Kaustab Choudhury’s Reviews > Daily Rituals: How Artists Work > Status Update
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Day 38: Toni Morrison. For most of her writing career, she had a full-time job and was a single parent to two sons. How, then, she managed to deliver as she did is a mystery. She illuminates saying that her writing hours (rare as they were, in a given day) were concentrated, and she never (could afford to) brooded during those hours. Imagine, then, what we can accomplish, with all the time we waste on an average day.
— Jan 07, 2026 03:18AM
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Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 42: John Adams. “I confess that I’m not as Zen disciplined or as pure as I’d like,” he says. “Often after an hour of working I’ll yield to the temptation to read my email or things like that. ... if you get tangled up into some complicated communication with somebody, the next thing you know you look up and you’ve lost forty-five minutes of time.”
— 30 minutes ago
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Day 41: Francine Prose. "I sneak away to the country and work on a computer that’s not connected to the Internet and count on the world to go away long enough for me to get a few words down on paper, whenever and however I can. When the writing is going well, I can work all day. When it’s not, I spend a lot of time gardening and standing in front of the refrigerator."
— 23 hours, 47 min ago
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Day 40: Chuck Close. “Inspiration is for
amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
— Jan 09, 2026 06:10AM
amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 39: Joyce Carol Oates. “I write and write and write, and rewrite, and even if I retain only a single page from a full day’s work, it is a single page, and these pages add up,” she told one interviewer. “As a result I have acquired the reputation over the years of being prolix when in fact I am measured against people who simply don’t work as hard or as long.”
— Jan 08, 2026 05:32AM
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 37: Haruki Murakami. An author whose works have moved me to tears more than once. Discipline in his profession is the way Murakami works, even though it leads to a barely existent social life. “My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty and my top priority—as a novelist?”
— Sep 15, 2024 01:24AM
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 36: Tom Stoppard. From disorganisation to procrastination to discipline at night to discipline in the morning and then back to disorganisation, this playwright went through every possible writing schedule, at last, concluding: “I never work in the mornings unless I’m in real trouble.”
— Sep 07, 2024 10:07AM
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 35: Günter Grass. Yet another artist who strictly only wrote in the mornings. "I need daylight to begin."
— Sep 06, 2024 11:56AM
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 34: Beattie Ann. One of the first artists here who says that they do not believe in schedules. Not only that, she was a night owl! Did not believe at all in trying to write anything when nothing was coming to her. "It’s better if I just let it ride. I’ve learned I can’t force it.”
— Sep 03, 2024 10:05AM
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 33: Benjamin Britten. The Romantic cliche of the artist waiting for inspiration to strike him was rejected violently by Britten. He, instead, worked with discipline, following a strict timeline. “Functioning as a composer was his whole world. The creativity had to come first. Everyone, including himself, had to be sacrificed to the creative act.”
— Sep 01, 2024 09:35AM
Kaustab Choudhury
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Day 32: Arthur Miller. His own account of how he wrote reminds me of the classic Caspar David Friedrich painting "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog". Miller says, "I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That’s the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that."
— Aug 31, 2024 09:51AM
