Daily Routines

Truman Capote

INTERVIEWER
What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTE
I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don't use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

The Paris Review, Issue 16, 1957

Gay Talese

Mr. Talese’s third-floor office is set up so that he rarely has to leave. There is a bed that he sleeps in when he’s in Ocean City alone; an ancient IBM Selectric with a grimy plastic cover; and a five-year-old Power Macintosh, which is not connected to the Internet. (Mr. Talese does not engage in e-mail and prefers to hand-deliver his manuscripts to his editors). To reduce the glare from a skylight, Mr. Talese has put together a plastic foam canopy that swoops over his U-shaped desk like a sail on a blustery day. Mrs. Talese calls it “the suspension bridge.”

His summer routine is to write in the morning, play tennis in the afternoon, then maybe watch a game on the 36-inch Sony Trinitron with DirecTV service that he has set up in his office. His tastes run from the Yankees to Japanese skiing.

The New York Times, August 3, 2007

Gertrude Stein

Miss Stein gets up every morning about ten and drinks some coffee, against her will. She's always been nervous about becoming nervous and she thought coffee would make her nervous, but her doctor prescribed it. Miss Toklas, her companion, gets up at six and starts dusting and fussing around. Once she broke a fine piece of Venetian glass and cried. Miss Stein laughed and said "Hell, oh hell, hell, objects are made to be consumed like cakes, books, people." Every morning Miss Toklas bathes and combs their French poodle, Basket, and brushes its teeth. It has its own toothbrush.

Miss Stein has an outsize bathtub that was especially made for her. A staircase had to be taken out to install it. After her bath she puts on a huge wool bathrobe and writes for a while, but she prefers to write outdoors, after she gets dressed. Especially in the Ain country, because there are rocks and cows there. Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing. The two ladies drive around in their Ford till they come to a good spot. Then Miss Stein gets out and sits on a campstool with pencil and pad, and Miss Toklas fearlessly switches a cow into her line of vision. If the cow doesn't seem to fit in with Miss Stein's mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow. When the great lady has an inspiration, she writes quickly, for about fifteen minutes. But often she just sits there, looking at cows and not turning a wheel.

Miss Stein always drives, and Miss Toklas rides in the back seat, squealing and jumping, for they say that Miss Stein is the worst driver in the history of automotive engineering. She takes corners fast, doesn't put out her hand, drives on the wrong side of the street, pays no more attention to traffic signals or intersections than she does to punctuation marks, and never honks. Now and then Alice will lean over from the back seat and honk. They haven't had any accidents. One writer who visited her had a fake wire sent to him from Paris calling him back, because he was afraid he'd be killed in the Ford.

Miss Stein spends much of her time quarrelling with friends—always about literature or painting. The quarrels are passionate ones, involving everybody, taking hours to get under way, lasting for years (like the one with Hemingway). Nobody remembers after a couple of months exactly what the quarrels are about. The maid at the Stein house in Paris has to be told every day who will be persona grata at tea—it all depends on the quarrel of the night before. Gertrude sits up late, talking, arguing, and laughing; she has a rich, deep, and warming laugh. Afterward she wakes up Alice, who goes to bed early, and they go over the talk of the whole day. Miss Stein has a photographic memory for conversation.

The lady wears astonishing clothes: sandals, woollen stockings fit for a football-player, a man's plush fedora hat perched high on her head, rough tweed suits over odd embroidered waistcoats and peasant tunics. She also wears extraordinary blue-and-white striped knickers for underdrawers. This came out when she lost them once at a concert given by Virgil Thomson at the Hotel Majestic. She just stepped out of them somehow and left them lying there on the floor. She thought it was very funny and laughed loudly.

The New Yorker, October 13, 1934

J.M. Coetzee

"Coetzee," says the writer Rian Malan, "is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word."

New Statesman, October 25, 1999

Arthur Miller

INTERVIEWER
Do you have a routine for writing?

MILLER
I wish I had a routine for writing. 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. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.

