Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (25 page)

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

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

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

“
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
:

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.”

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

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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