Writer Stephen King starts every day at 8 to 8:30 a.m. and doesn’t stop until he reaches his daily goal of 2,000 words, usually between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Before sitting down to write, he takes a multivitamin with a glass of water or cup of tea and makes sure the papers on his desk are arranged meticulously. “The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day,” he told his biographer, Lisa Rogak, “seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.” Choreographer Twyla Tharp’s dance begins at 5:30 a.m., when she wakes up, throws on her workout clothes, and hails a cab to her gym on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put into my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab,” she wrote in her book, The Creative Habit. “The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.” Author Maya Angelou’s solution was to go into isolation. She had trouble writing in her beautifully appointed home because, as she said, “I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.” So she rented a small hotel room with a bed, a wash basin, and little else. “I try to get there around seven, and I work until two in the afternoon,” she told interviewer Claudia Tate. “If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvelous.” On returning home, Angelou showered and prepared dinner, so that when her husband arrived, she wouldn’t be totally absorbed in her work. But sometimes after dinner she would read to him what she’d written that day. “He doesn’t comment,” she added. “I don’t invite comments from anyone but my editor, but hearing it aloud is good. Sometimes I hear the dissonance; then I try to straighten it out in the morning.” —Maya Angelou Like many novelists, Bernard Malamud stuck to a disciplined routine—from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day—which usually resulted in a page or two of finished copy. But he scoffed at the idea of mimicking the work rituals of great writers. “You write by sitting down and writing,” he once said. “There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature…. The real mystery to crack is you.”
Jill Suttie April 4, 2017
Crystal Goh May 16, 2016
