‘A Writer Who Waits for Ideal Conditions Under Which to Work Will Die Without Putting a Word on Paper.’ – E.B. White
via The Daily Routines of Famous Writers | Brain Pickings.
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.
[....]
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.
[....]
Productivity maniac Benjamin Franklin had a formidably rigorous daily routine:
Read the whole thing
Hat tip: AB
****
Related at PJ Lifestyle on writing:
My sophomore year high school English teacher explained how to write essays: “Start at the beginning; go all the way through the middle, and stop when you get to the end.” Everyone in the class room cracked up.
I understood fairly soon the method would work as well for stories as essays, and began to apply it. Absurdly simplistic? Yes, but once tried, it works astoundingly well, though I’ll concede it takes awhile to identify a piece’s ideal beginning, middle, and end with certainty.
In the years since, I’ve discovered two more pieces of writerly wisdom:
1.) It’s not a list or an outline or a note if it’s not on paper.
2.) The fundamental unit of prose isn’t the word, but the sentence.
A friend objected to the second, “Yes, but isn’t a brick wall made of bricks?” True enough, but until they’re assembled into a wall, bricks are valueless. As often as the exact right word doesn’t show up quickly and easily, I key in **, continue writing, and search for ** later.
” “Start at the beginning; go all the way through the middle, and stop when you get to the end.” Everyone in the class room cracked up.
I understood fairly soon the method would work as well for stories as essays, and began to apply it.”
As an editor I disagree with the advice. In some cases it’s better to write the introduction and conclusion together first. In other cases it’s good to jump around and develop a few different points as your mind develops them. Then you can connect them together. The order that one actually writes different chunks of a piece means nothing. Different people’s habits and the nature of the piece will affect what you’re doing. It’s in the editing and revising of a piece where parts can be deleted and rearranged and reconceived that the piece really emerges.
Lists, outlines, and notes don’t have to be on REAL paper. I use minimalist Notepad or “sticky note” software for that stuff all the time.
Notes don’t have to be on real paper until hard drives, operating systems, applications, documents, and the whole general deal vanish into the ether without a moment’s notice or any realistic hope of recovery. That’s not to say old-fashioned paper wouldn’t be lost in a house fire, but I believe fires are less common than hard drive failures.
None of that’s to say or suggest I could quickly find the 30-odd-year-old note that includes three or four sentences of dialogue it’s taken me all this time to come up with the exact right use for. If it’s not in the big brown-topped shoe box, it’s got to be in the flat grey box, or else maybe at the bottom of the box of fountain pens I’ve bought and abandoned over the years because I’ve always loved the feel of nibs against paper and flow of ink, but they’re half as practical as roller skates on a cat. Wait. No. I distinctly remember putting all the really old paper in the deep box on top of the shelves on the other side of the closet. There’s the box, and by all gods I disbelieve in, it’s exactly where it belongs. Probably won’t take ten minutes to flip through the accumulated paper. Now, was it a title I was looking for, or…?
So, many roads lead to the same place in terms of a slog. There’s much more than that at stake. I’d like to see authors thoughts on bright creativity. Getting there is a far different proposition.