Miscellaneous

Additional anecdotes of writers’ preferred time I’ve collected:

• Kazuo Ishiguro (2014 interview): morning+evening

  I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9AM to 10:30PM, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner.

  The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 196, 2008_16ya) outlines non-crash writing:

  I usually write from ten o’clock in the morning until about six o’clock. I try not to attend to e-mails or telephone calls until about four o’clock.

• Dan Brown (profile): morning (>4AM–noon)

  Mr. Brown, 53, spent four years writing and researching the book. He is nothing if not disciplined. He rises at 4AM each day and prepares a smoothie comprising “blueberries, spinach, banana, coconut water, chia seeds, hemp seeds and … what’s the other kind of seed?” he asked. “Flax seeds, and this sort of weird protein powder made out of peas.” He also makes so-called bulletproof coffee, with butter and coconut oil, which he says changes “the way your brain processes the caffeine” so as to sharpen your mind. His computer is programmed to freeze for 60 seconds each hour, during which time Mr. Brown performs push-ups, situps and anything else he needs to do. Though he stops writing at noon, it’s hard for him to get the stories out of his head. “It’s madness,” he said of his characters. “They talk to you all day.”

• Philip Pullman (profile): late morning–early afternoon (10AM–1PM)

  Every day from roughly 10 until 1, Pullman sits at his desk in a monkish study at the top of the house and produces three pages, longhand. He has written three pages a day ever since he started writing. Habit, he is fond of saying, has written far more books than talent. The ritual is sacred. As is the space. “Nobody’s photographed this, and nobody will ever photograph this,” he told me, both fierce and faintly amused by the severity of his own rule. “I’m superstitious about that, very superstitious about that.”…For a man whose novels are restless, whose characters never stop traveling, Pullman leads a relatively static life. After the morning shift at his desk, he spends his afternoons either tending to the 800-odd trees he and Judith have planted in the fields behind their house or in his carpentry workshop, where he makes things like reading stands and chopsticks. Occasionally, he drives an elderly woman in the village to the library, and he goes to the cinema once a week with his publisher and close friend David Fickling and their wives. “I have the company of the people I’m writing about,” Pullman told me. “Jude and I are quite happy here with our hermit-like existence.”

• Ian Fleming (Playboy Interviews II, December 1964_60ya interview; pg56–57): morning+evening (10AM–noon, 6–7PM)

  Playboy: Do you spend most of your time there at the typewriter?

  Ian Fleming: By no means. I get up with the birds, which is about half-past 7, because they wake one up, and then I go and bathe in the ocean before breakfast. We don’t have to wear a swimsuit there, because it’s so private; my wife and I bathe and swim a hundred yards or so and come back and have a marvelous proper breakfast with some splendid scrambled eggs made by my housekeeper, who’s particularly good at them, and then I sit out in the garden to get a sunburn until about 10. Only then do I set to work. I sit in my bedroom and type about fifteen hundred words straightaway, without looking back on what I wrote the day before. I have more or less thought out what I’m going to write, and, in any case, even if I make a lot of mistakes, I think, well, hell, when the book’s finished I can change it all. I think the main thing is to write fast and cursively in order to get narrative speed.

  “Then, about quarter-past 12, I chuck that and go down, with a snorkel and a spear, around the reefs looking for lobsters or whatever there may be, sometimes find them, sometimes don’t, and then I come back, I have a couple of pink gins, and we have a very good lunch, ordinary Jamaican food, and I have a siesta from about half-past 2 until 4. Then I sit again in the garden for about an hour or so, have another swim, and then I spend 6–7—the dusk comes very suddenly in Jamaica; at 6 o’clock it suddenly gets very dark—doing another five hundred words. I then number the pages, of which by that time there are about seven, put them away 1n a folder, and have a couple of powerful drinks, then dinner, occasionally a game of Scrabble with my wife—at which she thinks she is very much better than I am, but I know I’m the best—and straight off to bed and into a dead sleep.”

  Playboy: And you return to England in March with a completed manuscript?

  Ian Fleming: Except for minor revisions, yes.

• Joseph Campbell (quoted from The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work): researched/studied in multiple blocks morning-evening

  So during the years of the Depression I had arranged a schedule for myself. When you don’t have a job or anyone to tell you what to do, you’ve got to fix one for yourself. I divided the day into 4 four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four-hour periods, and free one of them. By getting up a 8 o’clock in the morning, by 9 I could sit down to read. That meant that I used the first hour to prepare my own breakfast and take care of the house and put things together in whatever shack I happened to be living in at the time. Then three hours of that first four-hour period went to reading. Then came an hour break for lunch and another three-hour unit. And then comes the optional next section. It should normally be three hours of reading and then an hour out for dinner and then three hours free and an hour getting to bed so I’m in bed by 12. On the other hand, if I were invited out for cocktails or something like that, then I would put the work hour in the evening and the play hour in the afternoon. It worked very well. I would get nine hours of sheer reading done in a day. And this went on for five years straight. You get a lot done in that time.

• Charles Dickens (based on Charles Dickens: A Life, Tomalin 2011_13ya, cited by McCrum): morning–afternoon (9AM–2PM)

  But then, as you go deeper into Tomalin, you discover that Dickens, in his prime, used to compress his literary energies into five hours, roughly 9am to 2pm, after which he would walk incessantly, and put his mind into neutral. He might return to what he’d written in the morning later in the evening, but those five hours held the key to his output.

• Robert Frost (McCrum): afternoon-late evening (?-3AM)

  Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later.

• Winston Churchill (as cited to The Last Lion, Manchester): morning+late evening (~11AM–1:15PM, 11PM–2AM)

  Once all the newspapers have been perused, it’s time to answer the enormous amount of mail Churchill receives each day. A secretary stands by as Churchill dictates (his preferred method of “writing”) correspondence to private citizens and government officials. Once the mail is finished, it’s time to dictate memoranda and greet any visitors who have stopped by Chartwell. “He will receive anyone except the King in his bedchamber,” and visitors are often tickled by the image which greets them; Vice Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg said he presented “a most extraordinary spectacle, perched up in a huge bed, with the whole of the counterpane littered with dispatch boxes, red and all colours, and a stenographer sitting at the foot—Mr. Churchill himself with an enormous Corona in his mouth.” Churchill’s next task is to look through galley proofs of the latest book he’s working on, and ask his chief researcher to check and verify certain details. At this point, he often begins to work on his speeches. He paces the room, issuing phrase after phrase at a speed his secretaries have trouble keeping up with. Churchill, one of them recalls, would be “dashing around in shorts and undershirt and a bright red cummerbund while I trotted behind him from room to room with a pad and pencil struggling to keep pace with the torrential flow of words.” This flow of masterful oratory increases as the wordsmith warms up and finds his groove; “By noon the cadences of his prose have begun to trot; by 1:00PM they are galloping.” Lunch is at 1:15, so Churchill sets aside business and gets dressed to the nines (hence the aforementioned cummerbund)…Churchill believes his afternoon naps help him be much more productive. He has found that he can only produce good writing for a few hours at a stretch, before his brain gets tired and the quality diminishes. So by breaking up his schedule with a nap, he is able to have two creative working periods each day—one in the morning and one late at night—while also having time for socializing and duck feeding…The guests have gone home or retired to their bedrooms to stay over, Churchill begins his second working shift of the day. It’s 11:00 PM, and most of his fellow Englishmen are sleeping, but Churchill is rearing to go. He slips into something more comfortable and asks his aides to join him in the library:

