This book is a collection of working methods used by various creators (artists, writers, psychologists, etc). The sections are slivers of biographical information, covering not only working habits, but also eating habits, sleep schedules, exercise routines, drug use (and abuse), family relations, and more.
I really enjoyed it! And I'd encourage anyone who makes art or otherwise seriously pursues a craft or hobby to read it. A lot spoke to me on this reading, and I imagine different things will speak to me if/when I read it in the future.
Here are a few of my favorite selections (quotes from the book are in italics):
“[…] the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always to it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”
(As a morning person I also loved this bit trashing night owls:)
“Only the ‘Hitlers of the world’ work at night: no honest artist does.”
“It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5:30am; and and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy”
“By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast”
“[…] three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write”
(Limiting how much you produce in a day also seems to be a theme of various thinkers in the book.)
“The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work”
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work”
“There's no one way -- there's too much drivel about this subject. You're who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place -- you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time -- not steal it -- and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
“time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers”
“One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live”
“On the other days one is hurrying through the things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going. You get the garden planted. You get the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend a day with a friend… You may even enjoy doing such things… But always you are hurrying through these things with a certain amount of aggravation so that you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot — in a way it is what you do all the other things for… The painting is like a thread the runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.”
Miro always maintained a rigidly inflexible daily routine — both because he dislike being distracted from his work, and because he feared slipping back into the severe depression that had afflicted him as a young man, before he discovered painting. To help prevent a relapse, his routine always included vigorous exercise — boxing[, ] jumping rope[, ] Swedish gymnastics[, ] running on the beach[,] and swimming.
Other mornings he woke in a foul mood, “dreary as a dromedary,” convinced that “Everything is insipid or everything is dark.” Or, in the middle of a good day, depression would suddenly steal upon him out of nowhere. There seemed to be little he could do to control these black moods. To comfort himself, Boswell liked to wash his feet in warm water […] or drink a cup of green tea, which, he wrote, “comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant of spiritous liquors.” And then there was his Inviolable Plan, an elaborate and somewhat portentous pep talk and statement of purpose that he wrote to himself in October 1973. The Plan is full of resolutions large and small — to avoid idleness, to remember “the dignity of human nature,” to exercise regularly — as well as some moments of hard-won insight. Boswell writes, “Life has much uneasiness; that is certain. Always remember that, and it will never surprise you.”
On a late night walk near Dublin harbor, Beckett found himself standing on the end of a pier in the midst of a winter storm. Amid the howling wind and churning water, he suddenly realized that the "dark he had struggled to keep under" in his life -- and in his writing, which had until then failed to find an audience or meet his own aspirations -- should, in fact, be the source of his creative inspiration. "I shall always be depressed," Beckett concluded, "but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”
She wrote to her mother in October 1962, four months before she would take her own life, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”
(This one threw me straight down into the dumps.)
“The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I've ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy”
(When the work is going well, I wouldn't spend my time any other way. When the work is not going well, life is a fucking tar pit.)
home