The Paris Review, Fall 1999

Pauline Kael

Pauline kept a notepad at her bedside and scribbled in the middle of the night. At dinner, among friends, she would suddenly dive into her bag and retrieve the pad, attacking it with a mysteriously sharpened little pencil, writing down sentences while laughing at the conversation going on around her. The first drafts of her reviews were composed very rapidly. She was tiny (about five feet), and would gather up her weight and lean on a tilted architect's table, writing in pencil on unlined paper. After a while, she'd get up to walk or dance around the room, only to return to the table and to an activity that was as much physical as intellectual. Fearing that she would end up a secretary, she never learned to type, so after she finished a review her daughter, Gina James, would run it through the typewriter while Pauline took a break, drinking a little watered wine, or talking to a friend on the telephone. Then, staring at the piece in horror and exclaiming at her own ineptitude, she would immediately begin tearing it apart, scissoring and recombining the paragraphs, writing in new observations and jokes in the margins or above the lines, at which point the piece would be typed again. The process continued without interruption at the office where, like Proust after an injection of caffeine, she would assault the galleys, rearranging and rewriting, adding and subtracting still more jokes--on and on, until the pages were reluctantly yielded to the press.

The New Yorker, September 17, 2001

Brendan Gill

Brendan was the most professional and the most cheerful writer on earth; it was almost unbearable. Back in the sixties and early seventies, my twentieth-floor office at the old New Yorker quarters was two doors away from his, and no matter how early I turned up in the morning his light would be on and, most days, his typewriter going at full rattle. In no time, it always seemed, he would emerge, his task done, and scud past my corner with his beaky, friendly face alight, his hands full of galley proofs or fresh copy, and a couple of outbound letters clenched in his teeth while he struggled into his coat and somehow waved a greeting at the same time: off to meet someone or arrange something or simply attend to the city. After lunch, he was back, often in company and conversation with a visiting friend or interviewee--I can remember Brendan Behan coming by one day, and Max Ernst or Robert Graves on others, not to mention women of startling interest (who was that?)--and their talk and laughter from behind this door sounded livelier and more intense than anything going on with me just then. Other writers and editors took this same mild umbrage--sometimes we would exchange notes about our own low-level, underlit days compared to Brendan's dazzle--but it was hard to sustain, because he included everyone within his boundless and affable attention. "Yes!" he would cry in response to anything you offered, and you would feel the warming searchlight of his questions and ideas and anecdotes and afterthoughts fall upon you, and find yourself--for a minute, anyway--as cheerful and likable and riveting as he was, and almost as swift.

The New Yorker, January 12, 1998

Thomas Berger

I seldom get to work before 10 A.M. and then I never write more than four hours. Indeed, two hours would usually be more like it, two hours of actual composition, that is. I usually begin a writing period by answering letters. As with everything I do, this would seem contrary to the practice of everyone else, but I warm up in that fashion. For example, at this moment the time is 11:45 A.M. I have done nothing thus far this morning but write letters. After this one I will presumably work on my 11th novel, and I will surely work no longer than 2:30. Writing is a very intense experience for me, but the strain is too great to maintain for long. Interestingly enough, this is true only when the novel is going well, is for me truly an alternative to life. When I have no conviction I can write all day!

The New York Times, April 6, 1980

P.G. Wodehouse

On most days, he would get up at half past seven, go out onto the porch at the back door, and do the "daily dozen" sequence of calisthenic exercises he had performed every day since 1920. While Ethel, always a late riser, was still upstairs in bed, Wodehouse would prepare his regular breakfast -- toast and honey or marmalade, a slice of coffee cake and a mug of tea -- and, as part of the early morning routine, he would read a "breakfast book," for example a Rex Stout or Ngaio Marsh mystery. Then he would light the first pipe of the day, crumbling the cigars Peter Schwed sent him into the bowl in preference to pipe tobacco. At nine o'clock, after a short walk with some of the dogs, he would retire to his study, a spacious, pine-clad room overlooking the garden, for the morning's work. His writing methods had not changed in years. He would sit and brood in a favourite armchair, draft a paragraph or two in pencil, then move to the typewriter, sitting under a Victorian oil painting of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's Lombard Street offices. Even in old age, he was still translating the chaos of reality into the farcical stability of Blandings Castle. There is something both heroic and poignant about the octogenarian Wodehouse, in exile, pecking away at his typewriter.

In his last decade, Wodehouse could still average 1,000 words a day where, as a younger man, he had often written 2,500 words and more. The morning's work would be followed by lunch -- usually meat and two veg, followed by an English pudding like apple crumble -- at about one o'clock. If he was visiting Remsenburg, Bolton, now also in his eighties, would arrive at two for their daily walk, an hour-long circuit, a regular outing which would unfailingly bring Wodehouse back home in time for the all-important rendezvous with his favourite soap opera, The Edge of the Night. At about four, he and Ethel would have tea, which was served, English style, on good china with cucumber sandwiches. After this, he might snooze a bit in his armchair, have a bath, and do some more work, before the evening cocktail (sherry for her, a lethal martini for him) at six, which they took in the sun parlour, overlooking the garden. This was followed by dinner, alone with Ethel, and eaten early to allow the cook to get home to her family. After dinner, Wodehouse would usually read, but occasionally he would play two-handed bridge with Ethel, a habit, he joked, that doubtless suggested he was senile.

Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life

Roald Dahl

Settled into a writing career, he lived on a farm where he raised livestock and bred greyhounds. His routine was to write from 10 A.M. until noon, spend the afternoon tending his animals and return to his writing again from 4 to 6 P.M.

His writing was far from effortless. He commonly spent six months working on a single short story.

The New York Times, November 24, 1990

Isaac Asimov

His usual routine was to awake at 6 A.M., sit down at the typewriter by 7:30 and work until 10 P.M. 

In "In Memory Yet Green," the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1979, he explained how he became a compulsive writer. His Russian-born father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn that were open from 6 A.M. to 1 A.M. seven days a week. Young Isaac got up at 6 o'clock every morning to deliver papers and rushed home from school to help out in the store every afternoon. If he was even a few minutes late, his father yelled at him for being a folyack, Yiddish for sluggard. Even more than 50 years later, he wrote: "It is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6 A.M. anyway. I am still showing my father I'm not a folyack."

The New York Times, April 7, 1992

Immanuel Kant

His daily schedule then looked something like this. He got up at 5:00 A.M. His servant Martin Lampe, who worked for him from at least 1762 until 1802, would wake him. The old soldier was under orders to be persistent, so that Kant would not sleep longer. Kant was proud that he never got up even half an hour late, even though he found it hard to get up early. It appears that during his early years, he did sleep in at times. After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of tea -- weak tea. With that, he smoked a pipe of tobacco. The time he needed for smoking it "was devoted to meditation." Apparently, Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on. He then prepared his lectures and worked on his books until 7:00. His lectures began at 7:00, and they would last until 11:00. With the lectures finished, he worked again on his writings until lunch. Go out to lunch, take a walk, and spend the rest of the afternoon with his friend Green. After going home, he would do some more light work and read.

Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography

Karl Marx

His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. "I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing," he wrote in 1858.

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment

William Styron

When the Styrons settled in their Connecticut farmhouse and began a family, his life became the ideal of any aspiring writer: productive yet relaxed, sociable yet protected. On the door frame outside his workroom, he tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it: ''Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.''

The precept seemed to work for him, but it was an unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch with Rose around 1:30; run errands, deal with the mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4. Then up to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.

With Rose to guard the door, run the household, organize their busy social life and look after the children, Mr. Styron followed this routine over the next 30 years.

The New York Times, November 2, 2006

Philip Roth

If turbulence remains one of Roth's dominant literary tones, "Order in living" is now his credo. "Philip lives like he's at Fort Dix," his friend Ross Miller, who teaches literature at the University of Connecticut, told me. "Everything precise and hospital corners." Roth wakes early and, seven days a week, walks fifty yards or so to a two-room studio. The front room is outfitted with a fireplace, a desk, and a computer set up on a kind of lectern where he can write standing up, the better to preserve a bad back. There are pictures here and there of his family: his father, Herman, who sold insurance for Metropolitan Life; his mother, Bess; his older brother, Sandy, who used to be in advertising and now paints. Most of Roth's books are in the big house, where they run, room after room, in alphabetical order by category.

When I came to visit, it was a late-winter morning, and the snow was piled high around the studio. Roth was wearing a blue Shetland sweater, green corduroy pants. Often there is tweed. He dresses like a graduate student of the late fifties. He led me to the back room. There was a team photograph of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. There were free weights, a lifting bench, and an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape. He stays out here all day and into the evening: no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him.

"I live alone, there's no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with," Roth said. "My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning--this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens--and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on a call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency room. And I'm the emergency."

David Remnick, Reporting: Writings From The New Yorker