Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  Jerzy Kosinski (1933–1991)

  “When he was a schoolboy, George Levanter had learned a convenient routine: a four-hour sleep in the afternoon enabled him to remain mentally and physically active until the early dawn, when he would again go to sleep for four hours and wake ready for the day.” This is the first sentence of Kosinski’s 1977 novel, Blind Date, and what the Polish-American author wrote of his protagonist was apparently true of himself, as well. In 1972, an interviewer asked Kosinski if he was “Protestant and disciplined, or European and dissolute” in his writing habits. “I guess both,” Kosinski replied.

  I still wake up around 8 A.M. ready for the day, and sleep again for four hours in the afternoon, which allows me to remain mentally and physically active until the early dawn, when again I go to sleep. Being part of the Protestant ethos for less than one-third of my life, I acquired only some Protestant habits, while maintaining some of my former ones. Among the ones I acquired is the belief that I ought to answer my mail—a belief not shared by many happy intellectuals in Rome. In terms of my actual writing habits, I am an old member of the Russian and Polish intelligentsia—neither a professional intellectual nor a café-society hedonist. I love writing more than anything else. Like the heartbeat, each novel I write is inseparable from my life. I write when I feel like it and wherever I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time: day, night, and during twilight. I write in a restaurant, on a plane, between skiing and horseback riding, when I take my night walks in Manhattan, Paris, or in any other town. I wake up in the middle of the night or the afternoon to make notes and never know when I’ll sit down at the typewriter.

  Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)

  “The overriding factor in my life between the ages of six and twenty-two was my father’s candy store,” Asimov wrote in his posthumously published memoir. His father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn, which he opened at 6:00 A.M. and closed at 1:00 A.M., seven days a week. Meanwhile, Young Asimov woke at 6:00 to deliver the newspaper, and rushed home from school in the afternoons to help at the store. He wrote:

  I must have liked the long hours, for in later life I never took the attitude of “I’ve worked hard all my childhood and youth and now I’m going to take it easy and sleep till noon.”

  Quite the contrary. I have kept the candy-store hours all my life. I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day in the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.)

  In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store. Of course, I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never very good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do—but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

  I can only say that there were certain advantages offered by the candy store that had nothing to do with mere survival, but, rather, with overflowing happiness, and that this was so associated with the long hours as to make them sweet to me and to fix them upon me for all my life.

  Oliver Sacks (b. 1933)

  Sacks is a London-born, New York–based physician, professor of neurology and psychiatry, and bestselling writer, whose books include Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations.

  I get up around 5 A.M. or so—not out of virtue, but because this is the way my sleep-wake cycle goes. Twice a week, I visit my analyst at 6 A.M., as I have been doing for forty years. Then I go for a swim. Swimming gets me going as nothing else can, and I need to do it at the start of the day, otherwise I will be deflected by busyness or laziness. I come back hungry from my swim, and have a large bowl of oatmeal and the first of many cups of tea, hot chocolate, or coffee which get me through the day. I use an electric kettle, in case I get preoccupied with writing and forget to turn it off.

  Getting to the office—a two-minute commute, because my office and my apartment are in adjacent buildings—I look through the mail (hugely abundant now, especially with e-mail) and answer what seems to need an answer. (I do not use a computer, so I write or type my own letters.) I then have patients to see, sometimes, and writing to do, at all times. I may sketch out thoughts on my typewriter, but I generally prefer pen and paper, a Waterman fountain pen and long yellow paper. I often write at a standing desk, sometimes perched on a stool, to spare my bad back from too much sitting.

  I take a brief lunch break, walk around the block, practice piano for a few minutes, and then have my favorite noon meal of herrings and black bread. The afternoon is spent writing, if I am up to it. I sometimes fall asleep, or into a deep reverie, lying on my couch, and this may put my brain in an “idling” or “default” mode. I let it play with images and thoughts on its own; I come to from these altered states, if I am lucky, with energy renewed and confused thoughts clarified.

  I have an early dinner, usually tabouli and sardines (or if I have company, sushi), and play music (usually Bach) on the piano or a CD. Then I settle down to “pleasure” reading—biographies, histories, letters, occasionally novels. I hate television, and rarely watch it. I go to bed early, and usually have vivid dreams, which may haunt me until I reconstruct and (if possible) deconstruct them. I keep a notebook by my bed for memories of dreams, or night thoughts—many unexpected thoughts seem to come in the middle of the night. On the (rare) occasions when I get into a really creative mode, my daily structure is completely ignored, and I write non-stop, sometimes for 36 hours at a time, until the burst of inspiration has completed itself.

