well done, accompanied by good wine. Lunch might go until as late as 3:00, after which Kant took his famous walk and visited his closest friend, Joseph Green. They would converse until 7:00 on weekdays (9:00 on weekends, perhaps joined by another friend). Returning home, Kant would do some more work and read before going to bed precisely at 10:00.

[Anonymous No.19602291]

>William James
In April 1870, a twenty-eight-year-old James made a cautionary note to himself in his diary. “Recollect,” he wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” The importance of forming such “habits of order” later became one of James’s great subjects as a psychologist. In one of the lectures he delivered to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1892—and eventually incorporated into his book Psychology: A Briefer Course—James argued that the “great thing” in education is to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
>The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
James was writing from personal experience—the hypothetical sufferer is, in fact, a thinly disguised description of himself. For James kept no regular schedule, was chronically indecisive, and lived a disorderly, unsettled life. As Robert D. Richardson wrote in his 2006 biography, “James on habit, then, is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-late-learned too-little-self-knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits—or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits—and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”

Nevertheless, we can summarize a few of James’s tendencies. He drank moderately and would have a cocktail before dinner. He stopped smoking and drinking coffee in his mid-thirties, although he would cheat with the occasional cigar. He suffered from insomnia, particularly when he was deep into a writing project, and beginning in the 1880s he used chloroform to put himself to sleep. Before bed, if his eyes weren’t too tired, he would sit up and read until 11:00 or midnight, which, he found, “very much enlarges the day.” In his later years, he took a nap every afternoon from 2:00 to 3:00. He procrastinated. As he told one of his classes, “I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests.”

[Anonymous No.19602301]

>Jean-Paul Sartre
“One can be very fertile without having to work too much,” Sartre once said. “Three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening. This is my only rule.” If that makes the French philosopher’s life sound relaxed, however, it’s misleading. Sartre lived in a creative frenzy for most of his life, alternating between his daily six hours of work and an intense social life filled with rich meals, heavy drinking, drugs, and tobacco. On a typical day, Sartre worked in his Paris apartment until noon, then went out for an hour of appointments scheduled by his secretary. At 1:30, he joined his companion, Simone de Beauvoir, and their friends for lunch—a two-hour affair, washed down with a quart of red wine. At 3:30 on the dot he pushed away from the table and rushed back to his apartment for his second period of work, this time joined by Beauvoir. At night he slept badly, knocking himself out for a few hours with barbiturates.

By the 1950s, too much work on too little sleep—with too much wine and cigarettes—had left Sartre exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Rather than slow down, however, he turned to Corydrane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin then fashionable among Parisian students, intellectuals, and artists (and legal in France until 1971, when it was declared toxic and taken off the market). The prescribed dose was one or two tablets in the morning and at noon. Sartre took twenty a day, beginning with his morning coffee and slowly chewing one pill after another as he worked. For each tablet, he could produce a page or two of his second major philosophical work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

This was hardly his only excess. The biographer Annie Cohen-Solal reports, “His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol—wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on—two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.” Sartre knew he was wearing himself out, but he was willing to gamble his philosophy against his health. As he said later, “I thought that in my head—not separated, not analyzed, but in a shape that would become rational—that in my head I possessed all the ideas I was to put down on paper. It was only a question of separating them and writing them on the paper. So to put it briefly, in philosophy writing consisted of analyzing my ideas; and a tube of Corydrane meant ‘these ideas will be analyzed in the next two days.’”

[Anonymous No.19602302]

>Carl Jung
In 1922, Jung bought a parcel of land near the small village of Bollingen, Switzerland, and began construction on a simple two-story stone house along the shore of the upper basin of Lake Zurich. Over the next dozen years he modified and expanded the Bollingen Tower, as it became known, adding a pair of smaller auxiliary towers and a walled-in courtyard with a large outdoor fire pit. Even with these additions, it remained a primitive dwelling. No floorboards or carpets covered the uneven stone floor. There was no electricity and no telephone. Heat came from chopped wood, cooking was done on an oil stove, and the only artificial light came from oil lamps. Water had to be brought up from the lake and boiled (eventually, a hand pump was installed). “If a man of the sixteenth century were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamps and the matches would be new to him,” Jung wrote; “otherwise, he would know his way about without difficulty.”

Throughout the 1930s, Jung used Bollingen Tower as a retreat from city life, where he led a workaholic’s existence, seeing patients for eight or nine hours a day and delivering frequent lectures and seminars. As a result, nearly all Jung’s writing was done on holidays. (And although he had many patients who relied on him, Jung was not shy about taking time off; “I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,” he said.)

At Bollingen, Jung rose at 7:00 A.M.; said good morning to his saucepans, pots, and frying pans; and “spent a long time preparing breakfast, which usually consisted of coffee, salami, fruits, bread and butter,” the biographer Ronald Hayman notes. He generally set aside two hours in the morning for concentrated writing. The rest of his day would be spent painting or meditating in his private study, going for long walks in the hills, receiving visitors, and replying to the never-ending stream of letters that arrived each day. At 2:00 or 3:00 he took tea; in the evening he enjoyed preparing a large meal, often preceded by an aperitif, which he called a “sun-downer.” Bedtime was at 10:00. “At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself,” Jung wrote. “…I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”

[Anonymous No.19602305]

>Thomas Hobbs
Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but the English philosopher’s own experience was very nearly the opposite: he lived a long, productive, and mostly peaceful life, dying in bed at age ninety-one. He rose each day at about 7:00 A.M., ate a breakfast of bread and butter, and took his morning walk, meditating as he walked, until 10:00. Then, returning to his chamber, he would record the minutes of his thoughts on a sheet of paper pasted to an inch-thick square lapboard. Dinner was served precisely at 11:00 A.M. (In his old age, Hobbes gave up wine and meat, and ate fish daily.) Afterward, he smoked a pipe and, according to his friend and biographer John Aubrey, “threw himself immediately on his bed” to nap for half an hour. In the afternoon, Hobbes wrote in his chamber again, fleshing out his morning notes. In the evening he would sing a few popular songs in bed before going to sleep—not because he had a good voice but because, Aubrey notes, “he did believe it did his lungs good, and conduced much to prolong his life.”

[Anonymous No.19602312]

>René Descartes
Descartes was a late riser. The French philosopher liked to sleep until mid-morning, then linger in bed, thinking and writing, until 11:00 or so. “Here I sleep ten hours every night without being disturbed by any care,” Descartes wrote from the Netherlands, where he lived from 1629 until the last few months of his life. “And after my mind has wandered in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where I experience every pleasure imaginable, I awake to mingle the reveries of the night with those of the day.” These late-morning hours of meditation constituted his only concentrated intellectual effort for the day; Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, and he made sure not to overexert himself. After an early lunch, he would take a walk or meet friends for conversation; after supper, he dealt with his correspondence.

This comfortable bachelor’s life ended abruptly in late 1649, when Descartes accepted a position in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, who, at twenty-two, was one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe. It’s not entirely clear why he agreed to the appointment. He may have been motivated by a desire for greater recognition and prestige, or by a real interest in shaping the thinking of a young ruler. In any case, it proved a disastrous decision. Arriving in Sweden, in time for one of the coldest winters in memory, Descartes was notified that his lessons to Queen Christina would take place in the mornings—beginning at 5:00 A.M. He had no choice but to obey. But the early hours and bitter cold were too much for him. After only a month on the new schedule, Descartes fell ill, apparently of pneumonia; ten days later he was dead.

[Anonymous No.19602314]

>Voltaire
The French Enlightenment writer and philosopher liked to work in bed, particularly in his later years. A visitor recorded Voltaire’s routine in 1774: He spent the morning in bed, reading and dictating new work to one of his secretaries. At noon he rose and got dressed. Then he would receive visitors or, if there were none, continue to work, taking coffee and chocolate for sustenance. (He did not eat lunch.) Between 2:00 and 4:00, Voltaire and his principal secretary, Jean-Louis Wagnière, went out in a carriage to survey the estate. Then he worked again until 8:00, when he would join his widowed niece (and longtime lover) Madame Denis and others for supper. But his working day did not end there. Voltaire often continued to give dictation after supper, continuing deep into the night. Wagnière estimated that, all told, they worked eighteen to twenty hours a day. For Voltaire, it was a perfect arrangement. “I love the cell,” he wrote.

[Anonymous No.19602317]

>Karl Marx
Marx arrived in London as a political exile in 1849, expecting to stay in the city for a few months at most; instead, he ended up living there until his death in 1883. His first few years in London were marked by dire poverty and personal tragedy—his family was forced to live in squalid conditions, and by 1855 three of his six children had died. Isaiah Berlin describes Marx’s habits during this time:
>His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British [Museum] reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. “I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing,” he wrote in 1858.
Marx was, by 1858, already several years into Das Kapital, the massive work of political economy that would occupy the rest of his life. He never had a regular job. “I must pursue my goal through thick and thin and I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine,” he wrote in 1859. (In fact, he later applied for a post as a railway clerk, but was rejected because of his illegible handwriting.) Instead, Marx relied on his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels to send him regular handouts, which Engels pilfered from the petty-cash box of his father’s textile firm—and which Marx promptly misspent, having no money-management skills whatsoever. “I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff,” he noted. Meanwhile, his boils would get so bad that he “could neither sit nor walk nor remain upright,” as one biographer put it. In the end, it took Marx two decades of daily suffering to complete the first volume of Das Kapital—and he died before he could finish the remaining two volumes. Yet he had only one regret. “You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle,” he wrote to a fellow political activist in 1866. “I do not regret it. On the contrary. Had I my career to start again, I should do the same. But I would not marry. As far as lies in my power I intend to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life has been wrecked.”

