Kaustab Choudhury’s Reviews > Daily Rituals: How Artists Work > Status Update

Day 47: Jonathan Edwards. “For each insight he wished to remember, he would pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with the thought. When he returned home he would unpin these and write down each idea. At the ends of trips of several days, his clothes might be covered by quite a few of these slips of paper.”

Day 46: Margaret Mead. Once, Mead got news that a certain morning session had been postponed. She was furious. “How dare they? Do they realize what use I could have made of this time? Do they know I get up at five o’clock every morning to write a thousand words before breakfast? Why did nobody have the politeness to tell me this meeting had been rescheduled?” A sentiment some of us can very well relate to.

Day 45: BF Skinner. The founder of behavioral psychology treated his daily writing sessions much like a laboratory experiment, conditioning himself to write every morning with a pair of self-reinforcing behaviors: he started and stopped by the buzz of a timer, and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph.

Day 44: Nicholson Baker. “What I’ve found with daily routines is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work."

Day 43: Steve Reich. “I’m not really a morning person. I would say, if you look at everything I’ve ever written, ninety-five percent of it would have been written between twelve noon and twelve midnight.” Reich believes in taking breaks when problems come up. "The best thing to do is to just leave it and put your mind somewhere else, and not always but often the solution to that problem will bubble up spontaneously."

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.”

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."

Day 40: Chuck Close. “Inspiration is for
amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

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.”

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.