  Anne Rice (b. 1941)

  “I certainly have a routine, but the most important thing, when I look back over my career, has been the ability to change routines,” Rice said recently. For her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, Rice wrote all night and slept during the day. “I just found it the time when I could concentrate and think the best,” she says. “I needed to be alone in the still of the night, without the phone, without friends calling, with my husband sound asleep. I needed that utter freedom.” But when her son was born in 1978, Rice made “the big switch” to daytime writing and has continued to work that way for most of her career. A few times she has switched back to a nocturnal schedule for particular novels, to get away from distractions, but she finds it too hard physically to keep up permanently.

  These days she begins work in the late morning, after some time reading the newspaper, checking Facebook, and answering e-mails. She keeps writing into the afternoon, taking breaks to stretch her legs, look out the window, and drink a “massive amount” of Diet Coke on ice. In the evening she generally watches TV or a movie to relax. “That works best for me right now,” she says. “But there were many times when I couldn’t write until evening. And that has worked fine too. It’s always a search for the uninterrupted three- or four-hour stretch.”

  Rice adds that for her it’s “not a matter of being strict”—when beginning a new book, she tends to slip into a routine naturally, without any conscious planning. And once she’s adopted a writing schedule, she doesn’t need to force herself to work. But she does have to be strict about avoiding social engagements and other outside entanglements. “Because you won’t get those four hours if you’re spending most of the day worried about getting to an appointment and back,” she says. “What you have to do is clear all distraction. That’s the bottom line.”

  Charles Schulz (1922–2000)

  Over nearly fifty years, Schulz drew every one of his 17,897 Peanuts comic strips by himself, without the aid of assistants. The demands of producing six daily strips and a Sunday page required a regular schedule, and Schulz fulfilled his duties in a businesslike manner, devoting seven hours a day, five days a week, to Peanuts. On weekdays he rose at daybreak, took a shower, shaved, and woke his childr
en for breakfast (usually pancakes, prepared by his wife). At 8:20, Schulz drove the kids to school in the family station wagon, stopping to pick up the neighbor’s children on the way. Then it was time to sit down at the drawing board, in the private studio beside his house. He would begin by doodling in pencil while he let his mind wander; his usual method was to “just sit there and think about the past, kind of dredge up ugly memories and things like that.” Once he had a good idea, however, he would work quickly and with intense concentration to get it onto paper before the inspiration dried up.

  Schulz stayed in his studio for lunch—almost always a ham sandwich and a glass of milk—and continued working until around 4:00, when the kids returned home from school. The regularity of the work suited his temperament and helped him cope with the chronic anxiety he suffered throughout his life. “I would feel just terrible if I couldn’t draw comic strips,” Schulz once said. “I would feel very empty if I were not allowed to do this sort of thing.”

  William Gass (b. 1924)

  Gass is an early riser. In a 1998 interview, he said that he works mostly in the morning, finishing his serious writing by noon. Afternoons are spent on his academic duties—in addition to writing fiction, he has taught philosophy for most of his career—and “other kinds of work which is more mechanical.” A colleague once asked Gass if he had any unusual writing habits:

  “No, sorry to be boring,” he sighed.… “How does your day begin?” “Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,” he said. “What do you photograph?” “The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly,” he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand. “You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?” “Most days.” “And then you write?” “Yes.” “And you don’t think that’s unusual?” “Not for me.”

  Gass has also said that he writes best when he’s angry, which can take a toll on his health over the course of long writing projects. (It took him twenty-five years to complete his 1995 novel, The Tunnel.) “I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house,” he said in 1976. “It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.”

  David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)

  “I usually go in shifts of three or four hours with either naps or, like, you know, fairly diverting do-something-with-other-people things in the middle,” Wallace said in 1996, shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest. “So, like, I’ll get up at eleven or noon, work till two or three.” In later interviews, however, Wallace said that he followed a regular writing routine only when the work was going badly. From a 1999 radio interview:

  Things are either going well or they’re not going well.… I’m working on something now and I just can’t seem to get it. I flounder and I flounder. And when I’m floundering I don’t want to work, so I invent draconian “All right, this morning I’ll work from seven-thirty to eight-forty-five with one five-minute break”—all this baroque b.s. And after five or ten or a dozen or, you know, as with some books, fifty tries, all of a sudden it will just, it will start to go. And once it starts to go, it requires no effort. And then actually the discipline’s required in terms of being willing to be away from it and to remember that, “Oh, I have a relationship that I have to nurture or I have to grocery shop or pay these bills” and stuff. So I have absolutely no routine at all, because the times I’m trying to build a routine are the times that the writing just seems futile and flagellating.

