Daily Routines

Introducing the Subtle Maneuvers newsletter

Struggling with an ambitious creative project? Subtle Maneuvers is a free biweekly newsletter on routines, rituals, and wriggling through a creative life. Every other Monday, get a glimpse into how writers, artists, and other inspired minds actually got it done. Plus, an advice column! Subscribe now.

For more on the newsletter, read the intro post, check out the advice column, browse all past issues, or read some daily routines–focused excerpts here on the blog.

W. H. Auden

Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen," with the important proviso that "these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down."

John Lanchester, "High Style," The New Yorker, January 6, 2003

Paul Erdös

Erdös first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. "A mathematician," Erdos was fond of saying, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."

Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers