Kurt Vonnegut |
A writer who waits for ideal conditions
under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily
routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I
pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic
Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of
my favorite authors. Enjoy.
Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of
working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the
question of routines in this 2010 interview:
My passions drive me to the typewriter
every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I
never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me,
and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right
now and finish this.
[…]
I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms
and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a
small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with
the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later
on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and found a
basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter, you
could buy thirty minutes of typing time.
Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of
incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview:
I need an hour alone before dinner, with a
drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon
because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the
pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then
I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following
these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have
anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and
start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low
spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is
sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to
finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next
to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and
start typing.
E. B. White, in the same fantastic
interview that gave us his timeless insight on the role and responsibility of
the writer, notes his relationship with sound and ends on a note echoing
Tchaikovsky on work ethic:
I never listen to music when I’m working. I
haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other
hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a
living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway
to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a
lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room
to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me. A girl
pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me
particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was
unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been
protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence,
the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a
writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it,
I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to
work will die without putting a word on paper.
Jack Kerouac describes his rituals and
superstitions in 1968:
I had a ritual once of lighting a candle
and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night …
also kneeling and praying before starting (I got that from a French movie about
George Frideric Handel) … but now I simply hate to write. My superstition? I’m
beginning to suspect the full moon. Also I’m hung up on the number nine though
I’m told a Piscean like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do
nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a
slipper, and touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This
is incidentally more than yoga, it’s an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling
me ‘unbalanced’ after that. Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another
‘ritual’ as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my
energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife,
and the ever-present kitties. Okay?
He then adds a few thought on the best time
and place for writing:
The desk in the room, near the bed, with a
good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home,
but if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or
pad: peace.
Susan Sontag resolves in her diary in 1977,
adding to her collected wisdom on writing:
Starting tomorrow — if not today:
I will get up every morning no later than
eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)
I will have lunch only with Roger [Straus].
(‘No, I don’t go out for lunch.’ Can break this rule once every two weeks.)
I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)
I will tell people not to call in the
morning, or not answer the phone.
I will try to confine my reading to the
evening. (I read too much — as an escape from writing.)
I will answer letters once a week. (Friday?
— I have to go to the hospital anyway.)
Then, in a Paris Review interview nearly
two decades later, she details her routine:
I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a
pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. I like
the slowness of writing by hand. Then I type it up and scrawl all over that.
And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand and directly
on the typewriter, until I don’t see how to make it any better. Up to five
years ago, that was it. Since then there is a computer in my life. After the
second or third draft it goes into the computer, so I don’t retype the whole
manuscript anymore, but continue to revise by hand on a succession of hard-copy
drafts from the computer.
[…]
I write in spurts. I write when I have to
because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has
matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under
way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I
forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working
and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.
In 1932, under a section titled Daily
Routine, Henry Miller footnotes his 11 commandments of writing with this
wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:
MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as
stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of
section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section
at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafés.
Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if
wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor
program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make
corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight
to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional
bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for
references once a week.
In this 1965 interview, Simone de Beauvoir
contributes to dispelling the “tortured-genius” myth of writing:
I’m always in a hurry to get going, though
in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten
o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after
that, at five o’clock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no
difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, I’ll read
the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most often it’s a pleasure to work.
[…]
If the work is going well, I spend a
quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day before, and I make a few
corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the thread I have
to read what I’ve done.
Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote
standing (“Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his
oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the
reading board chest-high opposite him.”), approaches his craft with equal parts
poeticism and pragmatism:
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 the next day that is hard to get through.
Don DeLillo tells The Paris Review in 1993:
I work in the morning at a manual
typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off
one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of
interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back
into book time, which is transparent — you don’t know it’s passing. No snack
food or coffee. No cigarettes — I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is
clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his
solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window,
reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a
photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóín.
The face of Borges against a dark background — Borges fierce, blind, his
nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth
looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a
kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of
it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked — but the photograph
shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So
I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld
of magic, art, and divination.
Haruki Murakami shares the mind-body
connection noted by some of history’s famous creators:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get
up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km
or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I
go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The
repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I
mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
William Gibson tells the Paris Review in
2011:
When I’m writing a book I get up at seven.
I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup
of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven.
Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give
myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really
trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it
some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not
dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
[…]
As I move through the book it becomes more
demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is
roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it’s a
seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day.
Toward the end of a book, the state of
composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if
I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all
the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always
glad to see the back of that.
Maya Angelou shares her day with Paris
Review in 1990:
I write in the morning and then go home
about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard
work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop — I’m a
serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine,
thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have
houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all
the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than
not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three.
That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to
blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them — fifty
acceptable pages — it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many
times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a
semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him
things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it.
Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his
suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what?
Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again.
About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at
the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people.
Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the
other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the
editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.
Anaïs Nin simply notes, in a 1941
parenthetical comment, in the third volume of her diaries:
I write my stories in the morning, my diary
at night.
She then adds in the fifth volume, in 1948.
I write every day. … I do my best work in
the morning.
Lastly, the Kurt Vonnegut routine that
inspired this omnibus, recorded in a letter to his wife in 1965:
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and
hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.
I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What
they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at
home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the
nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half
an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the
afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach of prepare. When I get home from school
at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and
water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town.
There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots
of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and
sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but
maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged
man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my
heart broken.
For more wisdom from beloved authors,
complement with Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, Joy Williams on why
writers write, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11
commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6
pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.
Źródło: Brain Pickings/Books
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