  His appearance heralded by the harff, harff of his slippers, he enters the room in his scarlet, green, and gold dressing gown, the cords trailing behind him. Before greeting his researcher and the two secretaries on duty tonight, he must read the manuscript he dictated the previous evening and then revise the latest galleys, which arrived a few hours earlier from London. Since Churchill’s squiggled red changes exceed the copy set—the proofs look as though several spiders stained in crimson ink wandered across the pages—his printers’ bills are shocking. But the expense is offset by his extraordinary fluency. Before the night is out, he will have dictated between four thousand and five thousand words. On weekends he may exceed ten thousand words.

  Churchill’s night usually ends around 2 am, but when there is extra work to be done, he may not retire until 3 or 4.

• Frank Herbert (1969-02-03 interview with Willis McNelly): morning+evening (5PM–1AM and 5AM–7AM)

  Willis McNelly: What is your writing schedule?

  Frank Herbert: Well, it varies…depends on what I’m doing…writing for the magazine…but as a general rule it goes like this: I’ll get home somewhere around 5 o’clock when Bev is here, when she’s not working as she has been the last couple of weeks. She’ll have dinner ready at that time or very close to that time. I’ll then take an hour’s nap and then work sometimes until 1 o’clock in the morning. Then I hit the sack and get up and sometimes if a story is strong in me I get up in the morning and write…get up at 5 o’clock in the morning or so and write for an hour or two sometimes before going down to San Francisco.

  WM: Yes.

  FH: And this is the thing I want to get out of because I can write 8 hours a day in 2 bursts and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be doing what I want…writing what I want to write during those times. I don’t envision supporting myself entirely by science fiction writing in the sense of writing only science fiction, because I have other axes to grind, too.

• Harry Harrison (McNelly interview with Frank Herbert): afternoon (12:30PM–5PM)

  Willis McNelly: It’s interesting…Harry Harrison describes the writing process with him rather well in a tape I made with him a few months ago. He is absolutely uninterruptible from, say, 12:30 in the afternoon ’til 5:00 at night, because the ideas as they form in his mind sort of becomes extensions of his [cough] excuse me, fingers in his typewriter and that they are up here and that …that any interruption, whether it be a telephone ringing or his wife knocking at the door or anything at all is liable to shatter that idea as it transforms itself into paper.

• Brandon Sanderson (FAQ): afternoon+late evening (noon–5PM, 8PM–3AM)

  When I was in college, I got a job working the graveyard shift at a hotel, which was great for my writing because I was there most weeknights from 11 pm until 7 am, and the only requirements that they put me to were, “Just don’t fall asleep. Do whatever you want, just don’t fall asleep. We need you awake in case there’s an emergency or if anyone comes in.” I ended up spending a lot of my time working on novels during those early morning hours, and that’s how I was able to pay for school, attend it full-time, and still have time for writing. I still do most of my writing in the middle of the night…

  2012 chat interview:

  Sanderson works best at night. “I get up about noon,” he says, “write until five, and then spend a few hours with the family before starting work again about eight o’clock and then I write until the early morning hours. I often don’t get to bed before three am.” He did try getting up at what most people would consider to be a more normal hour, but after a few weeks his wife capitulated, saying, “This routine is making you miserable. Go back to being a night owl!”

  2013 Goodreads interview:

  BS: I work until about 4 a.m., and then I don’t wake up until noon. The job I do lets me have the weirdest sleep schedule ever, because sometimes I sleep for like three hours, and then I get up and work and go back to bed. An average day for me is two four-to-six-hour writing blocks during this time. In each, I try to write at least 1,500 words, and I am somewhat goal based. I have a tread desk that I walk on while I type a lot of the time. It’s not like I am getting any real exercise because it’s moving like one mile per hour, but it is good for just moving and not just sitting there. I write in my bedroom. I have an easy chair that I also sit in.

  “I get done at about 5:30, and I go out and play with my kids and hang out with my family and do all the stuff that dads and husbands do, then I put my kids to bed, hang out with my wife for a bit, then usually go back to work at about 9 or 10 and get my second block.”

  2023 Wired profile:

  It’s not that Brandon Sanderson can’t write. It’s more that he can’t not write. Graphomania is the name of the condition: the constant compulsion to get words out, down, as much and as quickly as possible. The concept of a vacation confuses Sanderson, he once said, because for him the perfect vacation is more time to write—vocation as vacation. His schedule is budgeted down to the minute, months out, to maximize the time he spends, rather counter-ergonomically, on the couch, typing away. Most days, he wakes up at 1 pm, exercises, and writes for four hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for four more. After that he plays video games or whatever until 5 am. A powerful sleeping pill is all that works, finally, to get him, and the voices in his head, to shut up.

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in writing The Little Prince preferred evenings, starting at 11PM, or even later, as described by Lewis Galantière in 1947

  Saint-Exupéry wrote beautifully, but at the price of great effort. He went out rarely, but he had friends in almost every day to lunch and dinner. In the evening, when his friends had gone, he would brew himself a great pot of coffee and sit down to work at his dining table (his desk served merely as a catchall in which his checkbook could never be found). Now and then he would write in an all-night restaurant, where, having eaten a dish of raw chopped beef drowned in olive oil and crusted with pepper, be was likely to scribble from 2 in the morning until dawn. When be had written himself stiff, be would stretch out at home on a sofa under a lamp, take up the mouthpiece of a dictaphone, and record his copy, revising as he went along. Then, towards 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning, he would go to bed. The secretary would come in at 9 and type while be slept. Often, when friends arrived for lunch at 1 o’clock, they would ring and pound for 20 minutes before he woke up and let them in.

• Neil Gaiman is described as a night owl (eg. collaborators interviewed in Conversations With the Dream King describe him as phoning them usually late at night or as a ‘vampire’)

• Donald Hall

  Back then, I wrote all day, getting up at five. By this time, I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until seven. I drink coffee before I pick up a pen. I look through the newspaper. I try to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me down by ten o’clock.