[Anonymous No.19602330]

>Samuel Johnson
In James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, Johnson tells his future biographer that he “generally went abroad at four in the afternoon, and seldom came home till two in the morning.” And apparently he did much of his writing upon returning home, working by candlelight while the rest of London slept—the only time, it seems, that he could avoid the city’s plentiful distractions. Boswell quotes the recollections of Rev. Dr. Maxwell, a social friend of Johnson’s:
>His general mode of life, during my acquaintance, seemed to be pretty uniform. About twelve o’clock I commonly visited him, and frequently found him in bed, or declaiming over his tea, which he drank very plentifully. He generally had a levee of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters…and sometimes learned ladies.… He seemed to me to be considered as a kind of publick oracle, whom every body thought they had a right to visit and consult; and doubtless they were well rewarded. I never could discover how he found time for his compositions. He declaimed all the morning, then went to dinner at a tavern, where he commonly staid late, and then drank his tea at some friend’s house, over which he loitered a great while, but seldom took supper. I fancy he must have read and wrote chiefly in the night, for I can scarcely recollect that he ever refused going with me to a tavern.…
Johnson readily admitted that he suffered from procrastination and a lack of discipline. “My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness,” he wrote in his diary, and he told Boswell that “idleness is a disease which must be combated.” Yet, he added, he was temperamentally ill equipped for the battle: “I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.”

[Anonymous No.19602335]

>Sigmund Freud
“I cannot imagine life without work as really comfortable,” Freud wrote to a friend in 1910. With his wife, Martha, to efficiently manage the household—she laid out Freud’s clothes, chose his handkerchiefs, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush—the founder of psychoanalysis was able to maintain a single-minded devotion to his work throughout his long career. Freud rose each day by 7:00, ate breakfast, and had his beard trimmed by a barber who made a daily house call for this purpose. Then he saw analytic patients from 8:00 until noon. Dinner, the principal meal of the day, was served promptly at 1:00. Freud was not a gourmet—he disliked wine and chicken, and preferred solid middle-class fare like boiled or roast beef—but he enjoyed his food and ate with quiet concentration. Although normally a genial host, Freud could be so absorbed by his thoughts during the meal that his silence sometimes discomfited guests, who would struggle to carry a conversation with the other members of the family.

After dinner, Freud went for a walk around Vienna’s Ringstrasse. This was not a leisurely stroll, however; his son, Martin, recalled, “My father marched at terrific speed.” Along the way he would often purchase cigars and collect or deliver proofs to his publisher. At 3:00 there were consultations, followed by more analytic patients, until 9:00 at night. Then the family ate supper, and Freud would play a game of cards with his sister-in-law or go for a walk with his wife or one of his daughters, sometimes stopping at a café to read the papers. The remainder of the evenings was spent in his study, reading, writing, and doing editorial chores for psychoanalytical journals, until 1:00 A.M. or later.

Freud’s long workdays were mitigated by two luxuries. First, there were his beloved cigars, which he smoked continually, going through as many as twenty a day from his mid-twenties until near the end of his life, despite several warnings from doctors and the increasingly dire health problems that dogged him throughout his later years. (When his seventeen-year-old nephew once refused a cigarette, Freud told him, “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.”) Equally important, no doubt, were the family’s annual three-month summer vacations, which they spent in a spa or hotel in the mountains, going on hikes, gathering mushrooms and strawberries, and fishing.

[Anonymous No.19602344]

>>19601540
It is well known that the poor has more virtues and imagination than the rich.

[Anonymous No.19602373]

>>19602317
>He never had a regular job

[Anonymous No.19602411]

>>19602373
Why would he need to care given Engles recognized the importance of his work?

[Anonymous No.19602438]

I love the whole "I don't give a fuck what people think, I do what what works for me" vibe of this whole set. It feels so liberating to have this concrete information about how the most esteemed humans actually got about doing what they did.

[Anonymous No.19603045]

>>19602224
I’m surprised by this one because you’d think someone like David would try hard to streamline it, but it makes sense given his disposition.
>>19599068
>Greek Orthodox Church
Really? I wasn’t sure why he would but it’s kinda his thing to go against Catholicism towards something a bit mystic.
>>19599181
This is missing the edging anecdote.
>[Balzac] would “masturbate to the very edge of orgasm, but not over, and that state—agitated, excited to the point of near madness—was Balzac’s sweet spot, in terms of composing. ”

[Anonymous No.19603331]

>>19602154
thanks anon, sounds like a good read.

[Anonymous No.19603692]

I'm surprised these guys actually took it pretty easy, not really working constantly wake to sleep.

[Anonymous No.19603754]

>>19602181
>before retiring to their separate bedrooms
why did boomers hate their spouses?

[Anonymous No.19603804]

this the best thread in literal years

[Anonymous No.19603819]

>>19599143
I just wanted to let you know that I pronounce the "ou" in Proust like the "ou" in louse.

[Anonymous No.19603872]

>>19602335
Freud did cocaine very frequently and even gave it to children randomly
Why is this not mentioned?

[Anonymous No.19603873]

>>19602335
>"My father marched at terrific speed."
lol

[Anonymous No.19603920]

>>19602317
>I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine

[Anonymous No.19604047]

>>19602317
>He never had a regular job.
god what a piece of shit

[Anonymous No.19604054]

>>19601540
All broke but most of them seem to have someone to serve them each meal, live on estates on in places with a lovely view, or spend much of their time on leisure.

[Anonymous No.19604092]

Fantastic thread, thanks OP.

[Anonymous No.19604142]

>>19601334
I wish Kafka could see what it’s like today. Writers like Kafka and Henry Miller could see the dehumanizing effects of the industrial, globalized, corporate system that was already taking hold ~100 years ago. Life today is a monotonous grind. It’s all about risking yourself and finding beauty in the small things to live a fulfilling life

[Anonymous No.19604671]

>>19602220
>both aspired to be writers, so they struck a deal...one of them would work full-time and earn a living for the couple while the other wrote
This is awesome. I think I'm going to add this proposal to my online dating profile.

[Anonymous No.19604706]

>>19602271
I sure hope he brushed his teeth is all I can think...

[Anonymous No.19604756]

>>19604047
Keep seething kek

[Anonymous No.19604901]

>ignoring the best one

[Anonymous No.19605101]

>>19604901
this is fake

[Anonymous No.19606091]

The great commonality I see is that outside a few outliers, all of these seem to have started working every day immediately after they woke up or had had breakfast. Even then, with so much going on, Morrison probably had a routine to handle all that meaning there was a fairly specific spot reserved for writing, and Johnson appears to have started writing more or less immediately after getting home from the pub, while Wallace forced himself into a routine whenever he was having difficulties. Quite a few seem to have had a special writing space where they would do their time regardless of how productive they were being — and I saw a couple mentioning word quotas. And of course all those servants and spouses taking care of the daily affairs.

All of which isn't that surprising, given that people who do stuff regularly tend to finish their stuff one day. But hopefully some procrastinator might learn something through examples, because just telling that a routine is helpful never works, does it? Despite being the kind of person whose brain starts to work only after 11PM, I've found it quite useful to start working immediately after breakfast. Even if I rarely produce anything, I can at the very least review and revise, and I feel like spending some time in the "morning" just thinking about my writing sets something at work in the subconscious so that when I actually am able to start writing at night, I tend to be more productive. If I start my day by checking the news or, worse, browsing 4chan, I tend to waste both day and night without being able to tear myself off the Internet.

[Anonymous No.19606484]

>>19602317
So basically Marx himself was exactly the same as every single idiot Marxist you meet on the internet. How very apt.

[Anonymous No.19606564]

>>19599101
What a sweet man

[Anonymous No.19606607]

>>19599089
>for a whole week I saw nothing but Montenegrins in my sleep, in extremely disagreeable clarity, which gave me headaches, I saw every detail of their complicated dress
holy top kek

[Anonymous No.19606637]

>>19601334
this shit. after 5 hours of office wageslavery i still feel rather good. by 8 or 9 (lunch hour being unpaid in our time) i'm dead on my feet from mental strain and feel bitter and resentful. the modern work life is shit, designed to kill your soul and poison your body.
>>19601565
>Stephen King is a fucking hack who has openly admitted that he writes the literary equivalent of McDonald's. Meanwhile tons of great geniuses died penniless.
this. existence is utter shite.

[Anonymous No.19607013]

>>19599068
>extravagance and alcoholism
Heh

[Anonymous No.19607030]

>>19602312
>stop being NEET
>dies

[Anonymous No.19607043]

>>19599101
This man felt connected to the earth around him. Most wholesome routine in this thread

[Anonymous No.19607071]

>Pliny the Elder
>Before daybreak, he was in the habit of attending the Emperor Vespasian,—for he, too, was one who made an excellent use of his nights,—and then betook himself to the duties with which he was charged. On his return home, he devoted all the time which was still remaining to study. Taking an early repast, after the old fashion, light, and easy of digestion, in the summer time, if he had any leisure to spare, he would lie down in the sun-shine, while some book was read to him, he himself making notes and extracts in the meanwhile; for it was his habit never to read anything without making extracts, it being a maxim of his, that there is no book so bad but that some good may be got out of it. After thus enjoying the sunshine, he generally took a cold bath; after which he would sit down to a slight repast, and then take a short nap. On awaking, as though another day had now commenced, he would study till the hour for the evening meal, during which some book was generally read to him, he making comments on it in a cursory manner. I remember, on one occasion, a friend of his interrupting the reader, who had given the wrong pronunciation to some words, and making him go over them again. “You understood him, didn’t you?” said my uncle. “Yes,” said the other. “Why, then, did you make him go over it again? Through this interruption of yours, we have lost more than ten lines.” So thrifty a manager was he of time! In summer he rose from the evening meal by daylight; and, in winter, during the first hour of the night, just as though there had been some law which made it compulsory on him to do so. This is how he lived in the midst of his employments, and the bustle of the city. When in retirement in the country, the time spent in the bath was the only portion that was not allotted by him to study. When I say in the bath, I mean while he was in the water; for while his body was being scraped with the strigil and rubbed, he either had some book read to him, or else would dictate himself. While upon a journey, as though relieved from every other care, he devoted himself to study, and nothing else. By his side was his secretary, with a book and tablets; and, in the winter time, the secretary’s hands were protected by gloves, that the severity of the weather might not deprive his master for a single moment of his services. It was for this reason also that, when at Rome, he would never move about except in a litter. I remember that on one occasion he found fault with me for walking—“You might have avoided losing all those hours,” said he; for he looked upon every moment as lost which was not devoted to study. It was by means of such unremitting industry as this that he completed so many works, and left me 160 volumes of notes, written extremely small on both sides, which in fact renders the collection doubly voluminous.

*dictates first encyclopedia after listening to audiobooks*

[Anonymous No.19607405]

>>19607030
he's literally me

[Anonymous No.19608269]

>all these early morning fuckers
>I have to be up at 6:30 for work
Bros, is it over for me? Is my future as a writer confined to the evenings forever?

[Anonymous No.19608713]

>>19608269
I write primarily in the evenings. 4pm-10pm is prime time. of course if i have nothing to do in a given day i can write 9am until midnight.

if i woke up at 3am to write i would literally fall over dead. guess i need more coffee and/or crack for that.

[Anonymous No.19609617]

>>19602317
damn this nigga might be the greatest smoke blower of all time

[Books on learning Ancient Gree(...) No.19609679]

>>19602317
>“I must pursue my goal through thick and thin and I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine,”
>“I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff,”
>Marx relied on his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels to send him regular handouts
>which Marx promptly misspent, having no money-management skills whatsoever
>In fact, he later applied for a post as a railway clerk, but was rejected because of his illegible handwriting.

[Anonymous No.19609872]

>>19599089
>in extremely disagreeable clarity
kek

[Anonymous No.19610581]

>>19601565
Dam...if only Dave Ramsey

[Anonymous No.19610589]

>>19602167
being poor sucks
starving artist/victim/saint is a meme

[Anonymous No.19610708]

>>19602317
>never learned how to properly do some handwriting, a calligraphylet in the worst of times
>sits in a museum much like a disgusting meth addicted hobo would sit inside a library today
>writes like a teenager in his journal despite reaching an advanced age. never matured.
>causes great harm and perils upon his family for no reason other than his ego, pointing to a embarrassingly absent sense of personal responsibility
>zero management skills. never bothered to learn. doesn't even realize where he's messing up.
>writes about workers' rights, never worked in his entire life. fuckin kek.
>and last but not least, he lead a parasitic life by shamelessly leeching on his FRIEND'S FATHER's hard earned money that was getting stolen. He was stealing money from a regular, elderly person's pocket. This is absolutely insane.
My god, this is some fuckin chris chan ''working'' on sonichu while surviving with borb's money and welfare checks tier bullshit. I am appalled.
Marxfags, i'm asking this with the utmost seriousness: How can you ever respect a man like this?

[Anonymous No.19611300]

>>19607071
i read that as elder pinoy