times that I’ve tried that, when I have been in a slump and I try to get out of it by saying, ‘Come on, Ann, sit down at that typewriter,’ I’ve gotten in a worse slump. It’s better if I just let it ride.” As a result, she often won’t write anything for months. “I’ve learned I can’t force it,” she said. But that doesn’t mean that she is able to relax and enjoy herself during these fallow periods; rather, she says it’s like having an almost permanent case of writer’s block. As she told an interviewer in 1998, “I certainly am a moody and, I would say, not very happy person.”
Günter Grass (b. 1927)
Asked if he writes during the day or at night, Grass seemed to shudder at the latter notion: “Never, never at night. I don’t believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it’s not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o’clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music. After breakfast I work, and then take a break for coffee in the afternoon. I start again and finish at seven o’clock in the evening.”
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)
The playwright has struggled with chronic disorganization and procrastination throughout his career. He once noted that the only thing that really got him to write was fear—he had to get “frightened enough to discipline myself to the typewriter for successive bouts.” Then he would sit up all night writing and smoking, usually working in the kitchen while the rest of the household was asleep. His biographer, Ira Nadel, notes that Stoppard’s smoking habits were unusual as well: “An inveterate chain-smoker, he was notorious for stubbing out acigarette after one or two puffs and then lighting another. This, he calculated, was equivalent to smoking with a very long filter.”
At various times, Stoppard attempted to reform his “ineffectual inefficiency” as a writer; in the early 1980s he even succeeded in chaining himself to the desk from roughly 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. daily. But he graduallyslipped back into old habits. In 1997, he told a reporter that he generally worked from midday to midnight, adding, “I never work in the mornings unless I’m in real trouble.”
Haruki Murakami (b. 1949)
When he is writing a novel, Murakami wakes at 4:00 A.M. and works for five to six hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), runs errands, reads, and listens to music; bedtime is 9:00. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told
The Paris Review
in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Murakami has said that maintaining this repetition for the time required to complete a novel takes more than mental discipline: “Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” When he first hung out his shingle as a professional writer, in 1981, after several years running a small jazz club in Tokyo, he discovered that the sedentary lifestyle caused him to gain weight rapidly; he was also smoking as many as sixty cigarettes a day. He soon resolved to change his habits completely, moving with his wife to a rural area, quitting smoking, drinking less, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and fish. He also started running daily, a habit he has kept up for more than a quarter century.
The one drawback to this self-made schedule, Murakami admitted in a 2008 essay, is that it doesn’t allowfor much of a social life. “People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations,” he wrote. But he decided that the indispensable relationship in his life was with his readers. “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?”
Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“I am not able to write regularly,” Morrison told
The
Günter Grass (b. 1927)
Asked if he writes during the day or at night, Grass seemed to shudder at the latter notion: “Never, never at night. I don’t believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it’s not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o’clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music. After breakfast I work, and then take a break for coffee in the afternoon. I start again and finish at seven o’clock in the evening.”
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)
The playwright has struggled with chronic disorganization and procrastination throughout his career. He once noted that the only thing that really got him to write was fear—he had to get “frightened enough to discipline myself to the typewriter for successive bouts.” Then he would sit up all night writing and smoking, usually working in the kitchen while the rest of the household was asleep. His biographer, Ira Nadel, notes that Stoppard’s smoking habits were unusual as well: “An inveterate chain-smoker, he was notorious for stubbing out acigarette after one or two puffs and then lighting another. This, he calculated, was equivalent to smoking with a very long filter.”
At various times, Stoppard attempted to reform his “ineffectual inefficiency” as a writer; in the early 1980s he even succeeded in chaining himself to the desk from roughly 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. daily. But he graduallyslipped back into old habits. In 1997, he told a reporter that he generally worked from midday to midnight, adding, “I never work in the mornings unless I’m in real trouble.”
Haruki Murakami (b. 1949)
When he is writing a novel, Murakami wakes at 4:00 A.M. and works for five to six hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), runs errands, reads, and listens to music; bedtime is 9:00. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told
The Paris Review
in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Murakami has said that maintaining this repetition for the time required to complete a novel takes more than mental discipline: “Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” When he first hung out his shingle as a professional writer, in 1981, after several years running a small jazz club in Tokyo, he discovered that the sedentary lifestyle caused him to gain weight rapidly; he was also smoking as many as sixty cigarettes a day. He soon resolved to change his habits completely, moving with his wife to a rural area, quitting smoking, drinking less, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and fish. He also started running daily, a habit he has kept up for more than a quarter century.
The one drawback to this self-made schedule, Murakami admitted in a 2008 essay, is that it doesn’t allowfor much of a social life. “People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations,” he wrote. But he decided that the indispensable relationship in his life was with his readers. “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?”
Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“I am not able to write regularly,” Morrison told
The
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