  Marina Abramovic (b. 1946)

  In her four-decade career as a performance artist, Abramovic has forced herself into displays of tremendous (and often shocking) discipline and endurance. For her 2010 career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, Abramovic staged a particularly grueling piece. Called The Artist Is Present, it required her to sit motionless in a chair every hour that the exhibition was open—seven hours a day (ten hours on Fridays), six days a week, for eleven weeks. Each day, museum visitors were invited to sit in a chair opposite her for as long as they liked; by the end of the eleven weeks, Abramovic had gazed at 1,565 pairs of eyes. To prepare for the performance, she had to train her body to go all day without food and without urinating. (There was some speculation in the press that she was wearing a catheter or a diaper, but Abramovic insists that she just held it in.)

  She began building a routine three months before the opening. Her biggest challenge was to go all day without taking any fluids. To get the water her body needed, Abramovic adopted a nocturnal hydration regimen. Throughout the night, she forced herself to get up every forty-five minutes to drink a small amount of water. “At the beginning I was exhausted,” she says. “And then at the end I kind of trained myself and actually I could drink the water without interrupting my sleep in a certain way.”

  On performance days, Abramovic would wake up at 6:30 A.M., take a bath, and at 7:00 have her last drink of water for the day. Then she would eat a meal of lentils and rice and drink a cup of black tea. At 9:00 a car would take Abramovic, her assistant, and her photographer to MoMA, and Abramovic would change into her dress. Over the next forty-five minutes she would visit the bathroom four times, emptying her bladder completely. Then she would draw a line on the wall to mark the previous day’s completed performance and sit by herself for fifteen minutes before visitors began to arrive.

  Seven or ten hours later, Abramovic would return home, eat a light vegetarian meal, and be in bed by 10:00 P.M., continuing to take a small amount of water every forty-five minutes through the night. At no point in the day did she talk on the phone or answer e-mails. “I completely cut communications,” she says. “I didn’t talk except with the guard at the museum, the curator, and my assistant and photographer. No phone calls, no talking, no meetings, no interviews. Nothing. Everything stopped.”

  This is typical of Abramovic’s working style. When she has a new idea for a performance, it takes over her life. But when she is not giving a performance or preparing for one, she is a different creature entirely. “In my personal life, if I don’t have a project, I don’t have any discipline,” she says. Neither does she follow a regular daily routine. “I don’t have any particular everyday kind of thing,” she says. “Only when I know that I have to do the performance, then I absolutely concentrate on that in a rigorous way.”

  Twyla Tharp (b. 1941)

  Tharp is something of an expert on daily routines. The choreographer’s 2003 book, The Creative Habit, is all about the necessity of forming good, consistent work habits in order to function at a high creative level. Not surprisingly, her own routine is intense:

  I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

  By automatically getting up and getting into the cab every morning, she avoids the question of whether or not she feels like going to the gym; the ritual is one less thing for her to think about, as well as “a friendly reminder that I’m doing the right thing.” But the 5:30 cab is only one item in her “arsenal of routines.” As she writes later in the book:

  I repeat the wake-up, the workout, the quick shower, the breakfast of three hard-boiled egg whites and a cup of coffee, the hour to make my morning calls and deal with correspondence, the two hours of stretching and working out ideas by myself in the studio, the rehearsals with my dance company, the return home in the late afternoon to handle more business details, the early dinner, and a few quiet hours of reading.
That’s my day, every day. A dancer’s life is all about repetition.

  Tharp admits that this schedule does not allow for a particularly sociable life. “It’s actively anti-social,” she writes. “On the other hand, it is pro-creative.” And, for her, that daily creativity is sustaining: “When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love, and faith.”

  Stephen King (b. 1947)

  King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30. Some days he finishes up as early as 11:30, but more often it takes him until about 1:30 to meet his goal. Then he has the afternoons and evenings free for naps, letters, reading, family, and Red Sox games on TV.