• Hunter Thompson: Carroll’s biography includes a supposed daily schedule where Thompson starts writing at midnight until 6AM (but the schedule is so clearly exaggerated & humorous in the level of drug use claimed that I don’t know how seriously to take any of it); one of his editors, Terry McDonnell says “When he got you on the phone in the middle of the night to listen to someone in his kitchen read to you what he had just written, all you could say was that it sounded good and that he should send it to you”; a collection of letters includes him telling a landlady to put down carpets so his typing late at night won’t keep her up; his Paris Review interviewer describes him as keeping late hours on “Owl Farm” and the interview went into the night, where he describes his first writing job as having the advantage of letting him write entirely at night. All together, there’s no doubt Thompson preferred late night, and midnight–6AM specifically does seem plausible.

• Michel Houellebecq (2018 roundtable): “The author does not have any special routine for writing, he just likes to start working early in the morning.”

  From The Art of Fiction No. 206, 2010_14ya:

  Interviewer: What is your writing schedule now?

  Houellebecq: I wake up during the night around one a.m. I write half-awake in a semi-conscious state. Progressively, as I drink coffee, I become more conscious. And I write until I’m sick of it.

  Interviewer: Do you have other requirements for writing?

  Houellebecq: Flaubert said you had to have a permanent erection. I haven’t found that to be the case. I need to take a walk now and then. Otherwise, in terms of dietary requirements, coffee works, it’s true. It takes you through all the different stages of consciousness. You start out semi-comatose. You write. You drink more coffee and your lucidity increases, and it’s in that in-between period, which can last for hours, that something interesting happens.

• Ursula K. Le Guin, 1988 interview (ideal daily schedule presented as a bulleted list)

• Gene Wolfe, “The Wolfe & Gaiman Show” (September 2002_22ya interview in Locus #500):

  Gene Wolfe: …We sold the house in Ohio and I became a staff member [technical editor] on Plant Engineer [magazine]. What I did mostly was get up early in the morning and write for one to two hours. One of the good things about working for this magazine was that in ten minutes I could get from my front door to my desk, which gave me more writing time. I often wake up during the night, and I had rule that if it was after 4 a.m. I got up for the day, and I would write until Rosemary had breakfast ready. Then of course I wrote on Saturdays and Sundays as everybody does, and the holidays.

  Neil Gaiman: Was there a big change when you retired and became a full-time writer?

  Gene Wolfe: Yes and no. I had written on vacation, and this was like I was on vacation all the time. All I had to do was write. It was really neat. This was cruel of me, but I would set the clock radio to a station that gave traffic reports for commuters. They would be saying, ‘Oh, the Kennedy is wall-to-wall today. It’s an hour and a half from over here to the Loop,’ and I would get up and yawn and stretch and say, ‘I don’t have to be down there.’ So I’d brush my teeth, start the coffee, and go over to the desk and write.

  1981 interview:

  This is my current schedule … it changes, depending on how things are going. I get up at 5:15 a.m., shave, wash my face and by about a quarter to six, I’m in the basement at the typewriter and I write till about a quarter to eight and then Rosemary has my breakfast ready. I write each morning. But when things get tight, and I’m up against a deadline, I also write in the evening … now I’m a technical editor. I was an engineer for sixteen years. But I am now a senior editor on the staff of Plant Engineering magazine. Basically, my writing experience combined with the engineering degree, too, enabled me to get this job which is, frankly, a good job and a lot of fun.

• Max Lugavere (2019 profile):

  I’m up somewhere between 7 and 8. I don’t use an alarm clock. I go straight into the kitchen and drink a tall glass of room-temperature water…I’ll grab a cup of coffee that I’ve cold-brewed overnight and park myself in front of the computer to read the latest health related news. My go-to sites are EurekAlert!, Twitter, Science Daily and The New York Times. I also come up with a new post for my Instagram. I do one post a day and try to make it as interesting as possible…I spend a good two hours working on my book. It’s all about how to live your best life and avoid cognitive decline through your diet and lifestyle…Ben and Andrew usually head to bed around midnight. I may do a little more writing and go to sleep myself.

• A. E. Housman (The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933_91ya):

  I know how this stuff came into existence; and though I have no right to assume that any other poetry came into existence in the same way, yet I find reason to believe that some poetry, and quite good poetry, did. Wordsworth for instance says that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and Burns has left us this confession, “I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish rather than the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose”. In short I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process; and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster.

  …Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon—beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life—I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so, then perhaps the spring would bubble up again.

• John Peale Bishop (Ghiselin 1952_72ya, The Creative Process: A Symposium)

  Ghiselin, in the preface (pg20) of The Creative Process: A Symposium (which focuses largely but not entirely on the arts & fiction), commenting on writing styles, states:

  Practical guidance can often be deduced from the general principles alone. Most writers find it easier to work in the morning—as one should expect, since then the mind has not been so much incited from without, focused, and fixed. John Peale Bishop recommended going as soon as possible from sleep to the writing desk. On the other hand, A.E. Housman wrote his poems mostly in the afternoon. Others have preferred to do their work at night. How shall we turn such information to guidance unless we understand that the time for work should be that time when the excited mind moves most free of the encumbrances of its consciously supported order? If we cannot because of circumstances choose the best time, we may be able to help ourselves through reducing the schematic fixation that interferes with production.

  The detail about Housman is easy to attribute to Ghiselin’s selection in the volume of The Name and Nature of Poetry, but I have not been able to trace the Bishop statement any further. (While now highly obscure, Bishop extensively corresponded or interacted with major literary figures of his time such as Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, making it hard to sort through all the hits for his name, and uses of keywords like ‘sleep’ or ‘writing desk’ didn’t work.)

• Danielle Steele (2019 Glamour profile):

  The author has written 179 books…Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she’s at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989_35ya Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact. To pull it off, she works 20 to 22 hours a day. (A few times a month, when she feels the crunch, she spends a full 24 hours at her desk.)

  …Steel is a creature of habit. She gets to her office—down the hall from her bedroom—by 8:00 A.M., where she can often be found in her cashmere nightgown. In the morning she’ll have one piece of toast and an iced decaf coffee (she gave up full-throated caffeine 25 years ago). As the day wears on, she’ll nibble on miniature bittersweet chocolate bars. “Dead or alive, rain or shine, I get to my desk and I do my work. Sometimes I’ll finish a book in the morning, and by the end of the day, I’ve started another project,” Steel says.

  She credits her boundless energy for her productivity…Her output is also the result of a near superhuman ability to run on little sleep. “I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor. If I have four hours, it’s really a good night for me,” Steel says. She’s always been like this, even as a kid growing up in France. Instead of playing with friends after school, she’d come home, immediately devour her homework, then set to work on her own stories. By 19, Steel had written her first book.

  …Her son told her that he never works past a certain time at the office, a model of that elusive work-life balance. Steel balks. “They expect to have a nice time,” she says. “And pardon me, but I think your twenties and a good part of your thirties are about working hard so that you have a better quality of life later on. I mean, I never expected that quality of life at 25. I had three jobs at the same time, and after work I wrote. Now it’s a promise that it’s all going to be fun.”

  …When asked if she plans to retire, give it all up, shop in Paris, sail in the South of France, even just take a nap—her answer is swift and serious. “When I was first starting out, I had the same agent as Agatha Christie. I was about 19 years old and she was in her nineties. I met her once, and I remember she said, ‘I want to die face-first in my typewriter.’ And I feel that way. I mean, I want to go on forever, just writing.”

  2006 interview with The Age:

  It’s not as if she had nothing to do—Steel began writing her books at night, often making do with only four hours of sleep, in order to be there for her children during the day, and she still keeps to the same grueling schedule, hammering away at the same 1946_78ya Olympia typewriter she has always used. But writing isn’t enough any more.

  2017 interview/profile with Vanity Fair:

  Danielle Steel’s wildly popular novels have made her a household name, and as the founder of the Nick Traina Foundation—so called after her late son—the mother of nine is also an ardent advocate for mental-health awareness…“On the walls of my office are framed covers of my books and sayings that I love. One favorite, since I work very late: ‘What hath night to do with sleep?’”

  Despite being 71 in 2019, Steel has apparently kept to her schedule. While her claimed work habits have been regarded skeptically, she apparently wrote all those novels herself (unlike other extraordinarily prolific authors like James Patterson who lean heavily on collaborators or ghost-writers & are more like ‘brands’ than authors), and in general, fits a classic profile of “short sleepers” (which has been linked to rare genetic mutations): often working multiple jobs or engaged in many projects simultaneously (in Steel’s case, art galleries & mental health activism in addition to novel-writing), preferring (not merely enduring) half or less normal sleep durations and unable to sleep normal hours without it being unpleasant, with short-sleeping patterns emerging in childhood/adolescence. It would be interesting to know if any of her 8 (non-adoptive) children or grandchildren keep similar hours.

• Sherrilyn Kenyon (personal website, “A day in the life…”)

  • 7 PM: Avoid ringing phone which most likely isn’t for me. Dodge into office to start the real writing time.

  • 7:03 PM: Glare at hubby who has decided to sit in my office while he chats on the phone with his mother. Why? Hubby grins, and continues talking about nonsense and people I don’t know.

  • 3:30–4 AM: head to bed, wondering where the time went (unless oldest is still up and decides that he needs help plotting, or with characters, but really, at 4 AM my brain is again mush and I can’t postulate what chromosomal damage would cause fire-eating, ice dragons from Mars).

• B. F. Skinner, B. F. Skinner: A Life, Bjork 1993_31ya, pg216–217:

  On the surface, Skinner’s later years seemed conventional: He retired from Harvard in 1974_50ya and was presented with a first edition of Thoreau’s Walden…On closer inspection, however, he had continued the intensity of his intellectual life…The circadian rhythm of his writing schedule did not miss a beat. A timer rang at midnight signaling him to arise, move to his desk, and writing until signaled to stop at one o’clock. He returned to bed and arose again to the sound of the timer at five o’clock and composed until it buzzed two hours later. He write three hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included. As the years passed, these three early morning hours were, as he often said, “the most reinforcing part of my day.”¹⁴ The other twenty-one hours were arranged to make the writing time as profitable as possible…During the last decade of his life he frequently listened to Wagnerian music, usually in mid-afternoon, relaxing after the rigors of early morning writing and thinking.

  pg21 (shortly before death):

  …Toward the far end of the study, facing each other on opposite walls, are a long wooden writing desk and a bright yellow sleeping cubicle, complete with stereo system, storage compartment for musical tapes—especially Wagner—and a timer which, with circadian-like rhythm, rang at five o’clock every morning for over twenty years to bring B. F. Skinner to his writing desk, like a monk to his matins. For two hours every morning, until the timer rang again at seven, one of America’s most controversial intellectuals worked on the papers, articles, and books that would define and defend a science he called the experimental analysis of behavior.

• Candace Bushnell, NYT profile

  At 11ish I write for the next hour. I get creative and problem solve. I make little videos and songs on GarageBand. It’s good for your brain. When I moved back to Connecticut, I wrote a lot, and I gained a lot of confidence in myself. I learned to sit and be with myself without needing distractions. That gives me a lot of strength.

• Peter Morgan, “How the Man Behind The Crown Made the Monarchy Relevant Again: At a time when the British royals have never seemed more anachronistic, Peter Morgan has shown viewers why it isn’t easy being queen.”, NYT 2019:

  Morgan rises early every day and sits down at his desk around 6 a.m. Hours will pass in fruitful silence. Unlike others in his line of work, however, he is not incorrigibly solitary. Once a week, a team of researchers, which doubles as a kind of writers’ room, comes over to his house in Central London for script meetings, based in part on documents they’ve dug up pertaining to whichever episode he happens to be working on. These could be anything from contemporary press clippings to transcripts of original interviews with those who witnessed, or participated in, the events he is in the process of imaginatively reconstructing. “He’s not precious about the material,” Annie Sulzberger, the show’s head of research (and the sister of The New York Times’ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger), told me. “As a researcher, you find a detail and you think, Wow, I hope this makes the cut. That doesn’t mean anything to him. If something doesn’t move the plot along, or reveal character, or tell us something relevant about Britain at the time, it doesn’t have a place.” Morgan isn’t precious about the scripts themselves either. “If something isn’t working in rehearsal he’ll say, ‘Can you hang on a minute? Just talk amongst yourselves’”, Colman told me. “Five minutes later it’ll be, ‘O.K., try that.’ And sure enough he’s just churned out a brilliant speech.”

• Brendan Behan, Wikipedia (no clear sources):

  He left Ireland and all its perceived social pressures to live in Paris in the early 1950s. There he felt he could lose himself and release the artist within. Although he still drank heavily, he managed to earn a living, supposedly by writing pornography. By the time he returned to Ireland, he had become a writer who drank too much, rather than a drinker who talked about what he was going to write. He had also developed the knowledge that to succeed, he would have to discipline himself. Throughout the rest of his writing career, he would rise at seven in the morning and work until noon—when the pubs opened.

• Anthony Trollope, chapter 15, An Autobiography, 1883_141ya:

  The work that I did during the twelve years that I remained there, 1859^–₁₂1871_153ya, was certainly very great…I did the work of a surveyor of the General Post Office, and so did it as to give the authorities of the department no slightest pretext for fault-finding. I hunted always at least twice a week. I was frequent in the whist-room at the Garrick. I lived much in society in London, and was made happy by the presence of many friends at Waltham Cross. In addition to this we always spent six weeks at least out of England. Few men, I think, ever lived a fuller life. And I attribute the power of doing this altogether to the virtue of early hours. It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5:30 A. M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me…By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.

  All those I think who have lived as literary men—working daily as literary labourers—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom—and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself—to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three hours were not devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases. I would strongly recommend this practice to all tyros in writing. That their work should be read after it has been written is a matter of course—that it should be read twice at least before it goes to the printers, I take to be a matter of course. But by reading what he has last written, just before he recommences his task, the writer will catch the tone and spirit of what he is then saying, and will avoid the fault of seeming to be unlike himself. This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year—the precise amount which so greatly acerbated the publisher in Paternoster Row, and which must at any rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man.

  I have never written three novels in a year, but by following the plan above described I have written more than as much as three volumes; and by adhering to it over a course of years, I have been enabled to have always on hand—for some time back now—one or two or even three unpublished novels in my desk beside me…In 1867_157ya I made up my mind to take a step in life which was not unattended with peril, which many would call rash, and which, when taken, I should be sure at some period to regret. This step was the resignation of my place in the Post Office.

  It is worth noting that biographers of Trollope have found that An Autobiography embellishes Trollope’s life in some cases; I wonder if Trollope really was as mercilessly methodical as he described himself, or if this is a case like Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” describing “The Raven” where Poe may have overegged the pudding.

• Jerry Saltz, “Episode 311: Jerry Saltz”, 2018-09-16

  To this day I wake up early and I have to get to my desk to write almost immediately. I mean fast. Before the demons get me. I got to get writing. And once I’ve written almost anything, I’ll pretty much write all day, I don’t leave my desk, I have no other life. I’m not part of the world except when I go to see shows.

• Mary Oliver, description in The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (dated 2017 but appears earlier without sourcing in the 2006_18ya Keillor-edited anthology Good Poems for Hard Times which were “Chosen by Garrison Keillor for his readings on public radio’s The Writer’s Almanac”—did Oliver give an interview prior to 2006_18ya or what?)

  Oliver said: “I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours. […] If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or 5 and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day—which is what I did.”…Oliver said: “I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.”

• Zoey Ellis, profile in NYT article about copyright dispute:

  One day last spring, Ms. Ellis met me for coffee at a hotel near Paddington Station. She doesn’t seem like someone who writes dark, edgy, sometimes violent erotica. She’s young, cheerful, and works in education in London, which is one of the reasons she declines to publish under her real name. Most days, she gets up at four in the morning to write, then heads to the school where she works. On her Amazon author page, she describes herself as a “cat mama” who loves “sexual tension that jumps off the page.” Ms. Ellis said she got into fan fiction in 2006_18ya.

• Jack London, 1903_121ya essay “Getting Into Print”:

  Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word-story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint”, and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.

  (London is often cited as having a rule of 1,000 or 1,500 words a day, but I didn’t find any direct quotes, and most of the citations point to his 1903_121ya essay which does not include that rule, so the rule may be simply an inference from his short but prolific career.)

• Astrid Lindgren, official Astrid Lindgren website (2020):

  Many people have borne witness to Astrid’s enormous capacity to work. Having time for a demanding publishing job at the same time as her own writing is undoubtedly admirable. In the mornings and before lunch, whilst still at home in bed, she wrote, or took down her own books in shorthand. And in the afternoons, after a quick lunch and a fast walk to the office on Tegnérgatan, she began her work as editor of children’s books.

• Joseph Conrad (1898_126ya):

  Boice 1997_27ya uses Conrad as an example of how natural binging might be worse than regular writing, pointing out Conrad’s poor health ascribed to the stress of binging, and that while he attempted to keep a schedule, by Conrad’s own account it typically failed:

  I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of 8 hours I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you…sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife. It’s no joking matter. After such crises of despair I doze for hours still half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again—and at last go to bed completely done-up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts. ⁹

  Conrad would only actually write in the evening. Boice 1997_27ya further points out that Conrad’s patron & collaborator, the ubiquitous novelist Ford Madox Ford, was able to temporarily enforce a regular writing schedule, so Conrad could complete Nostromo & One Day More; when the partnership fell apart & Conrad returned to his vices, the quality & quantity of Conrad’s fiction deteriorated with his health & business relationships.

• Susanna Clarke (2020, New Yorker)

  Often while I spoke to Clarke I could hear Greenland in the background, clinking dishes in the kitchen sink. Later, he told me that Clarke gets up much earlier than he does, and tries to write for the few hours when her energy is at its peak. By the afternoon, she needs to rest, and even in the morning her ability to participate in, say, a demanding conversation is limited to about an hour. She is very private about whatever she’s working on; in fact, she can be a little cagey about whether she’s working on anything at all. “She’s on her sofa with her laptop”, Greenland said. “And I don’t know if she’s playing a game, if she’s watching TV, if she’s writing e-mails, or if she’s working. It’s not apparent to me. She’s in her bubble. But what I do know is that, for a long while, she was too ill to write. And then, after that, she was writing fragments.”

• Kevin Kelly, 2017 interview

  Q. “Are there times of day that you tend to write?”

  A. “I mostly write at night. During the day I’ll do research, do interviews, do reading. I just find the psychological interruptions [during the day] difficult. I can write if it’s a very, very specific task. If I know what I need to write, I can write during the day. If I don’t know…”

  Q. “… then it’s a nocturnal thing.”

  A. “Exactly. What usually happens is that I’m writing along, and I’ll start to explain something, and I’ll realize “I have no idea; I thought I knew this thing, I thought I had total command.” So my writing is constantly interrupted by my own ignorance. I’ll realize, say, that I don’t really know what a neural net is; I can’t go any further until I master some degree of understanding what a neural net is.”

• Edwidge Danticat, 2020 interview:

  COWEN: What’s your most productive or most unusual work habit?

  DANTICAT: Working at night, and the older I’m getting, the harder it is to actually stay up all night, but I find that writing at night is really my most productive time because somehow, at night, you just feel everybody is safe in bed that I’m responsible for, and there’s not too many distractions. The internet is always there, but it’s just easier to imagine a whole other universe at night. I feel that that’s when I’m most productive.

• Harlan Coben, 2021 profile:

  Because Armstrong-Coben is a pediatrician—today, she is also a senior associate dean for admissions at Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University—before the pandemic, she had a daily commute. Coben stayed home, so he drove the kids to school, picked them up and took them wherever they needed to be. And in between, he would write. “I’m not great at writing in the house, though I’m better now”, Coben said in an interview last month, nearing the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 shutdowns in the United States. “I would take them off to whatever school, and then I would find a coffee shop or a library or any weird place. I keep changing places. Most writers have a set routine, a set place. My routine is to not have a routine.” While one of his sons was in high school, Coben spent six months writing at a Stop & Shop deli counter with a coffee stand next to it. “I came home smelling like olive loaf”, he said, but the pages were good. For his book “The Stranger”, he spent three weeks taking Ubers everywhere he went because he found he was writing well in the back seat. He finished the book that way.

  Goodreads interview:

  Well, I have four kids, so my first job is to get them off to school. One of them I have to drive, so my best workday lately is dropping him off at 8 a.m. and then hiding out in a coffee shop that is inside of a supermarket, which is a little weird. It’s a Starbucks near a deli counter. I’ve been writing there. I usually will write from 8 until noon. Some days I’ll catch another hour or two in the afternoon. The morning is my best time. I can write anyplace, and I change up my places a lot. It’s almost like riding a horse. Whatever seems to be working, I’ll do that until the horse collapses in exhaustion, and then I’ll find a new horse. Weirdly enough I was in New York, and I was writing in subways, and I was taking subway rides with a notebook and a pencil for a while. Sometimes I’ll write well while on an airplane, and I’ll start doing that as much as I can. Whatever works I will do. I don’t have that one office or that one corner room or a certain pair of socks. I’m mixing it up as much as I can.

• Brian Dear:

  Q. “When and where do you write?”

  A. “I wrote The Friendly Orange Glow [2017] all day long, morning, noon, and night. No particular pattern like some Famous Authors (“I get up at 5, drink my coffee, then write until 11”—not me). The last six months of writing, in 2016, are still a blur. I just entered a “zone” and tried to stay in it for months on end. It was the only way to get the manuscript done and to the publisher on time. I still do all of my writing on a Macbook Pro (with 30” Cinema Display) while I’m seated in an Aeron chair at a big Amazon door desk (google it) which I bought in Seattle in 1997_27ya after seeing the desks all over Amazon’s offices.”

• Larry McMurtry (unsourced statement in the 2021 article “How The Last Picture Show Changed The World’s View of Small Town Texas”, possibly based on his Books: A Memoir?)

  In January of this year, Footlick, the woman who wrote about being the real Jacy Farrow [in The Last Picture Show], died in North Carolina. Leachman died almost two weeks later. And on March 25, McMurtry, the writer who created all this beautiful trouble, died at the age of 84. A few days after his death, nobody answered the doorbell at his house in Archer City, a majestic, three-story mansion just down the road from the high school. Looking through the front window, everything seemed to me to be just the way he left it, from the table made from a giant dinosaur fossil to the towering shelves of books in every room. McMurtry bought this place, the biggest home in town, after he won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove [in 1986_38ya]. He’d wake up early in the morning, type for an hour and a half or so at his long oak table, then go to the bookstore to price antiquarian volumes. Most of the locals would leave him alone.

• James Patterson (GQ, 2023):

  …Though his productivity is due in large part to a stable of co-writers that he works with, it’s also a result of a daily routine that includes about eleven hours of reading and writing, one hour of golf, and many chats with his wife Susan. Here, he explains how he can re-work a draft of a novel in half an hour, how co-writing works, and why he prefers funerals to weddings.

  …Q. How many hours a day would you say that you… Well, I was going to say “work”, but I guess I’ll say “play” instead?

  A. I do what I do seven days a week. I’ll usually get up at 5:30 [AM] and work for an hour. Then, frequently, I will go out and hit a golf ball. They let me onto most of the courses I belong to very early, which is nice. If I come at 6:00, they say, “Go ahead.” I’ll go around for an hour, an hour and a half. Then I’m back here by 8:00 [AM], and then I’ll work till 6:00 [PM]. I’ll take a couple breaks if I need them, which I usually do. And obviously, what that [day] results in is more books than my publisher wants. That’s why I started doing non-fiction, because they said, “Okay, yeah, we can handle one or two non-fiction.”

  Q. …So this 8:00 [AM] to 6:00 [PM] routine—

  A. With breaks, with breaks. I’m very lucky because my wife and I, we love each other. We love hanging together. In my autobiography, I write, and this is true, every night, we go to sleep holding hands. And one of my comedic lines about her, which is also true, is, “If Sue ever leaves me, I’m going with her.” That’s another habit, another routine, but it’s a really good one. We are best friends, we love to talk to one another, and people who get together who don’t like to talk to together, that really makes it difficult. It’s just like, “You know, you’re really pretty….” That’s not enough.

  Q. During your daily routine, how much of that is spent writing, and how much is spent looking at other things that your co-authors have written?

  A. Well, it could be anything. Pretty much every day I’ll get stuff to read. In terms of the routine that we follow with the co-writers, in 95 percent of the cases I will write a 50- to 70- page outline. I then encourage the co-writer to contribute, because I want the contributions and I want them emotionally involved, which is important. If they’re just going to do a workman-like job, I don’t really want them. I want to see pages every couple of weeks, unlike publishers who say, go ahead, and then a year later go, this isn’t what I was looking for. But with every couple of weeks, I can say, “Wonderful”—which I love to say—”you’re the best, this is terrific, best pages ever.” Or I might say, “We’re going sideways here. We’ve lost the pace. This is not the tone of voice of a Women’s Murder Club story”, or, “We’re not buying this part”, or, “These three chapters seem flat.” It’s so much easier to deal with 30 pages than it is to deal with 400 pages.

  Q. When you’re writing, are you writing longhand?

  A. I write longhand, and then once I’ve typed one draft, my assistant gives me back pages which are triple-spaced, and I’ll write between the lines. I’ll cross off whatever I don’t like anymore, add new stuff. And then I’ll do the next draft in an hour, or half an hour, where all I do is to alter the new stuff. I don’t want to read the whole thing again, I’m assuming what I left is fine. So, I can do another draft in half an hour, usually. Let’s say it’s 40 pages, and let’s say I’ve added seven pages of additions. I can go over that and rewrite it. I’ll do two polishes with what’s there. But I don’t go over the whole thing again. Whatever I didn’t mess with it, I don’t mess with. And then, if I do another draft, I’ll do a draft on the whole thing.

• Yukio Mishima: it is widely mentioned in profiles of Japanese novelist Mishima that he would write strictly from midnight to dawn or ‘6AM’ (it is even mentioned in the 1985_39ya biographical film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters); it is unclear if there is a single source for this or if it was too well-known in Mishima’s well-documented high-profile life to need any sourcing.

  A representative example would be Donald Keene’s 1995 reminscence of his relationship with Mishima, prefacing a previously-unpublished 1958_66ya interview of Mishima:

  Despite his increasing attention to the affairs of the Shield Society (in addition to training the cadets, he also designed their uniforms and wrote a march song for the society), Mishima’s literary pursuits were not interrupted. He continued what had become a nightly routine, writing through the hours between midnight and dawn. In 1969_55ya, the first two volumes of his final work, The Sea of Fertility, were published; the same year he also wrote a ballet and two three-act plays. When the cadets threatened to interrupt his writing schedule with frequent nighttime visits, he rented the lower floor of a coffee shop, the Salon de Claire, where they could meet with him for two hours every Wednesday. Indeed, Mishima maintained a distinct separation between his two worlds: the members of the Shield Society were unfamiliar with his novels and plays, and Mishima thought literary youth unsuited to the military.

  Yourcenar’s Mishima: A vision of the Void (in the 2001_23ya translation by Alberto Manguel) describes the writing as more strictly partitioned by topic:

  Sickly and diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis in his early youth, Mishima, whatever the occupations and distractions which filled his life, allotted two hours a day to physical exercise intended to rebuild his body. This man, whom the flow of alcohol in bars and at literary parties did not manage to intoxicate, would shut himself up in his room, by midnight at the latest, to devote two hours to pulp literature, thereby raising the number of volumes in his complete works to thirty-six, though six or seven would have earned him glory. The rest of the night and the hours before dawn were dedicated to “his books.” It seems impossible that the mediocre, the false, and the prefabricated in literature produced for the enjoyment of the reading masses—the reading but unthinking masses, who expect the writer to give back to them their own image of the world, contrary to the demands of the writer’s own genius—should not frequently seep into his true works of art, and this is a problem that we must try to resolve when reading The Sea of Fertility. But the reverse experiment has never been tried: since none of the minor works intended for popular consumption have been translated, we cannot search in that tangle of themes better developed elsewhere—and it would in any event be a waste of time to do so—for dazzling or sharp images, episodes pregnant with truth, which would have found their way into these works as if inadvertently, and which belong instead to his “true works of art.” It seems, however, unimaginable that the two endeavors remained isolated.

• Lord Dunsany: afternoon–evening, as described by H. P. Lovecraft (apparently based on an October 1919_105ya public talk in Boston in a December 1922_102ya essay “Lord Dunsany and His Work”—“delivered as lecture to an amateur journalists’ group in Boston, December 1922”, formally published in the posthumous 1944_80ya anthology Marginalia):

  The personality of Lord Dunsany is exceedingly attractive, as can be attested by the present writer, who sat in a front seat directly opposite him when he spoke in the Copley-Plaza ballroom in Boston in October 1919_105ya. On that occasion he outlined his literary theories with much charm, and read in full his [one-act] playlet, The Queen’s Enemies…He dresses with marked carelessness, and has been called the worst-dressed man in Ireland. Certainly, there was nothing impressive in the loosely draped evening attire which nebulously surrounded him during his American lecturers. To Boston autograph seekers he proved very accommodating, refusing none despite a severe headache which forced his hand many times to his forehead. When he entered a cab his top hat was knocked off—thus do the small remember the mishaps of the great!

  …Dunsany’s writing is always very rapid, and is done mainly in the late afternoon and early evening, with tea as a mild stimulant. He almost invariably employs a quill pen, whose broad, brush-like strokes are unforgettable by those who have seen his letters and manuscripts. His individuality appears in every phase of his activity, and involves not only an utterly unique simplicity of style but an utterly unique scarcity of punctuation which readers occasionally regret. About his work Dunsany spread a quaint atmosphere of cultivated naiveté and child-like ignorance, and likes to refer to historical and other data with a delightfully artless air of, unfamiliarity. His consistent aim is to survey the world with the impressionable freshness of unspoiled youth—or with the closest approach to that quality which his experience will allow. This idea sometimes plays havock with his critical judgment, as was keenly realised in 1920_104ya, when he most considerately acted as Laureate Judge of Poetry for the United Amateur Press Association [cf. The United Amateur, history; Dunsany was apparently addressing the UAPA & former president H. P. Lovecraft]. Dunsany has the true aristocrat’s attitude toward his work; and whilst he would welcome fame, he would never think of debasing his art either for the philistine rabble or for the reigning clique of literary chaoticists. He writes purely for self-expression, and is therefore the ideal amateur journalist type.

• Isaac Asimov: morning, 7AM–noon (~1985¹⁰); as reported by Seth Godin in a podcast interview:

  Tyler Cowen: What did you learn from Isaac Asimov?

  Seth Godin: Isaac worked with me when I was 24 years old. He wrote and published 400 books. I was sitting in his living room in Lincoln Center in New York City, and I said, “Isaac”—being presumptuous—“how do you go about writing 400 books?” He said, “Here’s the secret.” He pointed to this old manual typewriter. He said, “Every morning, I sit in front of this typewriter at 7:00 am, and I type until noon. It doesn’t have to be good, but I have to keep typing.”

  The lesson is, once your subconscious knows you’re going to keep typing no matter what, it becomes sufficiently embarrassed by the bad stuff that it will let some good stuff in. People who think they have writer’s block don’t have writer’s block. They have fear of bad writing. If you show me all your bad writing, sooner or later you’re going to have to show me some good writing.

  T. Cowen: How was he with you? Encouraging? Gruff?

  S. Godin: What a delight. I licensed a lot of stuff in my career as a book packager. Getting the rights to the robots novels was surprisingly inexpensive. We worked together in figuring out what the video that we made was going to be. He always gave me — at 24, 25 years old — the benefit of the doubt. He always had a useful contribution, and he never got petulant or brought his ego to . . . “Didn’t you know I invented the robot?” He never said that. He just said, “How can we make this better together?” So many people who partner want to control, and he just wanted to make it better.

  …I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.

• Katherine Rundell: morning (5AM–?), evening (unspecified). 2015-10-02 interview:

  Interviewer: Talk to us a bit about your writing habits. Do you write early in the morning, or through the night? Pen or laptop? Silence or music?

  Katherine Rundell: I’ve always had another job while I’ve been writing. I teach chicks there at Oxford and I also have a doctorate. So to write, I have to carve up space, you know… a bit of nails [clawing gesture with hand]. I tend to wake up very early around five, write in bed with my coffee and laptop, then again late at night. Mostly I tend to write in cafes and libraries, all I need really though is a laptop and large amounts of caffeine, that’s it. Music helps too. I have an app on my phone which plays cafe noise, it really helps to have the burble of café sounds, especially if the cafes themselves aren’t producing the right kind of noise. All I do then is play the app and I get exactly the café noise I want. I can’t remember a time I didn’t want to be a writer. As soon as I knew that books were created, not just born, I wanted to write.

• Samuel Smiles: after leaving office for the day (5PM?) until the 10PM late-train; from The autobiography of Samuel Smiles, Smiles & Mackay 1905_119ya:

  After my work at the office, I could leave the station, and spend a few hours on making inquiries [for his biography on the father of trains], be home on the late train, about ten o’clock. On Saturday afternoons, when the office work ended at two, there was still more time for investigations.

• George P. Elliott: “the morning”, according to a 1980_44ya obitary by a friend:

  …George lived for over a decade in Syracuse, out of the swim of New York, teaching in an academic English department where he also served for a time as chairman. He had written almost every day of his adult life—even when he visited friends for a weekend he insisted on spending the morning at a borrowed desk—but despite his reputation in certain circles, despite the large number of books he had published in his lifetime, he had been unable to find a publisher for his later works.

• Douglas Adams: while notoriously writing-averse, Adams apparently wrote in the morning when he did; excerpted from Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography Of Douglas Adams, Webb 2003_21ya:

  [Adams was famously shut up in a hotel to make the publisher’s deadlines for his 1984_40ya So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Adams did the hotel thing earlier in May 1984_40ya as well, for his contribution to the 1984 text adventure game.] The reason we hit the Berkeley was he wanted to swim, and there was a pool upstairs. I explained the routine. I’d get him out of bed; he’d go up for a swim; we’d have breakfast, finish by 8.30 a.m.

  And Douglas would sit down at this small desk with a typewriter, and I would sit in an armchair at 45 degrees from that, my back facing him, and I’d read a manuscript. I’d wait for the sound of those fingers on his typewriter keys—which sometimes would kind of happen, sporadically, and then there’d be long periods of silence, and I’d turn around to check him out and see that he hadn’t croaked on me or something. He’d be sitting up, staring out the window at this roof terrace. And every now and then I’d say, ‘How’s it going?’ And he’d say, ‘Fine—fine.’ And you’d hear paper being crumpled and thrown into a dustbin.

  It was quite macabre, looking back on it. The pile of manuscripts that I was reading would grow up on the floor as I went through yet another submission. And at the end of the day I would gather together whatever pages Douglas had written, and we’d talk about it. Then I would phone the office. My assistant, Jenny [Gregorian], would turn up to collect the pages and take them to the office.

  That was the tenor of the day. We’d have lunch; room service would come down. In the evening we would go out to some restaurant round the corner, have a dinner, and then I’d bring Douglas back, and say, ‘Okay Douglas, you’d better get some sleep’, and he would be sent to his room.

  British comedian Jason Hazeley claims (without citation) that Adams seems to have had a similar writing schedule while writing the first book in that series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:

  In 1978_46ya, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd were commissioned to write the novel of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. They rented a cheap villa in the remote village of Agios Stefanos in Corfu to use as HHGG HQ.

  Once there, a daily routine soon set in: Adams would sit at a typewriter on the balcony while Lloyd wandered down the hill to drink Greek coffee in a local taverna and learn advanced Corfiot swearing from the eccentric owner, Manthos. Adams had usually finished work by 11.30am, such was his driveless tire, and he’d join Lloyd at Taverna Manthos, where they’d spend the rest of the day drinking and playing silly games.

• Philip K. Dick: in a preface to a 1963_61ya story (“The Days of Perky Pat”) added for the 1987_37ya The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Dick describes his writing habits at the time:

  In those days—the early Sixties—I wrote a great deal, and some of my best stories and novels emanated from that period. My wife wouldn’t let me work in the house, so I rented a little shack for $109.62^$15₁₉₆₂ a month and walked over to it each morning. This was out in the country… was terribly lonely, shut up by myself in my shack all day. Maybe I missed Barbie, who was back at the big house with the children…There I went, one day, walking down the country road to my shack, looking forward to 8 hours of writing, in total isolation from all other humans, and I looked up at the sky and saw a face…But if you are sitting alone day after day at your typewriter, turning out one story after another and having no one to talk to, no one to be with, and yet pro forma having a wife and four daughters from whose house you have been expelled, banished to a little single-walled shack that is so cold in winter that, literally the ink would freeze in my typewriter ribbon, well, you are going to write about iron slot-eyed faces and warm young women. And thus I did. And thus I still do.

• Herman Melville: 1850-12-13 letter to his publisher friend Evert Augustus Duyckinck, describing life on his Arrowhead farm while writing Moby-Dick (Gilman1960, pg117):

  Do you want to know how I pass my time?—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. [manuscripts] 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 them. My own dinner over, I rig my sleigh & with my mother or [4] sisters start off for the village—& if it be a Literary World [published by Dyckinck] 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.

• Rebecca F. Kuang: “Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction (Ep. 202)”

  I recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism because I was fed up with social media. I found it very compelling. Then I read Deep Work, too. I know lots of people have strong feelings—good or bad—about all those books. I think I’m the kind of person who that advice is very helpful for, the extremist approach to deep work.

  This is just what I do now. I have gotten pretty strict about whose emails I answer, when I answer emails, who I make time for and who I don’t, so that I’m able to spend the most productive and focused hours of my day, which is from 9:00 to 12:00 in the morning, writing fiction.

  Then, as the hours trickle on after that and my brain becomes more and more tired, I shift to tasks that are less and less engaging until, by the end of the day, I’m just firing off, “Yes, thank you. Sounds good”, in my inbox.

• Stanisław Lem1984, “Chance and Order” 1984_40ya:

  For many years now, I have not owned my books and my work; rather, I have become owned by them. I usually get up a short time before five in the morning and sit down to write: I am writing these words at six o’clock. I am unable now to work more than five or six hours day without a pause. When I was younger, I could write as long as my stamina held out; the power of my intellect gave way only after my physical prowess had been exhausted. I write increasingly slowly—my self-criticism, the demands I put upon myself, have continued to grow—but I am still rather prolific. (I know this from the speed with which I have to throw away used up typewriter ribbons.) Less and less of what comes into my mind I consider to be good enough to test as suitable subject matter by my method of trial and error. I still know as little about how and where my ideas are born as most writers do.

• Samuel P. Huntington, 2024-03 interview Fareed Zakaria:

  …Tyler Cowen: What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view.

  Fareed Zakaria: I think two things…The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20^th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me. Me, obviously in a tiny graduate student apartment, but he in a townhouse on Beacon Hill. I would sometimes talk to him. We’d have coffee in the mornings. [~1991, before Zakaria left academia to become a journalist & edit Foreign Affairs]

  He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard.

  His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book.

  I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines, that has structure, that has more feedback because, as you know well, Tyler, there’s a very lonely aspect to being an academic. There’s a lot of fun, and there’s lots of interesting things, but a lot of it is just sitting by yourself.

  In the new Leonard Bernstein movie, there’s a point at which Bradley Cooper says — I’m guessing this comes out of a Bernstein interview, where he was asked what’s the difference between being a conductor and a composer — he says, “Well, being a performer, you have a constant relationship with the outside world. You have a grand outer life, a life directed outward. But as a composer, as a creator, you only have a grand internal life.”

  It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else. I think it’s important, but it’s relatively — in my conception, in my hierarchy, it’s trivia. The most important thing you can do is to try and write books that make a difference, that put new ideas into the world, but it’s the hardest thing for me.

• Colleen Hoover: all day during binges: