What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

John Irving (Paris Review interview) appears to write mostly in the morning to afternoon:

A novel is such a long involvement; when I’m beginning a book, I can’t work more than two or three hours a day. I don’t know more than two or three hours a day about a new novel. Then there’s the middle of a book. I can work eight, nine, twelve hours then, seven days a week—if my children let me; they usually don’t. One luxury of making enough money to support myself as a writer is that I can afford to have those eight-, nine-, and twelve-hour days. I resented having to teach and coach, not because I disliked teaching or coaching or wrestling but because I had no time to write. Ask a doctor to be a doctor two hours a day. An eight-hour day at the typewriter is easy; and two hours of reading over material in the evening, too. That’s routine. Then when the time to finish the book comes, it’s back to those two- and three-hour days. Finishing, like beginning, is more careful work.

Walter Mosley (2017 Paris Review interview)

INTERVIEWER: Do you write every day?

MOSLEY: Yeah, when I wake up in the morning.

INTERVIEWER: Weekends?

MOSLEY: Every day. People ask me if I write even when I’m on vacation. And I say, Man, do you take a shit on vacation?

Iris Murdoch (1990_36ya Paris Review interview)

INTERVIEWER: What are your daily work habits?

MURDOCH: I like working and when I have time to work, I work. But I also have to do other things like washing up and buying food. Fortunately my husband does the cooking. I sometimes have to go to London or I want to see my friends. Otherwise, I work pretty steadily all the time. I go to bed early and I start work very early. I work all morning, and then I shop and write letters—the letters take up a lot of time—in the afternoon. Then I work again from about half-past four until seven or eight. So I work steadily when I’ve got the open time, which is more days than not.

William Gibson, 2011_15ya interview in The Paris Review:

Interviewer: What is your writing schedule like?

Gibson: When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

Interviewer: And your schedule is steady the whole way through?

Gibson: As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it’s a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day. Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.

Umberto Eco (2008_18ya, “The Art of Fiction No. 197”)

INTERVIEWER: When in the day do you write?

ECO: There is no rule. For me it would be impossible to have a schedule. It can happen that I start writing at seven o’clock in the morning and I finish at three o’clock at night, stopping only to eat a sandwich. Sometimes I don’t feel the need to write at all.

INTERVIEWER: When you do write, how much do you write every day? Is there no rule for that as well?

ECO: None. Listen, writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

INTERVIEWER: So every day is different for you?

ECO: If I am in my countryside home, at the top of the hills of Montefeltro, then I have a certain routine. I turn on my computer, I look at my e-mails, I start reading something, and then I write until the afternoon. Later I go to the village, where I have a glass at the bar and read the newspaper. I come back home and I watch TV or a DVD in the evening until eleven, and then I work a little more until one or two o’clock in the morning. There I have a certain routine because I am not interrupted. When I am in Milan or at the university, I am not master of my own time—there is always somebody else deciding what I should do.

David McCullough (The Art of Biography No. 2, 1999)

I work in the small building out back, and it’s just right for me. There’s no running water and no telephone. No distractions. Because it has windows on all four sides and a high ceiling, there’s no feeling of being boxed in. It’s off-limits to everyone but grandchildren. They come out anytime they wish—the smaller the better. I work all day and just about every day. I go out about eight-thirty in the morning, like I’m going to the train, come back in for lunch, look at the mail, then I go back again for the afternoon. We built it when I was writing The Great Bridge. Before that I rented a little studio from a neighbor who had built several of them, each on wooden skids. You could pick out a spot on his farm and he’d hook a studio to his tractor and drag it there for you.

Hermione Lee (The Art of Biography No. 4, 2013)

We’ll go to Yorkshire for several weeks. We go to a ramshackle old house, where you can just walk out of the house into the countryside. We will get up not too late, and we will have breakfast and we will both go to our desks and all day long, until about three o’clock in the afternoon, I will write my book, and then in the afternoon we will go for a walk. Then we’ll make supper, and then I’ll probably do a bit more writing in the evening. That is my writing day in the country. It’s very quiet and very concentrated. It’s the opposite of life at Wolfson College, which is chock-full of people and meetings and committees and events and decision making.

Michael Holroyd (The Art of Biography No. 3, 2013)

Our conversations took place over two extended afternoons in the summer of 2012_14ya.

…INTERVIEWER: What would you be doing at this time of day if I weren’t bothering you?

HOLROYD: When I am working at a book, I tend to write in the mornings and do secondary work and ponder on the writing later in the day. That was not the case when I was younger and had more cumulative energy and concentration.

Richard Holmes, Rose Tremain (The Art of Biography No. 7, 2017)

HOLMES: Absolutely right. When I was writing Shelley, my old dining-room table was very important because it had two leaves that folded out. It gave me a huge spread for books, card catalogues, pictures, and a big Olivetti typewriter. My neighbors in the flat below said, Richard, we hear this terrible thumping at two A.M.! So I put more books under the table legs. I’ve never been a great morning person. Everyone has a best writing time. For me, it’s midafternoon on, and reading as late as possible.

INTERVIEWER: Does Rose work on a different schedule?

HOLMES: Yes, she’s a morning girl. After twenty-five years, we still find that works surprisingly well. We get together for meals. A light lunch, strong coffee to see us through, and then she’s finishing work and I’m starting. But it’s the evenings that are so lovely. We have late supper together always by candlelight, and talk and talk.

Robert Caro (The Art of Biography No. 5, 2016)

INTERVIEWER: You start writing in longhand, correct?

CARO: Yes. I write on white legal pads. I seldom have only one draft in longhand—I’d say I probably have three or four. Then I go and do the same pages over on the typewriter, and then I throw them out. I go chapter by chapter. I can’t go on to another chapter until I feel this chapter is done.

INTERVIEWER: Do you work from nine to five?

CARO: “I generally get up around seven or so, and I walk to work through Central Park outlining the first paragraphs that I’m going to write that day. But the thing is, as you get into a chapter, you get wound up. You wake up excited—I don’t mean”thrilled” excited but “I want to get in there,” so I get up earlier and earlier. Sometimes Ina says, Do you know what time it is? I say, I don’t want to look. I work pretty long days. If I’m doing research, I can have lunch with friends, but if I’m writing, I have a sandwich at my desk. The guy at the Cosmic Diner, John, he knows my voice.”

INTERVIEWER: Do you set daily quotas?

CARO: I have to, because I have a wonderful relationship with my editor and my publisher. I have no real deadlines. I’m never asked, When are you going to deliver? So it’s easy to fool yourself that you’re really working hard when you’re not. And I’m naturally lazy. So what I do is—people laugh at me—I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young, everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I’m going to a job. I have to produce. I write down how many words I’ve done in a day. Not to the word—I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make me remember it’s a job. I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t, but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself.

Stacy Schiff (The Art of Biography No. 6)

INTERVIEWER: Once you get started writing, do you finish a draft relatively quickly?

SCHIFF: Well, I think both my family and my editor would opt for the “relatively.” Generally I need at least eighteen months to write a book. I’m a relentless reviser, so the pages take a while even when I know where I’m headed. Along the way, I inevitably turn a corner and find I need to return to something in the archives. That can be wrenching—when I’m writing I want only to be at my desk. Whatever is sitting there feels fragile and fugitive. I worry that if I so much as turn my back, there will be a code blue. Moreover, I’m living inside those pages, in another reality altogether, which means I’m wholly useless at anything else. For at least a few years, you are a displaced person, holding off one world for the sake of another. And then there is the problem of lunch, in which the writer’s day craters. I avoid midday commitments when I’m writing, which endears me to no one.

Robert Crumb (The Art of Comics No. 1, 2010_16ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you punch the clock? Do you say, I’m going to work from two until five?

CRUMB: No, I could never work regularly like that. I work in erratic spurts. Once I get rolling on something I tend to be more regular. Getting started is like getting a rocket off the ground. You need the most energy and the most push to get started; once you’re up there and you’re going then it’s easier to keep it going. Sit down and pick up where you left off, you know. Getting going is always tough.

Harold Bloom (The Art of Criticism No. 1, 1991)

INTERVIEWER: Is there a particular time of day when you like to write?

BLOOM: There isn’t one for me. I write in desperation. I write because the pressures are so great, and I am simply so far past a deadline that I must turn out something.

INTERVIEWER: So you don’t espouse a particular work ethic on a daily basis?

BLOOM: No, no. I lead a disordered and hurried life.

INTERVIEWER: Are there days when you do not work at all?

BLOOM: Yes, alas, alas, alas. But one always thinks about literature. I don’t recognize a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an experimental critic. I’ve spent my life proclaiming that what is called “critical objectivity” is a farce. It is deep subjectivity which has to be achieved, which is difficult, whereas objectivity is cheap.

INTERVIEWER: What is it that you think keeps you from writing when you’re unable to write?

BLOOM: Despair, exhaustion. There are long periods when I cannot write at all. Long, long periods, sometimes lasting many years. Sometimes one just has to lie fallow. And also, you know, interests change. One goes into such different modes.

George Steiner (The Art of Criticism No. 2, 1995)

INTERVIEWER: You mention the fax, the telephone, the computer. Let’s talk about the implements of writing and the way in which technology does or doesn’t factor into your own work.

STEINER: Yes, I’m fascinated by the actual material techne of writing. I’m a morning creature. All my best work tends to be done in the morning, especially the early morning, when somehow my mind and sensibility operate much more efficiently. I read and take notes in the afternoon, then sketch the writing I want to do the next morning. The afternoon is the time for charging the battery. I write on very old-fashioned typewriters. The Paris Review has the largest collection of insight into this of any publication. It’s utterly irrational, but I love foolscap; in America it’s called “legal” size. It used to be available in any stationery shop, but you now have to order it in advance. I tend to type single-space on those huge sheets, badly typed without any attention, often even to paragraphing. This is the first naively typed, brute output. The second one will be double-spaced, and begin to be on normal-size typing paper, but still with a lot of hand insertions and corrections. So in a funny way, my rough draft is a single-spaced, typed scribble on foolscap. I don’t know when it began, but I’ve been doing this for many, many years and I walk up and down the room like a deprived mother hen when I do not have that odd size of paper which somehow corresponds to the way I see a problem.

Helen Vendler (The Art of Criticism No. 3, 1996_30ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you work daily? What is your routine?

VENDLER: No, I have no routine. I hate routines. I have no fixed hours for sleeping, eating, waking, working.

INTERVIEWER: Do you write at a desk or in bed or on a sofa?

VENDLER: I write in various places . . . sometimes on the sofa, sometimes in bed, sometimes sitting at the computer. I hate routine more than anything else. I’m a night person, so I tend to write later in the day rather than earlier, but I have no fixed hours and no fixed days…What I mind more than slowing down, which everyone has done by sixty-three, is that in a day you no longer have a third wind and sometimes you don’t even have a second wind. I always had a third wind for many years, and then I always had a second wind. Now, if I’ve had a hard day, I don’t feel disposed to write at night.

Simone de Beauvoir (The Art of Fiction No. 35, 1965_61ya)

INTERVIEWER: People say that you have great self-discipline and that you never let a day go by without working. At what time do you start?

DE BEAUVOIR: I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five o’clock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, I’ll read the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most often it’s a pleasure to work.

INTERVIEWER: When do you see Sartre?

DE BEAUVOIR: Every evening and often at lunchtime. I generally work at his place in the afternoon.

…INTERVIEWER: Do your writer friends have the same habits as you?

DE BEAUVOIR: No, it’s quite a personal matter. Genet, for example, works quite differently. He puts in about twelve hours a day for six months when he’s working on something and when he has finished he can let six months go by without doing anything. As I said, I work every day except for two or three months of vacation when I travel and generally don’t work at all. I read very little during the year, and when I go away I take a big valise full of books, books that I didn’t have time to read. But if the trip lasts a month or six weeks, I do feel uncomfortable, particularly if I’m between two books. I get bored if I don’t work.

Kenneth Roberts, according to E. B. White (The Art of the Essay No. 1, 1969_57ya)

INTERVIEWER: You have wondered at Kenneth Roberts’s working methods—his stamina and discipline. You said you often went to zoos rather than write. Can you say something of discipline and the writer?

WHITE: Kenneth Roberts wrote historical novels. He knew just what he wanted to do and where he was going. He rose in the morning and went to work, methodically and industriously. This has not been true of me. The things I have managed to write have been varied and spotty—a mishmash. Except for certain routine chores, I never knew in the morning how the day was going to develop. I was like a hunter, hoping to catch sight of a rabbit. There are two faces to discipline. If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it. The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds. This takes stamina and resolution. Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up; he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as is necessary to achieve excellence, or as close to excellence as he can get. This varies from one time to maybe twenty.

Hilton Als (The Art of the Essay No. 3, 2018)

INTERVIEWER: Do you have writing rituals?

ALS: Yes. The ritual aspect is getting my head together to do it. I don’t want to add more shit to the experience, so it’s very simple. I love Wendy Williams, because she doesn’t speak English. She speaks Wendy, and that frees me to imagine my own language. I wake up early and have a little breakfast, then Wendy’s over, and I make the bed and get to work. I also like to stop writing at a thought that’s going to be waiting for me the next day so it’s less daunting sitting down again.

Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir No. 1, 2009_17ya)

Mostly mornings at home. I made a habit in grad school of getting up at five in the morning to work. When my son was born, in ’86, I had to get up really early, like four. I was teaching six sections of comp at three different schools, and that was the only time I had. For ten years there, I didn’t have time to shave both legs the same day. If I had even an hour, I could work anywhere. I was very unpersnickety. But I usually can’t write big prose while teaching. I can write journalism or lectures. And I’m always scribbling poems…But with Lit, I faced such time pressure, I had to write lying down. If I sat up and typed with this injury, I’d last maybe six or seven hours. Lying down with my laptop on my knees, I could go from seven in the morning until eight or nine at night. I did that seven days a week. I felt like a Turkish pasha. I’d lie around in silk pajamas. And eat pistachios all day.

Adam Phillips (Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7, 2014_12ya)

On the days he sees patients, Phillips arrives at the office as early as six in the morning in order to read for an hour or two before his first appointment. (He claims to require very little sleep.) He also reads between consultations, whenever he can. As he puts it, “I need to hear other voices.”

…INTERVIEWER: Do you go into the office to write?

PHILLIPS “Yes, I can only write in my office. I love the romance of people who can write anywhere, who can write in hotels, but I can’t write anywhere but in that room. At least, so far I can only write in that room.”

(Another short-sleeper?)

Geoff Dyer (The Art of Nonfiction No. 6, 2013_13ya)

INTERVIEWER: Is there a consistent routine?

DYER: I always have a nap sometime between two and five in the afternoon. Beyond that, we’d have to talk about each book in turn and what stage I was at in a particular book. Which means, I suppose, that the answer is no. I find it incredibly difficult to settle and I have very limited powers—if we can dignify it with that word—of concentration, so at first I’m up and out of my chair every few minutes. Later on I can stay at the desk for longer periods until eventually I don’t even have to force myself to stay there. The general process is just to splurge stuff out, without being particularly worried about the spelling or anything. Just splurging to make sure there’s something there. And then I begin knocking it into shape both at the level of the sentence and the overarching structure. But that initial phase is the one I increasingly hate, so I try to get it done as quickly as possible, in the five-minute bursts that I’m capable of putting in at the desk before I get up to do something else. It would be a better way of working if I could write in proper sentences from the beginning. Why I don’t do that is a mystery to me, or would be, were it not a mystery at all. It’s because I’m so impatient. I want to get all the content down so that I can then move on to the fun part, which is sorting out the sentences. So my impatience to get to that point ends up postponing it.

Gay Talese (The Art of Nonfiction No. 2, 2009_17ya)

GAY TALESE: Usually I wake up in bed with my wife. I don’t want to have breakfast with anyone. So I go from the third floor, which is our bedroom, to the fourth floor, where I keep my clothes. I get dressed as if I’m going to an office. I wear a tie.

INTERVIEWER: Cuff links?

TALESE: Yes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes.

…INTERVIEWER: You never write directly onto the computer?

TALESE: Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I want to be forced to work slowly because I don’t want to get too much on paper. By the end of the morning I might have a page, which I will pin up above my desk. After lunch, around five o’clock, I’ll go back to work for another hour or so.

John McPhee (The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, 2010_16ya)

It sounds very mechanical, but the effect is the exact opposite. What it does is free you to write. It liberates you to write. You’ve got all the notes there; you come in in the morning and you read through what you’re going to try to write, and there’s not that much to read. You’re not worried about the other ninety-five percent, it’s off in a folder somewhere. It’s you and the keyboard. You get away from the mechanics through this mechanical means. The spontaneity comes in the writing, the phraseology, the telling of the story—after you’ve put all this stuff aside. You can read through those relevant notes in a relatively short period of time, and you know that’s what you want to be covering. But then you spend the rest of your day hoping spontaneous things will occur.

It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write.

Luc Sante (The Art of Nonfiction No. 9, 2016)

As I’ve gotten older, my habits have changed. I used to write late at night. I would wake up in the morning, and I’d kind of fidget and get things set up and clear my throat, and by the time everything was just right, it would be after dinner, and I’d get started around ten or eleven and work all night. Somewhere Walter Benjamin says that you can’t feel confident about any piece of work that you haven’t sat all night over. It’s sort of true. I do still find myself pulling all-nighters. But I’ve discovered that the best time for me these days is to start soon after waking. Try not to look at my e-mail. Try to get to it when my brain is still soft. You know, sleep entangled—because it’s more raw, and because it’s less self-conscious. Writing needs a certain kind of self-consciousness, at some point, but it will never do in launching the initial salvo.

Amy Clampitt (The Art of Poetry No. 45, 1993_33ya)

My favorite place for writing, the place where I’m most likely to get something written, is the coast of Maine, where I’ve spent some time—never more than six weeks at a stretch, usually less—nearly every summer since 1974_52ya. I find a place to put my typewriter where I can look at the water. I tend to work best in the morning—I’m not a night person, although I have occasionally woken up with a phrase in my head and not been able to sleep. I used to keep something to write with under the pillow just in case something like that came to me—sometimes it was very hard to decipher because I don’t like to turn the light on. I’m not an obsessive writer at all. I know of people who say that they write every day—I don’t. I wish I were that organized, but I’m not. There are times when there are other things I have to do. I need some time when I’m not going to be interrupted. I can sometimes write through interruptions, but that’s because I’ve sort of set myself in that mode. I’m very erratic about it.

Andrei Voznesensky (The Art of Poetry No. 26, 1980_46ya)

INTERVIEWER: When you’re not on tour, when you’re at home, do you have a regular working schedule?

VOZNESENSKY: Never.

INTERVIEWER: You wait for it to happen?

VOZNESENSKY: I don’t schedule. Nobody does. In Russia, everything is improvisation. Nobody can tell where he’ll be on Friday night. Let me give you an example. When I came to America, I wanted very much to visit my dear friend Robert Lowell’s grave. We drove out from Boston in the late afternoon—a dinner had been arranged for that evening. It was dark by the time we found the grave in the forest. I was with a young poet from Boston, and I said to him, “Please, I’m sorry, excuse me, it is impolite, but leave me alone, go to your car, I want half an hour alone.” Then I began to write poetry. Later I asked him to find a phone and call the people and tell them we wouldn’t come to dinner. They were all friends of Lowell’s and they were very upset with me. But how could I have gone to a dinner party and broken the mood of that encounter? Even if I hadn’t been writing a poem, I couldn’t have gone to a party after that visit to his grave.

W. H. Auden, via Anthony Hecht (The Art of Poetry No. 40, 1988_38ya)

…“In any case, if I share any other literary characteristics with [W. H.] Auden, the chances are very great that I acquired them through studying his work.”

INTERVIEWER: “What are your memories of him on Ischia?” [~1951]

HECHT: He kept to an inflexible schedule of work and play. He rose early, wrote and read before breakfast, which was likely to be no more than coffee. (I was told all this.) Continued work till about three PM, pausing for a light lunch. The rest of the day was for relaxation and amusement. He used to say that he was never able to work beyond mid-afternoon, but only came to understand the reason for this when he had become a convinced Christian, because he then realized that three p.m. is the canonical hour of the crucifixion. He was no less punctual about cocktails and dinner, and went home to bed, even being known to leave his own birthday parties at a fixed time in order to be up and at work at his scheduled time of, I think it was, six. He credited his parents with instilling in him this useful discipline.

Auden, The Art of Poetry No. 17, 1974_52ya:

INTERVIEWER: Many poets are night workers, manic, irregular in their habits.

AUDEN: Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!

Aharon Appelfeld (The Art of Fiction No. 224, 2014_12ya)

Aharon Appelfeld says that in order to be a serious writer you need to have a routine. For years his routine has been to write with a Biro on sheets of ordinary white paper in the café at Ticho House, in Jerusalem, which was once the house of a wealthy doctor and where this interview took place.

…INTERVIEWER: So you come here to work at Ticho House twice a week?

APPELFELD: Yes. I come here somewhere around ten or eleven. I stay here for two or three hours and then I go home. It’s a routine. Generally, when we say routine, it sounds bad, but routine is important.

INTERVIEWER: You write longhand. How many pages per day?

APPELFELD: One page, sometimes half a page, sometimes one and a half pages. I stop when I am tired—when I do not see more, when I do not hear more.

INTERVIEWER: Then you go home and read what you’ve done?

APPELFELD: Yes, in the late afternoon, after I have had my lunch, I spend another two hours on the same pages, then I leave it. I used to type them. I liked to type them very much. Suddenly you see there is something you have done. It was a joy. But now a woman comes to my house and I dictate. My old typewriter doesn’t work anymore.

Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Art of Fiction No. 91, 1986_40ya)

INTERVIEWER: Are you disciplined? Do you keep regular working hours?

ROBBE-GRILLET: No. I am not very disciplined but it usually works out that I do things at the same time. I get up late, have breakfast slowly, and start work at 11 a.m. I work through till three or four, and then I have a meal, perhaps a nap, start again around eight, and work through till midnight. So, twice four hours. At the moment I am writing the sequel to the Mirror, entitled Romanesque. It has taken me a month to write seven pages!

Alan Hollinghurst (The Art of Fiction No. 214, 2011_15ya)

HOLLINGHURST: …“Perhaps one is never as excited by anything as much as one’s first book, because then everything is potential. I had moved to London in 1981_45ya and was working full-time at the Times Literary Supplement, so I wrote the book in the evenings and on the weekends, with a glass or two of wine, which seemed to me a disinhibitor. Of course the third glass of wine tended to disinhibit me a bit too much. There was a big change when I began to write full-time. I turned myself into a morning-and-caffeine writer rather than an evening-and-alcohol writer. I don’t know if you can detect this at all in what I actually wrote.”

…INTERVIEWER: Do you write every day?

HOLLINGHURST: I spend ages not writing, and I have quite long spells in the course of a book when I’m not writing. But once I get going, I have a strict discipline. Kazuo Ishiguro told me his technique, which he called a “crash,” where he would plan a book for a long time and then set aside a period of four weeks in which he had absolutely no engagements. He would write for ten hours a day, and then at the end of the month he would have a draft of a novel. It’s a very good model for someone like myself who is naturally rather lazy. Unfortunately, in the case of The Stranger’s Child, it took four years instead of four weeks. I used to draw a line through the weeks of my diary to remind myself not to make any plans, and I would go out to see friends or to the pictures once a week. It has the defect of making you crazy and unsocialized but also the benefit of allowing you to think continuously, as Henry James exhorted himself to do. It’s wonderful just to live in the world of creation and know that there aren’t any other demands on you, and that you’re going to think as deeply and as continuously as you can about the thing in hand.

Robert Fagles (The Art of Translation No. 2, 1999_27ya)

INTERVIEWER: Can you take us through a sample working day on one of these translations?

FAGLES: I have a merciless internal clock that wakes me up rather early and gets me to my desk by seven-thirty or so and puts me to work on Homer. The work itself? The easiest thing to say is here, on one side, I’d have the Homeric texts and commentaries and lexicons, and on the other, as much as I could manage of English and American poetry, in my head or in an open book—say, Derek Walcott’s Omeros. There are about twenty-seven hundred years that separate the two traditions, and the trick (and the hard labor) is somehow to bring the two together. What I always do is read the Greek aloud until I begin to feel or find some English lurking between the Greek words, between the Greek lines, and I keep on mumbling like a maniac: Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon, hos mala polla / plangthê, epei Troiês hieron ptoliethron eperse. “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy.” The two passages are hardly equal, obviously—Homer’s infinitely greater—but trying to work from the Greek lines some English cadence of my own, trying over and over, would consume about three hours every morning. I once drove Robert Fitzgerald back to the Newark airport after he gave a reading in Princeton, and I said (fatuously, when he was halfway through his Iliad), It’s an awfully long poem, isn’t it, Robert? And he replied, Yes, Bob, but I wake up every morning with Homer as my companion. That’s the privilege. I know exactly how that feels now. It’s quite a privilege, and one you hate to leave.

August Kleinzahler (The Art of Poetry No. 93, 2007_19ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a favorite time of day in which you write?

KLEINZAHLER: Exclusively in the morning, eight to eleven. I can do things later but that’s when my energy is up. I get very impatient with company during those hours, which my wife doesn’t like. If I could afford it I’d have an office, although when I’ve had an office at universities I haven’t been able to do jack.

Matthew Weiner (The Art of Screenwriting No. 4, 2014_12ya)

A former Jeopardy! champion who once, rather than give notes, jumped up and danced to “Zou Bisou Bisou” for Jessica Paré (Megan Draper on the show), Weiner seems never to sleep. Our interview took place in four sessions that spanned almost eighteen months—real months, that is. More time than that passed on the show during the same period, but to say exactly how much would be, in Weiner’s universe, a spoiler. We spoke late into the night after he had spent full days in preproduction meetings, in editing, in sound-mixing sessions, on set, and in the writers’ room—and we could only sit down to talk on the rare nights when he didn’t have to write. Even with this schedule, he comes in every morning inspired by a movie he’s seen, an article he’s read, or a poem he’s remembered. (I’m lucky to be a writer on the show.) Weiner begins every season by rereading John Cheever’s preface to his Collected Stories: “A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself.” The life of a showrunner leaves him almost no time to be alone, but Weiner seems always to be instructing himself.

…WEINER: You know, I got a subscription to The Paris Review when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read those interviews all the time. They were really helpful.

INTERVIEWER: How did they help you?

WEINER: There were people talking about writing like it was a job, first of all. And then saying “I don’t know” a lot. It’s helpful, when you’re a kid, to hear someone saying “I don’t know.” Also, they were asking questions that I would’ve asked, only I’d have been embarrassed to ask them. Like, What time of day do you write?

INTERVIEWER: What time of day do you write?

WEINER: I write at night on this job because I have to, except Sundays when I write all day and all night. Left to my own devices I will always end up writing late at night, because I’m a procrastinator. But if there’s a deadline, I will write round the clock.

Another possible short sleeper.

Alberto Moravia (The Art of Fiction No. 6, 1954_72ya)

Never. I never work from notes. I had met a woman of Rome—ten years before. Her life had nothing to do with the novel, but I remembered her, she seemed to set off a spark. No, I have never taken notes or ever even possessed a notebook. My work, in fact, is not prepared beforehand in any way. I might add, too, that when I’m not working I don’t think of my work at all. When I sit down to write—that’s between nine and twelve every morning, and I have never, incidentally, written a line in the afternoon or at night—when I sit at my table to write, I never know what it’s going to be till I’m under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Aldous Huxley (The Art of Fiction No. 24, 1969_57ya)

I work regularly. I always work in the mornings, and then again a little bit before dinner. I’m not one of those who work at night. I prefer to read at night. I usually work four or five hours a day. I keep at it as long as I can, until I feel myself going stale. Sometimes, when I bog down, I start reading—fiction or psychology or history, it doesn’t much matter what—not to borrow ideas or materials, but simply to get started again. Almost anything will do the trick.

Alice Munro (The Art of Fiction No. 137, 1994_32ya)

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever had a specific time to write?

MUNRO: When the kids were little, my time was as soon as they left for school. So I worked very hard in those years. My husband and I owned a bookstore, and even when I was working there, I stayed at home until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would also do my writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I would write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably till about two-thirty, and then I would have a quick cup of coffee and start doing the housework, trying to get it all done before late afternoon.

INTERVIEWER: What about before the girls were old enough to go to school?

MUNRO: Their naps.

INTERVIEWER: You wrote when they had naps?

MUNRO: Yes. From one to three in the afternoon. I wrote a lot of stuff that wasn’t any good, but I was fairly productive. The year I wrote my second book, Lives of Girls and Women, I was enormously productive. I had four kids because one of the girls’ friends was living with us, and I worked in the store two days a week. I used to work until maybe one o’clock in the morning and then get up at six. And I remember thinking, You know, maybe I’ll die, this is terrible, I’ll have a heart attack. I was only about thirty-nine or so, but I was thinking this; then I thought, Well even if I do, I’ve got that many pages written now. They can see how it’s going to come out. It was a kind of desperate, desperate race. I don’t have that kind of energy now.

INTERVIEWER: What was the process involved in writing Lives?

MUNRO: I remember the day I started to write that. It was in January, a Sunday. I went down to the bookstore, which wasn’t open Sundays, and locked myself in. My husband had said he would get dinner, so I had the afternoon. I remember looking around at all the great literature that was around me and thinking, You fool! What are you doing here? But then I went up to the office and started to write the section called “Princess Ida,” which is about my mother. The material about my mother is my central material in life, and it always comes the most readily to me. If I just relax, that’s what will come up. So, once I started to write that, I was off. Then I made a big mistake. I tried to make it a regular novel, an ordinary sort of childhood adolescence novel. About March I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it. I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned that I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way.

…INTERVIEWER: We didn’t ask you questions about your writing day. How many days a week do you actually write?

MUNRO: I write every morning, seven days a week. I write starting about eight o’clock and finish up around eleven. Then I do other things the rest of the day, unless I do my final draft or something that I want to keep working on then I’ll work all day with little breaks.

INTERVIEWER: Are you rigid about that schedule, even if there’s a wedding or some other required event?

MUNRO: I am so compulsive that I have a quota of pages. If I know that I am going somewhere on a certain day, I will try to get those extra pages done ahead of time. That’s so compulsive, it’s awful. But I don’t get too far behind, it’s as if I could lose it somehow. This is something about aging. People get compulsive about things like this. I’m also compulsive now about how much I walk every day.

Ali Smith (The Art of Fiction No. 236, 2017)

Usually I get up around nine, I stay up quite late, till one or two in the morning, and work till quite late. But for How to be both I would get up at seven and use the first two hours to skim read—I was writing the book very fast and knew far too little about the Renaissance. So in the hours I’d usually still be asleep and dreaming, I read books about, say, the formation of building materials in Ferrara in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. At one point, for instance, the local river path was diverted, which made for a whole new possible clay mix, a new kind of brick. The stuff of dreams. But that was unusual for me. Normally I don’t do research at all. If I’m not writing to meet a deadline, I tend to spend the mornings doing admin—emails and stuff—and then start writing about two or three in the afternoon and work through until about eight or nine. I’m quite lazy, though. I spend lots of time staring into space and wandering around the room, picking things up, opening books, putting them down again.

Amos Oz (The Art of Fiction No. 148, 1996_30ya)

The first rule is never to travel when I’m pregnant with a book. I tend not to travel abroad when I’m writing, and even within this country I limit myself to three or four times a year. It doesn’t always work out, but that is my pattern. As for my day, I start at six a.m. with a forty-minute walk in the desert, summer and winter…I then have my coffee and come down to this room, sit at my desk, and wait. Without reading, listening to music, or answering the phone. Then I write, sometimes a sentence, sometimes a paragraph—in a good day, half a page. But I am here at least seven or eight hours every day. I used to feel guilty about an unproductive morning, especially when I lived on the kibbutz, and everyone else was working—plowing fields, milking cows, planting trees. Now I think of my work as that of a shopkeeper: it is my job to open up in the morning, sit, and wait for customers. If I get some, it is a blessed morning, if not, well, I’m still doing my job. So the guilt has gone, and I try to stick to my shopkeeper’s routine. Chores like answering letters, faxes, and telephone calls are squeezed in an hour before lunch or dinner. Perhaps poets and short-story writers can work with a different pattern. But writing novels is a very disciplined business. Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage—one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

Amy Hempel (The Art of Fiction No. 176, 2003_23ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you require a certain environment to work?

HEMPEL: I used to write only at night. All night, with a Walkman on. Did that for the first book. Much of the second book. Now there’s too much I have to get done in the day. You try not to be precious about it. An average day includes around two hours of writing-writing, about six miles of dog walking (which also counts as writing), a lot of time on E-mail, a movie, some forensics shows, and CNN to see what I missed. Andrea Barrett (The Art of Fiction No. 180, 2003_23ya)

INTERVIEWER: What’s your writing day like?

BARRETT: It depends. If things are lined up and I’m ahead of myself in terms of research, I’ll write in the morning, and then sort of gather stuff together in the afternoon. Say if I’m going to write about rhododendrons, I’ll get together all the stuff about rhododendrons in the house. And then I read it over in the afternoon or evening and try to write the passage the following morning. But sometimes, when I’m stuck, a scene will get to the point where I can’t write the next sentence because I don’t know something. What I just described is how I wrote Voyage and Servants of the Map and a few stories before that. My days are not as rigidly planned out now as they used to be. I travel too much. I’m always going off to give readings or to teach. I’m trying to get back to being more flexible—the way I was when I was younger, because I had to be. That little stretch of years when I was home enough and quiet enough that I could be quite firm about my schedule seems to be over, unfortunately. I don’t have that luxury right now, but I didn’t have it when I was working on my first books, and they still got written.

Angus Wilson (The Art of Fiction No. 20, 1957_69ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you work every day?

WILSON: Goodness, no. I did that when I was a civil servant and I don’t propose to do so now. But when I’m writing a book I do work every day.

INTERVIEWER: To a schedule?

WILSON: Not really. No. I usually work 8–2, but if it’s going well I may go on to 4. Only if I do I’m extremely exhausted. In fact, when the book is going well the only thing that stops me is sheer exhaustion. I wouldn’t like to do what Elizabeth Bowen once told me she did—write something every day, whether I was working on a book or not.

Carl Phillips (The Art of Poetry No. 103, 2019)

When I taught high school, I’d block out every Sunday morning for writing, but that’s because there was no other time for writing, so I had to make time. It happened to be Sunday, but it had nothing to do with Sunday being a day of worship for many people. So that was a kind of ritual, I suppose. For a while I had a house on Cape Cod with a garden shack that got converted into a writing studio. So there was the ritual of going into a particular space to write, but the time was random. Now I just write on the couch in my study or in the living room, whenever I feel I have an idea that could go somewhere, which is more often than not late at night. But I can’t make myself write at a given time. And frankly, I don’t want to. There are so many other things in a day to do, that I want to do, or have to do, besides write poems.

Anita Brookner (The Art of Fiction No. 98, 1987_39ya)

I only write in the summer holidays when the Institute is closed. Each novel has been written during a summer, over three or four months. Then I work every day all day and stop in the evening. I try to switch off completely and not think about it till the next day.

Ann Beattie (The Art of Fiction No. 209, 2011_15ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you still write late at night?

BEATTIE: I don’t write exclusively at night. But I do have more energy later in the day.

David Mamet (The Art of Theater No. 11, 1997_29ya)

INTERVIEWER: What sort of writing routine do you have? How do you operate?

MAMET: I don’t know. I’ve actually been vehemently deluding myself, thinking that I have no set habits whatever. I know that I have very good habits of thought, and I’m trying to make them better. But as for where I go, what I do and who’s around when I work—those things are never important to me.

Annie Proulx (The Art of Fiction No. 199, 2009_17ya)

The writing life is a perfect life for me. I can do my own thing and I can work at three AM if I want to….I don’t have a routine. I struggle to find time to write. This ranch is part of the problem. Yesterday I had a lot of writing to do and I couldn’t do it because a neighboring ranch called to say they were going to put bulls out in the pasture there. So I had to get over to the bridge over Jack Crick and let down the panels across the stream to stop the bulls from coming through onto my property. And that’s what happened to the afternoon. So I don’t have a set schedule for writing. When I was doing those Fine Just the Way It Is stories last summer, I think it was a two- or three-month stint to do all of the stories, and I could just work on it constantly from first light till late at night. When I’m in the groove, believe me, I’m in the groove. Nothing gets in the way. I do it.

Thomas Mann, Anthony Burgess (The Art of Fiction No. 48, 1973_53ya)

INTERVIEWER: At what time of day do you usually work?

BURGESS: I don’t think it matters much; I work in the morning, but I think the afternoon is a good time to work. Most people sleep in the afternoon. I’ve always found it a good time, especially if one doesn’t have much lunch. It’s a quiet time. It’s a time when one’s body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive—the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness.

INTERVIEWER: That’s very interesting. Thomas Mann, on the other hand, wrote religiously virtually every day from nine to one, as though he were punching a time clock.

BURGESS: Yes. One can work from nine to one, I think it’s ideal; but I find that the afternoon must be used. The afternoon has always been a good time for me. I think it began in Malaya when I was writing. I was working all morning. Most of us slept in the afternoon; it was very quiet. Even the servants were sleeping, even the dogs were asleep. One could work quietly away under the sun until dusk fell, and one was ready for the events of the evening. I do most of my work in the afternoon.

Anthony Powell (The Art of Fiction No. 68, 1978_48ya)

INTERVIEWER: Have your working methods varied much over the years?

POWELL: Not a lot. I really always, whenever I could, have worked all the morning. But in my early days I would quite often sit in front of a typewriter the whole morning without producing anything at all—it was not at all uncommon. Latterly I’ve got much more control as regards producing something, but one pays for that by not being able to do it later in the day. And when I was younger I found I could usually work all morning and then again after tea for an hour or so. But now I find that any serious work has got to be done in the morning, that I really am pretty well out for what you might call inventing anything after that, although I copy things out. My system is to do endless copies.

Arthur Koestler (The Art of Fiction No. 80, 1984_42ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you take holidays?

KOESTLER: I sometimes displace myself to a sunnier climate but I always take the office with me.

INTERVIEWER: Where to?

KOESTLER: The south of France, the Austrian Tyrol. I’m always working, you know. Nine-thirty until one. I have much reading to do and I’m a very slow reader, one of my misfortunes. If I’m reviewing a philosophical book it takes me a week to read it.

William Weaver (“The Art of Translation No. 3”, 2002_24ya)

INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk a bit about the realities of translation. What were the differences between the various writers you have worked with? Who was easy to work with? Who was hard? Who was pleasurable? Who was a pain in the neck?

WEAVER: Elsa was a pain in the neck. In fact, Alberto used to say that she was part witch. She was certainly a kind of clairvoyant. When I was translating La Storia (History), I was living in Tuscany. Every now and then she would call me up in the morning. I had told her once that I worked from the time I got up until about ten-thirty, and then I would have a cup of coffee, and then I would work again until lunchtime. She would always phone at ten-thirty, thinking that that was my break. The reason I took the break was that I didn’t want to think about translation for half an hour or so before I went back to it. But she would call and start asking questions. She said, Now on page three hundred and fifty-nine when I use the word so-and-so, how will you translate that? And I said, Elsa, I’m on page one hundred and twenty-three. I’ve got no idea! That didn’t stop her, and she started calling me almost daily at ten-thirty, ruining my morning. Finally I sat down and wrote her a long letter: Dear Elsa, I’m giving up the job. I think you better find somebody else. I don’t think that this is working. I made a copy for the publisher and another for my agent, and I sealed them all in airmail envelopes on a table in the entrance hall, from which the mail went out in the morning. It wasn’t going to go out until the next day. Just then Elsa called and said, I’m calling to say this is the last time I’m going to call you because I realize that this is not helping you. She had read my mind. I thought I’d torn up all the letters, but I apparently saved a carbon for myself, and years later when a student of mine was going through my papers he said, Bill, here’s this weird letter to Elsa Morante. I’d completely forgotten about it. She was by far the hardest person I worked with. The most pleasurable is certainly Umberto Eco, not only because he’s so much fun anyway, but also because he knows that you have to change some words when translating.

Barry Hannah (The Art of Fiction No. 184, 2004_22ya)

HANNAH: Right. Gosh, I hate to publish this, because young people will do anything it takes. But at first, yes. Teaching at Clemson was very hard work. I’d come home, put down the babies—and I was trying to be a good father and I think I was—but then that freedom, it was astonishing, my God. Every man or woman who comes home and takes a glass of wine or a couple of hits of bourbon on the rocks knows what I mean. Just this total loosening and release from the white noise of the day, so that you enter another zone. Instead of going to sleep I would hit the typewriter and sometimes write until four and teach my classes very haggardly. But I was often taught that everything is worth it for art. Everything. It was a cult. I remember Bill Harrison saying, “Don’t play with your child that much.” In other words, don’t be that good of a father. Get to that book. The ideal was Flaubert, who labored seven years on Madame Bovary and sweated out every word, le mot juste, the right word. So yeah, I learned things that way, but on the other hand I would have learned things had I been sober.

“Right now, it’s just what life gave me. It’s my backyard. Thank God I never ran over a child or had a car wreck. I scared my young children, driving fast and being loony. That’s the most regrettable thing, that I scared my young children.”

“Today, I’m well out. I couldn’t do it physically. I wish my genes were different, that I could have taken three beers max, like most people.”

Beryl Bainbridge (The Art of Fiction No. 164, 2000_26ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a strict routine?

BAINBRIDGE: When I’m writing, yes. I work day and night. I don’t go out. I sometimes don’t go to bed, but just nap on that sofa. I often don’t have a bath, because the treat of having a long bath after five days and washing my hair revitalizes me. I smoke, but I don’t drink. When I’m writing journalism, I sometimes have one drink, or if I get stuck in a book, I might have a shot. I live like that day and night for about four months, then it is over, the book is finished and I have a long bath. But by then, often the paperback of the previous book is out, or the American edition, and one has to do the publicity for it, with all that it entails by way of traveling and so on. Lately it has been a rat race.

Charles Wright (The Art of Poetry No. 41, 1989_37ya)

INTERVIEWER: I guess what I really wanted to ask is a question about your daily routine—if there is one. Do you schedule your writing, or does it come in desultory bursts?

WRIGHT: I used to have a routine—for years I wrote in the afternoon, unlike anyone else I’ve ever heard of, When I was in Italy I translated Monrale in the morning, and twenty years later, in 1983_43ya, I did it again when I was working on the Campana. But that makes it sound as though I had a fixed routine, certain hours when I did certain things. And I don’t have any such thing. And never did except for the hour and a half it takes me to read the newspaper each morning. Of course there’s b.c., and a.d.—Before Child and After Delivery. The past eighteen years have been much different from the nine before that. And certainly better, I might add. The beginnings of my little experiments with dislocation and discontinuity, the abstracting of the story line, all took place out of necessity in my case. Time was grabbed when grabbable, what with teaching, family, and all the other emanations bidding for its services. Innovation was the child of necessity for me. My poems became, or started to become, disconsecutive, going from stanza to stanza as units rather than from beginning to end as a seamless piece. Later, in The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the River, and Zone Journals, I tended to make an aesthetic of such impulses, and to widen them. All of which really doesn’t answer your question, does it?

INTERVIEWER: No, but it answers another question, and I’ll ask it in just a minute. But first, let’s get back to the business of your schedule, and if you have one.

WRIGHT: No, I never did have a schedule, though I was chipping away at things rather consistently. When I was working on something, I worked on it every chance I got, morning, afternoon, or evening. So work would come in bursts, but not desultory ones. For instance, on “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” I seemed to be working every day that year. Obsessively. Of course, I tend to think about writing obsessively even when I don’t have a project. I’d like to be writing all the time. I seldom read novels any more because I don’t want to get caught up in something that might take me three to four days, or longer, away from thinking about poems. This hardly becomes justifiable when I go, as I have done, three months or longer between poems. But one must protect one’s standards, mustn’t one? For a highly organized person, as I am, my writing schedule is wholly erratic.

Blaise Cendrars (The Art of Fiction No. 38, 1950_76ya)

INTERVIEWER: And your work habits? You’ve said somewhere that you get up at dawn and work for several hours.

CENDRARS: I never forget that work is a curse—which is why I’ve never made it a habit. Certainly, to be like everyone else, lately I’ve wanted to work regularly from a given hour to a given hour; I’m over fifty-five and I wanted to produce four books in a row. That finished, I had enough on my back. I have no method of work. I’ve tried one, it worked, but that’s no reason to fix on it for the rest of my life. One has other things to do in life aside from writing books.

Carlos Fuentes (The Art of Fiction No. 68, 1981_45ya)

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day’s writing. I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down. I always follow a triangular pattern on my walks here in Princeton: I go to Einstein’s house on Mercer Street, then down to Thomas Mann’s house on Stockton Street, then over to Herman Broch’s house on Evelyn Place. After visiting those three places, I return home, and by that time I have mentally written tomorrow’s six or seven pages.

Chinua Achebe (The Art of Fiction No. 139, 1994_32ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you find a particular time or place that you like to write—a time of day or a place in your house or your office?

ACHEBE: I have found that I work best when I am at home in Nigeria. But one learns to work in other places. I am most comfortable in the surroundings, the kind of environment about which I am writing. The time of day doesn’t matter, really. I am not an early-morning person; I don’t like to get out of bed, and so I don’t begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also. Generally, I don’t attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it’s trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it—without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.

John Guare (The Art of Theater No. 9, 1992_34ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you work everyday?

GUARE: I literally get sick if I don’t. I like to work; I like to get up in the morning and go to work.

Christopher Isherwood (The Art of Fiction No. 49, 1974_52ya)

Isherwood works every morning and then usually walks to the ocean to swim. The substance of this interview was therefore recorded in a series of late-afternoon sessions—teatime. Possibly the conversation reflects something of the hour.

Cynthia Ozick (The Art of Fiction No. 95, 1987_39ya)

INTERVIEWER: You write all night. Have you always done so?

CYNTHIA OZICK: [Speaking, not yet typing.] “Always. I’ve written in daylight, too, but mainly I go through the night.”

INTERVIEWER: How does this affect your interaction with the rest of society?

OZICK: It’s terrible. Most social life begins in the evening, when I’m just starting. So when I do go out at night, it means I lose a whole day’s work.

INTERVIEWER: You don’t just start at midnight or whenever you get home?

OZICK: I almost never get home at midnight. I’m always the last to leave a party.

INTERVIEWER: What are your regular working hours?

OZICK: You’re talking as if there’s some sort of predictable schedule. I don’t have working hours. I wake up late. I read the mail, which sometimes is a very complex procedure. Then I eat breakfast with the Times. Then I start priming the pump, which is to read. I answer the letters.

Claude Simon (The Art of Fiction No. 128, 1992_34ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you follow a regular writing schedule, setting aside a certain amount of time to work every day?

SIMON: Each afternoon I start at around three-thirty and work until about seven-thirty or eight.

Alice McDermott (The Art of Fiction No. 244, 2019)

INTERVIEWER: It’s also the least “narrated” of your novels. The most omniscient. And it covers a lot of time. Have you found that your practice or your ambitions in the novels have changed over the years?

McDERMOTT: I suppose my practice has remained much the same—get to your desk, write. There may have been more urgency on my part when my kids were at home, when I had only until three every afternoon. Then again, at my age, there’s a similar urgency. How many more chances are you going to have to get this novel thing right? There’s still a clock at my back, it’s still ticking.

…INTERVIEWER: When Child of My Heart was published you came to UCLA to read, and someone asked what your schedule was, writing that novel. You said you worked three or four hours a day, three or four days a week. Another visitor, a male writer, had previously answered that same question by saying that he worked eight to ten hours, seven days a week. My students enjoyed guessing that both of you were fibbing, both exaggerating in the direction expected for your gender. Can you tell me more about your working habits?

McDERMOTT: I’ve always tried to shape my writing time as if this were a real job. At my desk by nine in the morning, break for lunch, write until five or six. Or, when my children were home, until three—another kind of ninth hour. Five days a week when I’m not teaching, four days a week when I am. But, of course, you asked me what my schedule was writing that novel, and I suppose the misinterpretation comes from the fact of my two-novel habit. At the time I was writing Child of My Heart, that book was my way of taking a break—procrastinating—from writing the novel that would eventually become After This. So my answer was, I suppose, honest, but without context. Three or four hours a day, three or four days a week on that novel, the rest of the time on the other novel, four or five days a week, nine to three, or five. Rarely on weekends, though. I think it’s always a good idea to live a bit.

Dag Solstad (The Art of Fiction No. 230, 2016)

INTERVIEWER: Do you write every day?

SOLSTAD: For a long time I had a system, I call it the 3-1-3 system. Three days of work. On the afternoon of the third day—drinking. Then you can get as drunk as you want. On the fourth day, you rest. Then you’re ready for three new days of work. I drink less now—age takes its toll. But when I was physically in better shape, I did that all the time. And it worked very well. It gives you a lot of work days, only one day off a week.

David Grossman (The Art of Fiction No. 194, 2007_19ya)

INTERVIEWER: So how do you do it now?

GROSSMAN: I start every morning around six by walking for an hour in the hills of Jerusalem—of Mevasseret—where we live. Then I go to work in a one-room apartment I rented in a village close to my home. When I was looking at the place, the landlady said, Unfortunately, there is no phone line here. I said, Wonderful! I’ll take it. I go there every morning, no matter what, for six hours of total isolation.

INTERVIEWER: Then you’re done for the day?

GROSSMAN: No, then I go back and write at home. But I do different work in the afternoon or evening. I mostly revise what I wrote in the morning. I erase. It’s less creative because life is around—family and friends.

Don DeLillo (The Art of Fiction No. 135, 1993_33ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it made a difference in your career that you started writing novels late, when you were approaching thirty?

DeLILLO: Well, I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this. Even when I was well into my first novel I didn’t have a system for working, a dependable routine. I worked haphazardly, sometimes late at night, sometimes in the afternoon. I spent too much time doing other things or nothing at all. On humid summer nights I tracked horseflies through the apartment and killed them—not for the meat but because they were driving me crazy with their buzzing. I hadn’t developed a sense of the level of dedication that’s necessary to do this kind of work.

INTERVIEWER: What are your working habits now?

DeLILLO: I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent—you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes—I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The face of Borges against a dark background—Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked—but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.

Edmund White (The Art of Fiction No. 105, 1988_38ya)

INTERVIEWER: Can you discuss your work process? When do you sit down to write, and what do you do to warm up?

WHITE: Oh, it’s very tormented. I try to write in the morning, and I write in longhand, and I write in very beautiful notebooks [White displays a couple of hardbound notebooks filled with thick, hand-laid paper] and with very beautiful pens. I just write away, and then . . . This is a first go at it, and then I start crossing out, and it gets crazier and crazier, with inserts and so on. Finally, two or three years of this go by and then one day I call in a typist. I dictate the entire book to her or him. The typist is a sort of editor in that he or she will tell me what is really terrible and what’s good, or what’s inconsistent and doesn’t make sense. I get together a whole version this way and then I stew over it some more. Eventually my editor reads it, and then he tells me to change things, and it goes on like that. If I write a page a day, I’m lucky. But I write less. And months go by without my writing at all, and I get very crazy when I write! Sick, physically.

…INTERVIEWER: You seem to be more a creature of inspiration than habit, which counters the dictum many writers have about getting up every morning and writing for several hours a day, come what may.

WHITE: Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you’re not writing well, why continue it? I just don’t think this grinding away is useful. The other thing they say: I write because I must. Well, I have never felt that, and I doubt most of them do either. I think they are mouthing a cliché. I don’t think most people write because they must; perhaps economically they must, but spiritually? I wonder. I think many writers would be perfectly happy to lay down their pens and never write again if they could maintain their prestige, professorship and PEN membership.

Edna O’Brien (The Art of Fiction No. 82, 1984_42ya)

INTERVIEWER: How do you organize your time? Do you write regularly, every day? Philip Roth has said that he writes eight hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Do you work as compulsively?

O’BRIEN: He is a man, you see. Women have the glorious excuse of having to shop, cook, clean! When I am working I write in a kind of trance, longhand, in these several copybooks. I meant to tidy up before you came! I write in the morning because one is nearer to the unconscious, the source of inspiration. I never work at night because by then the shackles of the day are around me, what James Stephens (author of The Crock of Gold) called “That flat, dull catalogue of dreary things that fasten themselves to my wings,” and I don’t sit down three hundred and sixty-five days a year because I’m not that kind of writer. I wish I were! Perhaps I don’t take myself that seriously. Another reason why I don’t write constantly is that I feel I have written all I had wanted to say about love and loss and loneliness and being a victim and all that. I have finished with that territory. And I have not yet embraced another one. It may be that I’m going towards it—I hope and pray that this is the case.

INTERVIEWER: When you are writing, are you disciplined? Do you keep regular hours, turn down invitations, and hibernate?

O’BRIEN: Yes, but discipline doesn’t come into it. It is what one has to do. The impulse is stronger than anything. I don’t like too much social life anyway. It is gossip and bad white wine. It’s a waste. Writing is like carrying a fetus. I get up in the morning, have a cup of tea, and come into this room to work. I never go out to lunch, never, but I stop around one or two and spend the rest of the afternoon attending to mundane things. In the evening I might read or go out to a play or a film, or see my sons. Did I tell you that I spend a lot of time moping? Did Philip Roth say that he moped?

Czesław Miłosz (The Art of Poetry No. 70, 1994_32ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is your writing process like?

MILOSZ: I write every morning, whether one line or more, but only in the morning. I write in notebooks and then type drafts into my computer. I never drink coffee and never use any stimulants when I write. I do drink moderately, but only after my work. I probably don’t fit the image of the neurotic modern writer for those reasons, but who knows?

Elias Khoury (The Art of Fiction No. 233, 2017)

INTERVIEWER: How did you find time to write during the war?

KHOURY: I wrote in spurts. For example, I finished the first draft of White Masks in three weeks. I wrote so fast my hand hurt. I’ve never written in that way again. There were times when I was fighting, in Beirut or outside the city, and times when I was working at the Research Center. So it wasn’t a matter of sitting down to write for three hours every morning like I do now. I wrote whenever I could, mostly in the evenings. Like I said, I was obsessed, or possessed. Do you know the story of al-Akhtal, the Umayyad poet? He was a Christian in the time of Caliph Muawiya. They say that when al-Akhtal stood to recite his poems in front of the caliph, his enemies would try to embarrass him by asking whether he prayed when he heard the muezzin call the faithful. So al-Akhtal told them, I pray whenever I’m visited by prayer. I’m the same way with writing.

Elie Wiesel (The Art of Fiction No. 79, 1984_42ya)

INTERVIEWER: What about the process of each? Is it a struggle, for instance, to get up each morning to write about something you would prefer not to write about?

WIESEL: It depends. I don’t have many examples of writing about the Holocaust because I haven’t written that much about it. But there is never a struggle in the morning. It’s a pleasant agony. I am myself only when I work. I work for four hours without interruption. Then I stop for my studies. But these four hours are really mine. It is a struggle when I have to cut. I reduce nine hundred pages to one hundred sixty pages. I also enjoy cutting. I do it with a masochistic pleasure although even when you cut, you don’t. Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.

David Ignatow (The Art of Poetry No. 23, 1979_47ya)

INTERVIEWER: Are you an impulsive writer, or do you set aside a certain number of hours to write?

IGNATOW: I’ve alternated between being impulsive and scheduled. When I was living out in East Hampton, during the three grants that I was lucky to get, I organized myself on a morning schedule, and, whether I had anything to say or not, I would sit down at the typewriter and slip in a piece of paper there, and I would tell myself there was nothing to write until something finally emerged, and I’d just keep at it for three or four hours. Those were the years when I didn’t have to teach; I didn’t have any other schedule to keep except my writing schedule, and so a lot of work got produced. Now, trying to keep a schedule these days while teaching . . . it’s impossible! I write when I can.

Elizabeth Spencer (The Art of Fiction No. 110, 1989_37ya)

INTERVIEWER: How do you work, and at what hours?

ELIZABETH SPENCER: I’m a morning worker. The minute my husband is out the door to work, out comes the paper, the typewriter, the manuscript I’m working on. I knock off at about two, eat and take a nap if possible, then I’m out for groceries, socializing, whatever.

Ernest Hemingway (The Art of Fiction No. 21, 1958_68ya)

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

…INTERVIEWER: Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

HEMINGWAY: When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Eudora Welty (The Art of Fiction No. 47, 1972_54ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you write when you’re away from home?

WELTY: I’ve found it possible to write almost anywhere I’ve happened to try. I like it at home better because it’s much more convenient for an early riser, which I am. And it’s the only place where you can really promise yourself time and keep out interruptions. My ideal way to write a short story is to write the whole first draft through in one sitting, then work as long as it takes on revisions, and then write the final version all in one, so that in the end the whole thing amounts to one long sustained effort. That’s not possible anywhere, but it comes nearest to being possible in your own home.

INTERVIEWER: Do you typewrite?

WELTY: Yes, and that’s useful—it helps give me the feeling of making my work objective. I can correct better if I see it in typescript. After that, I revise with scissors and pins. Pasting is too slow, and you can’t undo it, but with pins you can move things from anywhere to anywhere, and that’s what I really love doing—putting things in their best and proper place, revealing things at the time when they matter most. Often I shift things from the very beginning to the very end. Small things—one fact, one word—but things important to me. It’s possible I have a reverse mind and do things backwards, being a broken left-hander. Just so I’ve caught on to my weakness.

Erskine Caldwell (The Art of Fiction No. 62, 1982_44ya)

INTERVIEWERS: Do you need isolation in order to write?

CALDWELL: I do like privacy. In the old days in New York you could rent a room very cheaply, and I wrote several books in rented rooms because I had no distractions whatsoever. I could put a typewriter on the bed, sit opposite it in a chair, and write that way all day and night if I wanted to.

INTERVIEWERS: Do you ever have to overcome inertia to get yourself writing in the morning?

CALDWELL: No, I wouldn’t say so at all. Now, I might have the feeling coming in here that I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might be worried about that. But I’ll come in anyway and sit here until something happens. You see, it’s something I wanted to do to begin with and so I’ll still have that urge to see it through. I guess that talent is just a part of being a writer. You’ve got to have desire in order to make it all work.

…INTERVIEWERS: Your new book, A Year of Living, has so far taken you a year and a half to write. Would you describe your daily writing schedule for that book?

CALDWELL: Well, for this particular book I got into the habit of working twice a day. I am here at the typewriter at six o’clock with the lights on every morning and work until ten or eleven o’clock. Then from four until seven I’ll be back at it again.

INTERVIEWERS: Did other books have different schedules?

CALDWELL: Yes, I used to have all kinds of schedules. Years ago, in the state of Maine, I chose to write my book on even days and work outside on odd days. When winter came, I shoveled snow and slept a little during the day, then stayed up all night to write. Another early method I used was to take a trip to write a short story. I’d ride a bus, from Boston to Cleveland maybe, and get off at night once in a while to write. I’d do a story that way in about a week’s time. Then, for a while, I took the night boats between Boston and New York. The Fall River Line, the New Bedford Line, the Cape Cod Line, all going to New York at night. The rhythm of the water might have helped my sentence structure a little; at least I thought it did. Those were all early methods, or schedules, of writing. Everything since then has been a little bit different.

Derek Walcott (The Art of Poetry No. 37, 1986_40ya)

To live next door to Walcott, even for a week, is to understand how he has managed to be so productive over the years. A prodigious worker, he often starts at about 4:30 in the morning and continues until he has done a four- or five-hour stint—by the time most people are getting up for the day.

WALCOTT: …“Lately, I find myself getting up earlier, which may be a sign of late middle age. It worries me a bit. I guess this is part of the ritual: I go and make a cup of coffee, put on the kettle, and have a cigarette. By now I’m not too sure if out of habit I’m getting up for the coffee rather than to write. I may be getting up that early to smoke, not really to write.”

INTERVIEWER: What time is this?

WALCOTT: It can vary. Sometimes it’s as early as half-past three, which is, you know, not too nice. The average time would be about five. It depends on how well I’m sleeping. But that hour, that whole time of day, is wonderful in the Caribbean. I love the cool darkness and the joy and splendor of the sunrise coming up. I guess I would say, especially in the location of where I am, the early dark and the sunrise, and being up with the coffee and with whatever you’re working on, is a very ritualistic thing. I’d even go further and say it’s a religious thing. It has its instruments and its surroundings. And you can feel your own spirit waking.

Francine du Plessix Gray (The Art of Fiction No. 96, 1987_39ya)

INTERVIEWER: But let’s take a day when you’re finished with chores by mid-morning.

GRAY: I like to get to this studio a little before eleven, ideally, and stay here until six thirty or seven. Three to seven p.m., that’s when the best ideas come, and if I started at nine a.m. my back would never hold up until four p.m.—I’ve had severe back problems, like many writers, and in my case only exercise brings relief. So during the six or seven hours I spend in this room I like to take an athletic break: yoga, swimming forty laps, a few sets of tennis singles or a two-mile walk, depending on the season. And in summer there’s my beloved vegetable garden to weed and pick and freeze from. Mind you, during the time I sit here very little “writing” goes on—I write first draft by hand, on yellow legal pad, before putting it into my terrific new IBM computer. I write very impulsively, so terribly fast only I can decipher my scrawl. But only one quarter of this first outpouring, at the most, is usable, so actually, I work very slowly. It’s mostly pacing, researching, brewing endless cups of herb tea while I think of how to annotate these terrible earlier drafts. Hours are spent figuring how to rewrite one single sentence—I’ve never managed to write anything, even a book review, in fewer than three or four drafts. Again, the most important aspect of coming to this room for several hours a day is a talismanic one—it’s here, for the past twenty years, by creating a presence of words alongside me, that I’ve slowly become something I can begin to call myself, and traveled away from that “ocean of gibberish” that menaces us throughout life.

Gabriel García Márquez (The Art of Fiction No. 69, 1981_45ya)

INTERVIEWER: In interviews a few years ago, you seemed to look back on being a journalist with awe at how much faster you were then.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I do find it harder to write now than before, both novels and journalism. When I worked for newspapers, I wasn’t very conscious of every word I wrote, whereas now I am. When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small. On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.

…INTERVIEWER: When do you work best now? Do you have a work schedule?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When I became a professional writer the biggest problem I had was my schedule. Being a journalist meant working at night. When I started writing full-time I was forty years old, my schedule was basically from nine o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon when my sons came back from school. Since I was so used to hard work, I felt guilty that I was only working in the morning; so I tried to work in the afternoons, but I discovered that what I did in the afternoon had to be done over again the next morning. So I decided that I would just work from nine until two-thirty and not do anything else. In the afternoons I have appointments and interviews and anything else that might come up. I have another problem in that I can only work in surroundings that are familiar and have already been warmed up with my work. I cannot write in hotels or borrowed rooms or on borrowed typewriters. This creates problems because when I travel I can’t work. Of course, you’re always trying to find a pretext to work less. That’s why the conditions you impose on yourself are more difficult all the time. You hope for inspiration whatever the circumstances. That’s a word the romantics exploited a lot. My Marxist comrades have a lot of difficulty accepting the word, but whatever you call it, I’m convinced that there is a special state of mind in which you can write with great ease and things just flow. All the pretexts—such as the one where you can only write at home—disappear. That moment and that state of mind seem to come when you have found the right theme and the right ways of treating it. And it has to be something you really like, too, because there is no worse job than doing something you don’t like.

“One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That’s why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again.”

Gore Vidal (The Art of Fiction No. 50, 1974_52ya)

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about your work habits? You must be enormously disciplined to turn out so much in such a relatively short time. Do you find writing easy? Do you enjoy it?

VIDAL: Oh, yes, of course I enjoy it. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t. Whenever I get up in the morning, I write for about three hours. I write novels in longhand on yellow legal pads, exactly like the First Criminal Nixon. For some reason I write plays and essays on the typewriter. The first draft usually comes rather fast. One oddity: I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it’s too discouraging. Also, when you have the whole thing in front of you for the first time, you’ve forgotten most of it and see it fresh. Rewriting, however, is a slow, grinding business. For me the main pleasure of having money is being able to afford as many completely retyped drafts as I like. When I was young and poor, I had to do my own typing, so I seldom did more than two drafts. Now I go through four, five, six. The more the better, since my style is very much one of afterthought. My line to Dwight Macdonald, “You have nothing to say, only to add,” really referred to me. Not until somebody did a parody of me did I realize how dependent I am on the parenthetic aside—the comment upon the comment, the ironic gloss upon the straight line, or the straight rendering of a comedic point. It is a style which must seem rather pointless to my contemporaries because they see no need for this kind of elaborateness. But, again, it’s the only thing I find interesting to do.

“Hungover or not, I write every day for three hours after I get up until I’ve finished whatever I’m doing. Although sometimes I take a break in the middle of the book, sometimes a break of several years. I began Julian—I don’t remember—but I think some seven years passed between the beginning of the book and when I picked it up again. The same thing occurred with Washington, D.C. On the other hand, Myra I wrote practically at one sitting—in a few weeks. It wrote itself, as they say. But then it was much rewritten.”

Graham Greene (The Art of Fiction No. 3, 1953_73ya)

INTERVIEWER: Well now, how do you work? Do you work at regular hours?

GREENE: I used to; now I set myself a number of words.

INTERVIEWER: How many?

GREENE: 500, stepped up to 750 as the book gets on. I re-read the same day, again the next morning and again and again until the passage has got too far behind to matter to the bit that I am writing. Correct in type, final correction in proof.

Günter Grass (The Art of Fiction No. 124, 1991_35ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is your daily schedule when you work?

GRASS: When I’m working on the first version, I write between five and seven pages a day. For the third version, three pages a day. It’s very slow.

INTERVIEWER: You do this in the morning or in the afternoon or at night?

GRASS: 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.

Guy Davenport, (The Art of Fiction No. 174, 2002_24ya)

INTERVIEWER: Let’s begin with a homely question: How do you spend your days?

GUY DAVENPORT: Downstairs, writing and drawing; upstairs, painting, or reading Rex Stout, P.G. Wodehouse, and Georges Simenon. Talking with visitors and friends. In the backyard there’s a studio, designed and built by Keith Plymale for an architecture seminar. Cement floor, tin roof, nine windows, one at floor level for observing “sunlight on a wall” (a phrase from Tatlin! that Keith wanted to build into the structure), a small square window at the back, with a painted-wood still life in it (jug and apple), and a slender window in front, with a shelf outside, for cats to sit on (though no cat has). The neighbors call it my playhouse.

INTERVIEWER: What habits do you have as a writer? Do you keep to a schedule?

DAVENPORT: I like to believe that I don’t think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it’s whenever I feel there’s something to be put on paper. I don’t care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.

INTERVIEWER: Are the notebooks central to your method?

DAVENPORT: Yes, there is a kind of gestation period, which I suppose is common to all writers. The thing is to get a . . . well, I was about to say “plot,” but a lot of my stories use the old Joycean epiphany.

INTERVIEWER: What’s the typical progress of an idea, then, from being something you’ve jotted down in the notebook to finding a place in one of your stories or essays?

DAVENPORT: Well, who knows? I suppose you wait until it’s irresistible, then start working on it one way or another. When that time comes, I move from longhand to the typewriter.

…INTERVIEWER: Do you flip through the notebooks to get sparks?

DAVENPORT: Certainly. They’re my workbooks. I mine them.

INTERVIEWER: So, they aren’t diaries at all.

DAVENPORT: No. I keep what I call a logbook, and it’s very useful. I log in mail, and this has saved my life many times. I would say I correspond with between a hundred and two hundred people, and I learn an immense amount from letters. So, I note incoming mail, incoming books, outgoing, and very little else. You could not write my biography from it.

INTERVIEWER: Have any of your stories come out of something you read in a letter?

DAVENPORT: There are examples of this happening. “The Lark” is a friend’s experience of sexual awakening, recounted in old age in a letter.

Gustaw Herling (The Art of Fiction No. 162, 2000_26ya)

Most mornings for the better part of the last fifty years, until his death in July at the age of eighty-one, Gustaw Herling rose in the shadow of Vesuvius and went to his desk to continue what had long since become one of the great ongoing journeys in contemporary literature. A hero in his native Poland and a well-known if occasionally controversial figure in his adoptive Italy, Herling was for decades the object of quiet but intense admiration among readers and writers throughout Europe. Although a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, it wasn’t until the recent and widely acclaimed republication of several of his books in the U.S. that he was brought to the attention of a broader American readership.

Ha Jin (The Art of Fiction No. 202, 2009_17ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you wake up early to write?

JIN: I get up at seven and work for an hour or two. My wife cooks breakfast, and I always eat it and then go back to work. Usually by late afternoon I will say I’ve done enough writing. At night, I read and answer e-mails. I go to bed late at night—usually at one or two, sometimes three.

INTERVIEWER: That’s not very much sleep.

JIN: If I’m tired, I take a nap.

Harry Mathews (The Art of Fiction No. 191, 2007_19ya):

INTERVIEWER: What are your own writing habits?

MATHEWS: I used to get up and be at my desk at nine in the morning. Now I’m lucky if I start at eleven. What with e-mail and the Internet, I do most of my work in the afternoon. I write first in longhand. I copy the work on my computer, print it out, correct it in longhand, and so forth.

Haruki Murakami (The Art of Fiction No. 182, 2004_22ya):

INTERVIEWER: How is your typical workday structured?

MURAKAMI: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

…INTERVIEWER: Is there also a sense of not wanting to explain your books, in the way a dream loses its power when it comes under analysis?

MURAKAMI: The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.

Heinrich Böll (The Art of Fiction No. 74, 1983_43ya)

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe your usual workday?

BÖLL: Mine? That’s been difficult in the last few years because I was ill for a long time and actually still am. Normally I work mornings, from after breakfast until about half-past twelve, and then again in the afternoon, and in the evening as well, if I really get going. There are, unfortunately, quite a few interruptions—not unimportant ones, correspondence and the like—that make steady work difficult.

Henry Green(The Art of Fiction No. 22, 1958_68ya):

Mr. Green writes at night and in many longhand drafts. In his memoir, Pack My Bag, he has described prose in this way:

“Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone …”

Henry Miller (The Art of Fiction No. 28, 1962_64ya; see also his commandments):

INTERVIEWER: First of all, would you explain how you go about the actual business of writing? Do you sharpen pencils like Hemingway, or anything like that to get the motor started?

MILLER: No, not generally, no, nothing of that sort. I generally go to work right after breakfast. I sit right down to the machine. If I find I’m not able to write, I quit. But no, there are no preparatory stages as a rule.

INTERVIEWER: Are there certain times of day, certain days when you work better than others?

MILLER: I prefer the morning now, and just for two or three hours. In the beginning I used to work after midnight until dawn, but that was in the very beginning. Even after I got to Paris I found it was much better working in the morning. But then I used to work long hours. I’d work in the morning, take a nap after lunch, get up and write again, sometimes write until midnight. In the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve found that it isn’t necessary to work that much. It’s bad, in fact. You drain the reservoir.

Hilary Mantel (Art of Fiction No. 226, 2015_11ya):

…So I formed a cunning plan. I thought, I’ll write another novel. I’ll write a contemporary novel. That was Every Day Is Mother’s Day. I started it in Africa. I finished it in Saudi Arabia. At times I had very little sense of where I was going with it or whether there would be any profit or success at the end of it. It was written in the teeth of everything. It was an act of defiance—I thought, I’m not going to be beaten. I got an agent, I got a publisher, then I wrote the sequel. It wasn’t planned as two books. It was, for me, a way of getting a foot in the door. But once I had secured a contract, I just rolled up my sleeves and I set about Vacant Possession in a way that I’ve never worked before. I would write through the morning, Gerald would come home midafternoon, would have his siesta, and when he woke up, I would read him what I had written in the morning. I’ve never written like that since.

Ian McEwan (The Art of Fiction No. 173, 2002_24ya):

INTERVIEWER: By that time you had developed regular writing habits?

McEWAN: I’d be at work by nine-thirty every morning. I inherited my father’s work ethic—no matter what he’d been up to the night before, he was always out of bed by seven a.m. He never missed a day’s work in forty-eight years in the army. In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I’d type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer’s memory—like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.

INTERVIEWER: What’s a good day’s output for you?

McEWAN: I aim for about six hundred words a day and hope for at least a thousand when I’m on a roll…A writer whose morning is going well, whose sentences are forming well, is experiencing a calm and private joy. This joy itself then liberates a richness of thought that can prompt new surprises. Writers crave these moments, these sessions. If I may quote the second page of Atonement, this is the project’s highest point of fulfillment. Nothing else—cheerful launch party, packed readings, positive reviews—will come near it for satisfaction…Like Enduring Love, this was a novel that grew out of many months of sketches and doodling. One morning I wrote six hundred words or so describing a young woman entering a drawing room with some wild flowers in her hand, searching for a vase. She’s aware of a young man outside gardening whom she wishes both to see and avoid. For reasons that I couldn’t explain to myself, I knew that I had at last started a novel.

Irwin Shaw (The Art of Fiction No. 4, 1953_73ya/The Art of Fiction No. 4 (Continued), 1979_47ya):

He refuses to discuss work in which he is currently engaged. In the mornings he won’t be disturbed; his wife answers the phone for him. In the afternoons he abandons his typewriter for other activities, all performed with enormous vigor.

INTERVIEWER: …You wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” in one afternoon, I think you told me.

SHAW: Morning.

INTERVIEWER: Morning. You left it on the kitchen table, and your wife, Marian, tossed it out the window.

SHAW: Well, that’s not quite how it happened. We had one room up on the twenty-eighth floor of this hotel on Eighth Avenue. We were waiting for the rehearsals of The Gentle People to start. I wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” one morning while Marian was lying in bed and reading. And I knew I had something good there, but I didn’t want her to read it, knowing that the reaction would be violent, to say the least, because it’s about a man who tells his wife that he’s going to be unfaithful to her. So I turned it facedown, and I said, “Don’t read this yet. It’s not ready.” It was the only copy I had. Then I went out and took a walk, had a drink, and came back. She was raging around the room. She said, “It’s a lucky thing you came back just now, because I was going to open the window and throw it out.” Since then she’s become reconciled to it, and I think she reads it with pleasure, too.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (The Art of Fiction No. 42, 1968_58ya):

Singer works at a small, cluttered desk in the living room. He writes every day, but without special hours—in between interviews, visits, and phone calls. His name is still listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, and hardly a day goes by without his receiving several calls from strangers who have read something he has written and want to talk to him about it. Until recently, he would invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee.

INTERVIEWER: Could you tell me something about the way you work? Do you work every day, seven days a week?

SINGER: Well, when I get up in the morning, I always have the desire to sit down to write. And most of the days I do write something. But then I get telephone calls, and sometimes I have to write an article for the Forward. And once in a while I have to write a review, and I am interviewed, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing. I don’t have to run away. Some writers say that they can only write if they go to a far island. They would go to the moon to write not to be disturbed. I think that being disturbed is a part of human life and sometimes it’s useful to be disturbed because you interrupt your writing and while you rest, while you are busy with something else, your perspective changes or the horizon widens. All I can say about myself is that I have never really written in peace, as some writers say that they have. But whatever I had to say I kept on saying no matter what the disturbances were.

Italo Calvino (The Art of Fiction No. 130, 1992_34ya):

Thoughts Before an Interview: Every morning I tell myself, Today has to be productive—and then something happens that prevents me from writing. Today . . . what is there that I have to do today? Oh yes, they are supposed to come interview me. I am afraid my novel will not move one single step forward. Something always happens. Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills . . . always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then . . . I cannot do without them. They are like a drug. In short, only in the afternoon do I sit at my desk, which is always submerged in letters that have been awaiting answers for I do not even know how long, and that is another obstacle to be overcome. Eventually I get down to writing and then the real problems begin. If I start something from scratch, that is the most difficult moment, but even if it is something I started the day before, I always reach an impasse where a new obstacle needs to be overcome. And it is only in the late afternoon that I finally begin to write sentences, correct them, cover them with erasures, fill them with incidental clauses, and rewrite. At that very moment the telephone or doorbell usually rings and a friend, translator, or interviewer arrives.

INTERVIEWER: Do you work every day or only on certain days and at certain hours?

CALVINO: In theory I would like to work every day. But in the morning I invent every possible excuse not to work: I have to go out, make some purchases, buy the newspaper. As a rule, I manage to waste the morning, so I end up sitting down to write in the afternoon. I’m a daytime writer, but since I waste the morning I’ve become an afternoon writer. I could write at night, but when I do, I don’t sleep. So I try to avoid that.

Ismail Kadare (The Art of Fiction No. 153, 1998_28ya):

INTERVIEWER: To come back to the professional side of things, how do you divide your time between Tiranë and Paris? And your day, wherever you are?

KADARE: I am more in Paris than in Tiranë because I can work better here. There is too much politics in Tiranë, and too many demands. I am asked to write a preface here, an article there . . . I don’t have an answer to everything. As for my day: I write two hours in the morning, and I stop. I can never write more—my brain gets tired. I write in a café around the corner, away from distractions. The rest of my time is spent reading, seeing friends, all the rest of my life.

…INTERVIEWER: What are the things that prevent you from working? Hemingway said the telephone was the big work-killer.

KADARE: In Tiranë no one dared use the telephone except for the most anodyne purposes because the phones were tapped. But as I said, I only write two hours a day, and it is not difficult to be isolated for that length of time.

William Styron, James Baldwin (The Art of Fiction No. 78, 1984_42ya)

INTERVIEWER: How many pages do you write in a day?

BALDWIN: I write at night. After the day is over, and supper is over, I begin, and work until about three or four a.m.

INTERVIEWER: That’s quite rare, isn’t it, because most people write when they’re fresh, in the morning.

BALDWIN: I start working when everyone has gone to bed. I’ve had to do that ever since I was young—I had to wait until the kids were asleep. And then I was working at various jobs during the day. I’ve always had to write at night. But now that I’m established I do it because I’m alone at night.

…INTERVIEWER: But weren’t William Styron and Richard Wright, say, important to you in formulating your viewpoints?…Did you take a position on his book about Nat Turner?

BALDWIN: I did. My position, though, is that I will not tell another writer what to write. If you don’t like their alternative, write yours. I admired him for confronting it, and the result. It brought in the whole enormity of the issue of history versus fiction, fiction versus history, and which is which . . . He writes out of reasons similar to mine: about something which hurt him and frightened him. When I was working on Another Country and Bill was working on Nat Turner, I stayed in his guest house for five months. His hours and mine are very different. I was going to bed at dawn, Bill was just coming up to his study to go to work; his hours going on as mine went off. We saw each other at suppertime.

William Styron, The Art of Fiction No. 5, 1954_72ya:

INTERVIEWER: How many pages do you turn out each day?

STYRON: When I’m writing steadily—that is, when I’m involved in a project that I’m really interested in, one of those rare pieces that has a foreseeable end—I average two-and-a-half or three pages a day, longhand on yellow sheets. I spend about five hours at it, of which very little is spent actually writing. I try to get a feeling of what’s going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can’t turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

INTERVIEWER: And what time of the day do you find best for working?

STYRON: The afternoon. I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t. The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage, with a hangover.

Jack Kerouac (The Art of Fiction No. 41, 1968_58ya)

INTERVIEWER: You typed out On the Road in three weeks, The Subterraneans in three days and nights. Do you still produce at this fantastic rate? Can you say something of the genesis of a work before you sit down and begin that terrific typing—how much of it is set in your mind, for example?

KEROUAC: You think out what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can … and there’s no harm in that because you’ve got the whole story lined up. Now how that’s done depends on what kind of steel trap you’ve got up in that little old head. This sounds boastful but a girl once told me I had a steel-trap brain, meaning I’d catch her with a statement she’d made an hour ago even though our talk had rambled a million light-years away from that point … you know what I mean, like a lawyer’s mind, say. All of it is in my mind, naturally, except that language that is used at the time that it is used … And as for On the Road and The Subterraneans, no I can’t write that fast anymore … Writing The Subs in three nights was really a fantastic athletic feat as well as mental, you shoulda seen me after I was done …. I was pale as a sheet and had lost fifteen pounds and looked strange in the mirror. What I do now is write something like an average of eight thousand words a sitting, in the middle of the night, and another about a week later, resting and sighing in between. I really hate to write. I get no fun out of it because I can’t get up and say I’m working, close my door, have coffee brought to me, and sit there camping like a “man of letters” “doing his eight hour day of work” and thereby incidentally filling the printing world with a lot of dreary self-imposed cant and bombast, bombast being Scottish for pillow stuffing. Haven’t you heard a politician use fifteen hundred words to say something he could have said in exactly three words? So I get it out of the way so as not to bore myself either….The work-preservers are the solitudes of night, ‘when the whole wide world is fast asleep.’

INTERVIEWER: What do you find the best time and place for writing?

KEROUAC: The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad: peace. [Picks up harmonica and plays.] Boy, can I play!

James Jones (The Art of Fiction No. 22, 1958_68ya)

INTERVIEWER: Could you tell me something about your own work habits?

JONES: They’re pretty normal, I guess. I get up earlier than most guys—between seven and eight—but only because I like to go out in the afternoons while there’s still sun. After I get up it takes me an hour and a half of fiddling around before I can get up the courage and nerve to go to work. I smoke half a pack of cigarettes, drink six or seven cups of coffee, read over what I wrote the day before. Finally there’s no further excuse. I go to the typewriter. Four to six hours of it. Then I quit and we go out. Or stay home and read.

INTERVIEWER: How much do you get done in a day?

JONES: It all depends. It might be two typescript pages, or it might be even less. Or, if it’s a dialogue or a scene I had well fixed in my mind, I might get as much as ten or twelve. Usually, though, it’s a lot less. Three pages maybe. And then I often have to go back over it all the next day because I’m still dissatisfied. I guess I’ve got some neurotic compulsion to make everything as perfect as I can before I go on.

Frederick Seidel (The Art of Poetry No. 95, 2009_17ya)

INTERVIEWER: What are your working hours now?

SEIDEL: I start quite early in the morning and work throughout the day with occasional interruptions. And again at night, when I come back from wherever I’ve gone out to, I work. I walk around the city with the poem I’m working on folded up in my pocket. It’s a rabbit’s foot. The poem’s in my head. I don’t need the piece of paper.

Javier Marías (The Art of Fiction No. 190, 2006_20ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you keep regular writing hours?

MARÍAS: No, I can’t.

INTERVIEWER: How many hours a day do you write?

MARÍAS: Not many—three, four.

INTERVIEWER: Every day?

MARÍAS: :“When I can. I usually write down in my date book when I begin a book, when I interrupt it, and when I resume. Every fifty pages I see how many days I worked and how many days elapsed. Sometimes the working days are steady—I write fifty pages in about thirty-five or forty-five days—but sometimes one hundred and twenty days elapse before I complete my fifty pages, which means I have only been able to sit down and really work thirty-five days out of one hundred and twenty.”

Geoffrey Hill(The Art of Poetry No. 80, 2000_26ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a writing routine? A particular place it must be done? Do you only write in the summer, or every day?

HILL: Again, there’s been a radical change. I’m writing so much now that yes, I suppose I do write every day. I just have to to keep up with myself. This isn’t quite the same thing as having a routine. I work at it as I must.

INTERVIEWER:“So the routine announces itself, more or less?”

HILL: Yes. In my early days, I would often go for weeks, and sometimes months, without being able to set pencil to paper. And in the very early days, I finished things in my head before I set them down. I could do that because my short-term memory was much better than it is now. And because I was writing so sparsely, so infrequently, one poem wasn’t crowding out another, I had time to concentrate on the things that came. So very few drafts have survived of early stuff. Now it’s all immediate, scribbling phrases down, crossing them out, changing them. They go straight down onto paper.

Sam Shepard (The Art of Theater No. 12, 1997_29ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is your schedule like?

SHEPARD: I have to begin early because I take the kids to school, so usually I’m awake by six. I come back to the house afterwards and work till lunch.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any rituals or devices to help you get started?

SHEPARD: No, not really. I mean there’s the coffee and that bullshit, but as for rituals, no.

…INTERVIEWER: Do you write every day?

SHEPARD: When something kicks in, I devote everything to it and write constantly until it’s finished. But to sit down every day and say, I’m going to write, come hell or high water—no, I could never do that.

Jerzy Kosiński (The Art of Fiction No. 46, 1972_54ya):

INTERVIEWER: What about your working habits? Are you Protestant and disciplined, or European and dissolute?

KOSINSKI: I guess both. 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.

J. G. Ballard (The Art of Fiction No. 85, 1984_42ya)

INTERVIEWER: What are your daily working habits like?

BALLARD: Every day, five days a week. Longhand now, it’s less tiring than a typewriter. When I’m writing a novel or story I set myself a target of about seven hundred words a day, sometimes a little more. I do a first draft in longhand, then do a very careful longhand revision of the text, then type out the final manuscript. I used to type first and revise in longhand, but I find that modern fiber-tip pens are less effort than a typewriter. Perhaps I ought to try a seventeenth-century quill. I rewrite a great deal, so the word processor sounds like my dream. My neighbor is a BBC videotape editor and he offered to lend me his, but apart from the eye-aching glimmer, I found that the editing functions are terribly laborious. I’m told that already one can see the difference between fiction composed on the word processor and that on the typewriter. The word processor lends itself to a text that has great polish and clarity on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph level, but has haywire overall chapter-by-chapter construction, because it’s almost impossible to rifle through and do a quick scan of, say, twenty pages. Or so they say.

INTERVIEWER: How many hours a day do you put in at the desk?

BALLARD: Two hours in the late morning, two in the early afternoon, followed by a walk along the river to think over the next day. Then at six, Scotch and soda, and oblivion.

INTERVIEWER: That sounds like the schedule of an efficient worker.

BALLARD: Well, concentration has never been a problem, and now there are few distractions. I assume that it is not entirely coincidental that, to the despair of my friends, I live in this remote backwater seventeen miles from London, in a small town where I know almost no one. However, until five years ago I had three adolescent children here, and not much more than ten years ago, at the time I was writing Crash, I was still driving them to school, collecting them, and getting totally involved in the hurly-burly of family life as a single parent. My wife died from galloping pneumonia while we were in Spain. But even in those days I kept the same hours, though then I stopped drinking at about the time I now start. At the time I wrote Crystal World, and through the five years of Atrocity Exhibition, I used to start the working day once I returned from delivering the children to school, at 9:30 in the morning, with a large Scotch. It separated me from the domestic world, like a huge dose of Novocaine injected into reality in the same way that a dentist calms a fractious patient so that he can get on with some fancy bridgework.

Ishmael Reed (The Art of Poetry No. 100, 2016):

INTERVIEWER: You have such a relentless imagination, even after writing so much, in so many forms, over the decades. What is your work routine?

REED: I get up early in the morning. And I take a lot of notes. I get a lot of ideas when I’m swimming. I swim three times a week. Some psychics ask, Where do you talk to God? For me, the ideas come when I’m in the bathtub or when I’m swimming. Water, it does something. And I move through -different genres—that’s how I avoid writer’s block. So I’ll write a poem or draw a cartoon or work on a novel. Or I’ll write an essay. I get to reach a lot of people on Facebook.

Joan Didion (The Art of Fiction No. 71, 1978_48ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any writing rituals?

DIDION: The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.

Jim Harrison (The Art of Fiction No. 104, 1988_38ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you keep to a specific schedule when you’re working?

HARRISON: With this woman, I’ve had good luck starting very early in the morning, which I’ve never been able to do before. My optimum hours are between two and four in the afternoon. I don’t know why and it aggravates me. It’s a circadian rhythm I can’t avoid. And then between eleven and one at night. I always work a split shift.

Tennessee Williams (The Art of Theater No. 5, 1981_45ya):

It was Williams’s seventieth birthday, and he followed the routine he has adhered to most of his adult life. He got up at dawn and went to his typewriter and worked. Then he swam in the hotel’s pool. He returned to his suite and glanced through a pile of mail, mostly birthday greetings from friends. He opened several presents and a box containing a literary prize just presented to him by Italy for The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He found this somewhat puzzling because, he explained, when the novel and movie first appeared the Italians were angered by his story of a Roman gigolo romancing an older woman.

WILLIAMS: …“Before the success of Menagerie I’d reached the very, very bottom. I would have died without the money. I couldn’t have gone on any further, baby, without money, when suddenly, providentially, The Glass Menagerie made it when I was thirty-four. I couldn’t have gone on with these hand-to-mouth jobs, these jobs for which I had no aptitude, like waiting on tables, running elevators, and even being a teletype operator. None of this stuff was anything I could have held for long. I started writing at twelve, as I said. By the time I was in my late teens I was writing every day, I guess, even after I was in the shoe business for three years. I wrecked my health, what there was of it. I drank black coffee so much, so I could stay up nearly all night and write, that it exhausted me physically and nervously. So if I suddenly hadn’t had this dispensation from Providence with Menagerie, I couldn’t have made it for another year, I don’t think.”

…HABITS OF WORK

“In Key West I get up just before daybreak, as a rule. I like being completely alone in the house in the kitchen when I have my coffee and ruminate on what I’m going to work on. I usually have two or three pieces of work going at the same time, and then I decide which to work on that day.”

“I go to my studio. I usually have some wine there. And then I carefully go over what I wrote the day before. You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance. I’m inclined to excesses because I drink while I’m writing, so I’ll blue pencil a lot the next day. Then I sit down, and I begin to write…I’ve heard that Norman Mailer has said that a playwright only writes in short bursts of inspiration while a novelist has to write six or seven hours a day. Bull! Now Mr. Mailer is more involved in the novel form, and I’m more involved in the play form. In the play form I work steadily and hard. If a play grips me I’ll continue to work on it until I reach a point where I can no longer decide what to do with it. Then I’ll discontinue work on it.”

John Barth (The Art of Fiction No. 86, 1985_41ya):

Of his working habits Barth has said that he rises at six in the morning and puts an electric percolator in the kitchen so that during the course of sitting for six hours at his desk he has an excuse for the exercise of walking back and forth from his study to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He speaks of measuring his work not by the day (as Hemingway did) but by the month and the year. “That way you don’t feel so terrible if you put in three days straight without turning up much of anything. You don’t feel blocked.”

BARTH: …“Looking back, I don’t think I would have learned much more, and I don’t think I would have had the nerve to tackle some of the things I tackled as a young writer if I had been to university—I would have been beaten into 
submission by my lecturers. But I think I would have been a little more relaxed. After high school, instead of attending university I took a job as a clerk at Aer Lingus, the Irish airline. I wanted to be free, and working for an airline allowed me to travel. I didn’t socialize with literary people. Instead I would work every day and I would write every night. I’ve been doing that ever since. I’ve only very recently become what’s known as a full-time writer. I was a working journalist for thirty-five years, as a copy editor on the newspapers and then as books editor at The Irish Times. I can’t complain about that, because a day job gives you freedom.”

John Dos Passos (The Art of Fiction No. 44, 1969_57ya)

DOS PASSOS: The theater didn’t suit me really. I can’t sit up all night. Everything in the theater is done after midnight. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and we always finished so late that I had to walk back home across the Brooklyn Bridge. I never got home before three a.m. and being someone who’s never been able to sleep later than seven in the morning, I just couldn’t keep up the schedule.

…INTERVIEWER: What is your ideal set of working conditions?

DOS PASSOS: All you need is a room without any particular interruptions. Some things I’ve done entirely in longhand, but now I tend to start chapters in longhand and then finish them on the typewriter, and that becomes such a mess that nobody can transcribe it except my wife. I find it easier to get up early in the morning, and I like to get through by one or two o’clock. I don’t do very much in the afternoon. I like to get out of doors then if I can.

INTERVIEWER: You get all of your work done before you go swimming?

DOS PASSOS: Yes. Down here that’s my regular routine.

Arthur Miller (The Art of Theater No. 2, Part 2, 1999_27ya):

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.

Jack Gilbert (The Art of Poetry No. 91, 2005_21ya)

INTERVIEWER: Are your writing habits the same today as they were when you were young?

GILBERT: I trust the poems more.

INTERVIEWER: When do you work best now?

GILBERT: In the morning. But for most of my life I wrote late at night. When you get old your brain doesn’t function as well after noon.

INTERVIEWER: Do you keep to a work schedule?

GILBERT: No, I have an approximate rhythm, but I don’t like the idea of anything creative being mechanical. That’ll kill you. On the other hand, if I was not satisfied with how much I’d written in a year, then I would set out to write a hundred poems in a hundred days. I force myself to write poems even though I don’t approve of it because it does keep something alive. So I guess I have a little bit of a pattern that I live by. For instance, the other day I woke up at one in the morning and worked until four in the afternoon. I do that a lot. I can do that because I don’t have to accommodate anybody but me.

John Edgar Wideman (The Art of Fiction No. 171, 2002_24ya)

INTERVIEWER: When you do the writing, what is the process? Do you always start at the same time of day?

WIDEMAN: It’s seasonal. In the summertime I do most of what I call the brute writing, that is, putting words down on the page for the first time. Just trying to get down as many as I can. And rereading it the next day and going on from there. That happens, say, between the months of June until about November. Then I come back and teach and revise and rethink and rework. When I’m doing the brute work, I do it early in the morning; that’s the best time for me to get the stuff down on the page. That’s been my routine for years and years. I work on many things at once. I read a lot of books at the same time, I work on different projects and that changes the schedule and style somewhat. But the pattern persists. Up early before everybody else, before I get connected, before I get bugged, before I have obligations. Get the writing done first, then be the person I want to be in other ways after that.

INTERVIEWER: And what of the mechanical details of the writing? Do you use a computer, for instance?

WIDEMAN: I rewrite over and over again because I don’t use a computer. I use a Bic pen and a pencil. I simply write—fill a page and write between lines and on top of lines, so my manuscripts become palimpsests. They become incomprehensible to anybody but me. That means I have to rewrite them. It’s very tedious and slow. There are many, many layers; many, many edits. And at times it seems a pain in the ass. But each one of those clarifications that is scribbled is another edit. So in a funny way, it’s like I have developed a system in which there are four or five simultaneous drafts available to me, by reading between lines and using the arrows and the different print from the ink and the pencil. It’s like having transparencies. I can almost model like you model clay, because I have a whole series of words that could be the right word. Is it dry, is it parched, is it sear? Maybe all of those words are there in one form or another.

INTERVIEWER: How many hours per day do you spend writing during the months you’re getting down your first draft?

WIDEMAN: My answer would be meaningless. I work all the time. I work four or five hours in the morning. When I’m really going, I may do that four or five days a week. It might be one day, two hours, another day, eight because I’m going good. But for me, rewriting and different drafts go on endlessly. If I have a two-hundred-page book or two hundred pages of handwritten stuff, it might take six months to get it out of the incomprehensible stage into something somebody could read.

Tom Stoppard (The Art of Theater No. 7, 1988_38ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you disappear from home to write?

STOPPARD: I disappear into myself. Sometimes I go away for a short period, say a week, to think and concentrate, then I come back home to carry on.

INTERVIEWER: Where do you work and when?

STOPPARD: I have a very nice long room, which used to be the stable. It has a desk and lots of paper, etc. But most of my plays are written on the kitchen table at night, when everybody has gone to bed and I feel completely at peace. During the day, somehow I don’t get much done; although I have a secretary who answers the phone, I always want to know who it is, and I generally get distracted.

New Yorker profile, 1977_49ya:

In 1962_64ya, Stoppard heard that a new magazine called Scene was about to be launched in London; he applied for a job on the staff and was offered, to his amazement, the post of drama critic, which he instantly accepted. He then left Bristol for good and took an apartment in Notting Hill Gate, a dingy West London suburb. Derek Marlowe lived in the same dilapidated house. “Tom wrote short stories, and smoked to excess, and always worked at night”, Marlowe recalls. “Every evening, he would lay out a row of matches and say, ‘Tonight I shall write 12 matches’—meaning as much as he could churn out on 12 cigarettes.” Scene made its début early in 1963_63ya. Virulently trendy in tone and signally lacking in funds, it set out to cover the whole of show business. In 7 months (after which the money ran out and Scene was no longer heard from), Stoppard reviewed 132 shows.

Sinclair Lewis as reported by John Hersey (The Art of Fiction No. 92, 1986_40ya):

INTERVIEWER: Was he [Sinclair Lewis] a model for you in any way?

HERSEY: He was past his important work—this was a couple of years after It Can’t Happen Here. But he was wonderfully important to me; I was able to see the life of a man totally given over to writing. Even though he was not producing important novels anymore, he was so gripped by what he was doing that it was very impressive to me. He would get up in the middle of the night, cook up some coffee, and work for two or three hours and then go back to bed. He led an irregular life, but a life that was passionately devoted to his work. I was exposed to someone who lived for writing, lived in his writing, in a way. That summer he became interested in theater, and was writing what turned out to be a very bad play about a mythical Balkan kingdom. He wanted to learn everything about the theater. There was a summer-stock company in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where we were, and every night he would have the casts over to his house. He was like a student trying to learn fundamentals; he would ask them how you get people on stage and off stage. His utter wholeheartedness was an important example for me.

John Mortimer (The Art of Fiction No. 106, 1988_38ya)

INTERVIEWER: And you were heading a large family. How did you fit your writing in between working as a barrister and leading a busy family life? When did you find the time to write?

MORTIMER: It was very difficult. I used to get up very early in the morning, and when I became Queen’s Counsel, a criminal lawyer, it was much easier because I would do a big case, then have a gap, then do another big case. And by the end I was only doing about five cases a year.

John le Carré (The Art of Fiction No. 149, 1997_29ya)

INTERVIEWER: Did you find it easy? Did you have great confidence in yourself as a writer?

LE CARRÉ: I have a great debt of gratitude to the press for this. In those days English newspapers were much too big to read on the train, so instead of fighting with my colleagues for the Times, I would write in little notebooks. I lived a long way out of London. The line has since been electrified, which is a great loss to literature. In those days it was an hour and a half each way. To give the best of the day to your work is most important. So if I could write for an hour and a half on the train, I was already completely jaded by the time I got to the office to start work. And then there was a resurgence of talent during the lunch hour. In the evening something again came back to me. I was always very careful to give my country second-best.

…INTERVIEWER: Now that you no longer write on the train to London, what is your working day like?

LE CARRÉ: Well, I still don’t type. I write by hand, and my wife types everything up, endlessly, repeatedly. I correct by hand too. I am an absolute monk about my work. It’s like being an athlete: you have to find out which are the best hours of the day. I’m a morning person. I like to drink in the evening, go to sleep on a good idea and wake up with the idea solved or advanced. I believe in sleep. And I go straight to work, often very early. If a book’s getting to the end of its run, I’ll start at four-thirty or five o’clock in the morning and go through to lunchtime. In the afternoon I’ll take a walk, and then, over a scotch, take a look at what Jane’s typed out, and fiddle with it a bit more. But I always try to go to sleep before I finish working, just a little bit before. Then I know where I’ll go the next morning, but I won’t quite know what I am going to do when I go. And then in the morning it seems to deliver the answer.

John Updike (The Art of Fiction No. 43, 1968_58ya)

INTERVIEWER: I’d like to ask a bit about your work habits if I may. What sort of schedule do you follow?

UPDIKE: I write every weekday morning. I try to vary what I am doing, and my verse, or poetry, is a help here. Embarked on a long project, I try to stay with it even on dull days. For every novel, however, that I have published, there has been one unfinished or scrapped. Some short stories—I think offhand of “Lifeguard,” “The Taste of Metal,” “My Grandmother’s Thimble”—are fragments salvaged and reshaped. Most came right the first time—rode on their own melting, as Frost said of his poems. If there is no melting, if the story keeps sticking, better stop and look around. In the execution there has to be a “happiness” that can’t be willed or foreordained. It has to sing, click, something. I try instantly to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story or novel to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.

Jonathan Lethem (The Art of Fiction No. 177, 2003_23ya):

INTERVIEWER: And your sister’s a photographer. You come from a family of visual artists, and you trained as one in high school. Do the visual arts influence your writing process?

LETHEM “My process is dull. It’s as plodding and pedantic as Abraham’s film, painted one frame at a time. I’m a tortoise, waking each day to plod out my page or two. I try never to miss a morning, when I’m working on a novel. There are no other rules, no word counts or pencil sharpenings or candlelit pentagrams on the floor. Growing up with my father’s art-making in the house, the creative act was demystified, usefully. As a result, I see writing as an inevitable and ordinary way to spend one’s hours.”

Joseph Heller (The Art of Fiction No. 51, 1974_52ya):

INTERVIEWER: How long can you keep at it?

HELLER: I ordinarily write three or four handwritten pages and then rework them for two hours. I can work for four hours, or forty-five minutes. It’s not a matter of time. I set a realistic objective: How can I inch along to the next paragraph? Inching is what it is. It’s not: How can I handle the next chapter? How can I get to the next stage in a way that I like? I think about that as I walk the dog or walk the twenty minutes from my apartment to the studio where I work.

…INTERVIEWER: What about the necessary disciplines of writing?

HELLER: Well, I don’t have social luncheons with people. By not having lunch with people it means that I do not have two martinis, which usually means the afternoon is not shot, since all I can do after two martinis is read the newspaper.

José Saramago (The Art of Fiction No. 155, 1998_28ya)

INTERVIEWER: How do you work? Do you write every day?

SARAMAGO: When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity, a novel, for example, I write every day. Of course, I am subjected to all kinds of interruptions at home and interruptions due to traveling, but other than that, I am very regular. I am very disciplined. I do not force myself to work a certain number of hours per day, but I do require a certain amount of written work per day, which usually corresponds to two pages. This morning I wrote two pages of a new novel, and tomorrow I shall write another two. You might think two pages per day is not very much, but there are other things I must do—writing other texts, responding to letters; on the other hand, two pages per day adds up to almost eight hundred per year. In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers. I don’t have any of those problems, but I do have problems just like any other person doing any other type of work. Sometimes things do not come out as I want them to, or they don’t come out at all. When things do not come out as well as I would have liked, I have to resign myself to accepting them as they are.

J. P. Donleavy (The Art of Fiction No. 53, 1975_51ya)

DONLEAVY: …The body is not made to sit for long stretches of hours. Your heart has to be stimulated and you must get the blood through the system just to clean the sides of the blood vessels. At four o’clock in the afternoon my ears will turn red from work.

INTERVIEWER: Are the hours that you spend writing pleasurable to you?

DONLEAVY: I get waves of pleasantness now and again, but I think I have finally decided they are overall unpleasant. It’s unpleasant to have to sit down and work. It’s a hurdle you have to get over in order to start the machinery of the brain working. It takes a couple of hours each morning. Then, as I reach a high point, at the midsection of the afternoon, I force myself for as long as I can. I sometimes have to make myself get up from the desk and do thirty sit-ups and thirty back exercises just to shift the blood around. If I go past four o’clock I begin to notice that my guts start to get all pressed down, and it’s time to get up and move around. And at times when I can’t indulge the luxury of stopping, by late afternoon I’m kneeling at my desk. Obviously, standing is another method of relieving this. Every writer, I think, has his.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any devices to get you going in the morning?

DONLEAVY: No, just my physical setting. I try not to force myself too much, and to take some leisure. Generally, I eat my breakfast alone about eight o’clock. From my bedroom I have to walk down a long hall to the main staircase and then downstairs walk the same length of hall back to collect my breakfast and then back again to my work room. I sit there and actually enjoy myself. It’s a great time because I overlook a southern walled orchard and flower gardens and I gaze out the window, or read the newspaper, or look at an architectural book or listen to the radio. I must say it’s momentarily very pleasant. But if I’m really driving myself, battling my way, I forbid myself to read the newspaper or turn on the radio and I just sit there alone eating my breakfast. But usually I drive myself so much all day that in the mornings I don’t make it too difficult for myself.

Julian Barnes (The Art of Fiction No. 165, 2000_26ya)

INTERVIEWER: How do you work? Are you disciplined? Do you keep regular hours?

BARNES: I’m disciplined over a long stretch. That is to say, I know when I start a novel that it will work best if I write it in eighteen months, or two or three years, depending how complicated it is, and nowadays I usually hit that rough target date. I’m disciplined by the pleasure that the work gives me; I look forward to doing it. I also know that I work best at certain hours, normally between ten in the morning and one in the afternoon. Those are the hours when my mental capacity is at its fullest. Other times of the day will be fine for revising, or writing journalism, or paying bills. I work seven days a week; I don’t think in terms of normal office hours—or rather, normal office hours for me include the weekends. Weekends are a good working time because people think you’ve gone away and don’t disturb you. So is Christmas. Everyone’s out shopping and no one phones. I always work on Christmas morning—it’s a ritual.

J. H. Prynne (The Art of Poetry No. 101, 2016)

“I am not much of a morning person,” Jeremy Prynne warned us, as we made arrangements for this interview. “My natural habitat seems to be the hours of darkness, ad libitum. So I’ll be pretty useless until about ten thirty or eleven a.m. at best: but at the other end of the day I never tire.” So it proved. For four days at the end of January, we met after lunch in his rooms at Gonville and Caius College, at the University of Cambridge, and talked, with a break for dinner, until we pleaded exhaustion sometime after midnight. At the conclusion of each day’s interview, Prynne graciously walked us out through the sixteenth-century Gate of Honour before returning to his desk in the rooms he has kept since he was first appointed as a fellow, in 1962_64ya.

PRYNNE: …“In the spring of 2011_15ya, I had one of these feelings that I sometimes have, that maybe I’m about to write something…I chose to go to Thailand, because I’d been to Thailand once before. I arranged and clocked into an hotel, a very modest, cheap hotel in Bangkok, with the sole purpose of writing whatever this composition was going to be. And right up to the last minute I had no idea whether it would be anything at all…This hotel, by the way, had an all-night restaurant, which meant that at four o’clock in the morning, I could go down and have ice cream and coffee and refresh my spirits and return to my writing desk and write another slab of stuff. I wrote feverishly, uninterruptedly throughout the whole three-week period. Something I’d never done in my life before. For example, I never gave it a title. I had no idea what its subject matter was going to be. I had no idea about its range of material. I had no idea about its prosodic formalism. I had no idea how long it was going to be, if it was going to be terminable or interminable. I would engage in writing sessions that lasted, say, four or five hours, and then I’d be exhausted and I’d break off. Sometimes I’d sleep. Sometimes, if it was daytime, I’d have a little walk in the outside air to clear my thoughts. Then I’d go down to the restaurant and help myself to coffee and ice cream, which was my staple nutritional support. Then I’d go back upstairs again.”

Katherine Anne Porter (The Art of Fiction No. 29, 1963_63ya):

INTERVIEWER: But the new novel Ship of Fools has been in the writing since 1942_84ya. The regime for writing this must have been a good deal different.

PORTER: Oh, it was. I went up and sat nearly three years in the country, and while I was writing it I worked every day, anywhere from three to five hours. Oh, it’s true I used to do an awful lot of just sitting there thinking what comes next, because this is a great big unwieldy book with an enormous cast of characters—it’s four hundred of my manuscript pages, and I can get four hundred and fifty words on a page. But all that time in Connecticut, I kept myself free for work: no telephone, no visitors—oh, I really lived like a hermit, everything but being fed through a grate! But it is, as Yeats said, a “solitary sedentary trade.” And I did a lot of gardening, and cooked my own food, and listened to music, and of course I would read. I was really very happy. I can live a solitary life for months at a time, and it does me good, because I’m working. I just get up bright and early—sometimes at five o’clock—have my black coffee, and go to work.

INTERVIEWER: You work best in the morning, then?

PORTER: I work whenever I’m let. In the days when I was taken up with everything else, I used to do a day’s work, or housework, or whatever I was doing, and then work at night. I worked when I could. But I prefer to get up very early in the morning and work. I don’t want to speak to anybody or see anybody. Perfect silence. I work until the vein is out. There’s something about the way you feel, you know when the well is dry, that you’ll have to wait till tomorrow and it’ll be full up again.

INTERVIEWER: The important thing, then, is to avoid any breaks or distractions while you’re writing?

PORTER: To keep at a boiling point. So that I can get up in the morning with my mind still working where it was yesterday. Then I can stop in the middle of a paragraph and finish it the next day.

Kenzaburo Oe(The Art of Fiction No. 195, 2007_19ya)

INTERVIEWER: What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

OE: Once I start writing a novel, I write every day until it’s finished. Usually I wake at seven a.m. and work until about eleven. I don’t eat breakfast. I just drink a glass of water. I think that is perfect for writing.

Ken Kesey (The Art of Fiction No. 136, 1994_32ya)

He lives in a spacious barn that was built in the thirties from a Sears Roebuck catalog. It is decorated in bright Day-Glo colors. The stairs ascending to his loft-study are covered in streaks of neon green and pink, recalling the psychedelic designs made famous by Kesey’s bus, Furthur. Inspired by these visual remnants of the sixties, Kesey works late into the night, observed, as he points out, by a parliament of owls.

John Ashbery (The Art of Poetry No. 33, 1983_43ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you have rituals?

ASHBERY: Well, one of them is to use this very old, circa 1930_96ya I would say, Royal typewriter I mentioned. I hate to think what will happen when it finally gives out, though you can still find them sometimes in those used office furniture stores on West 23rd Street, which are themselves an endangered species. And then I procrastinate like everybody else, though surely more than most. On days when I want to write I will usually waste the morning and go for an afternoon walk to Greenwich Village. (I live nearby in Chelsea, which is a pleasant place to walk from though maybe not to.) Sometimes this takes too long and my preferred late afternoon moment will pass. I can’t really work at night. Nor in the morning, very much, when I have more ideas but am less critical of them, it seems. I never can use the time I waste doing this for some other purpose like answering letters. It’s no good for anything but wasting. I’ve never tried Schiller’s rotten apples, but I do drink tea while I write, and that is about the only time I do drink tea. On the whole, I believe I have fewer hang-ups and rituals than I used to. I feel blocked much less often, though it still happens. It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or the weather is wrong. Even if you don’t succeed you’ll be developing a muscle that may do it later on. And I think writing does get easier as you get older. It’s a question of practice and also of realizing you don’t have the oceans of time to waste you had when you were young.

Kingsley Amis (The Art of Fiction No. 59, 1975_51ya):

AMIS: Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and shower and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, ‘Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.’

John Hall Wheelock (The Art of Poetry No. 21, 1976_50ya)

INTERVIEWER: Did you write at night after you worked your day as an editor?

WHEELOCK: Yes. I had to, or felt that I had to. I couldn’t resist the desire to make poems, so I made them at night, I made them on weekends. But as an editor, there’s no limit to the work. So after I became senior editor, for many years I didn’t publish a book and I hardly ever wrote a poem. Yet those twenty years of editing stand as a divide between my lesser work, and my best. Before I became an editor, I just wrote whenever I got a chance, at night and on vacations. I learned early to do my work in my head. For many years I had a vacation of only two weeks; I would work during that time, walking along the beaches of Bonac and composing poems in my head and all the time revising them, too, in my head. I wouldn’t write down any of them. When I got back to the city, I would write them down when I had the chance. I know my poems by heart. All the various revisions of them. You work so hard over them, you know, that you never can forget them. I used to give readings from time to time—I can’t do this now—but while I would always have the book there in case I lost my way through nervousness, I rarely had to use it. At night, when I can’t sleep, I can say poems over endlessly. Not mine, necessarily, but any poems that come to mind. It’s a great resource. Yet most poets today are visual. Marianne Moore told me that she didn’t know any of her poems by heart. Robert Frost knew most of his. But some of the best poets couldn’t recite any one of their poems.

Louis Auchincloss (The Art of Fiction No. 138, 1994_32ya):

I found that writing took a bit of adjusting—essentially to be able to use little scratches of time to do it. Lots of writers have to have whole days or nights to get ready to write; they like to be by a fire, with absolute quiet, with their slippers on and a pipe or something, and then they’re ready to go. They can’t believe you can use five minutes here, ten minutes there, fifteen minutes at another time. Yet it’s only a question of training to learn that trick. If they had to do it that way, they’d be able to—the real writers, that is. I can pick up in the middle of a sentence and then go on. I wrote at night; sometimes I wrote at the office and then practiced law at home. My wife and I never went away on weekends. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else try this method, but it worked for me. And it did for Trollope. I don’t mean to compare myself to Trollope, but it was said that he made a habit of writing from nine to noon, and if he finished a novel at a quarter to twelve, he’d start another. Unfortunately, he put that all into his autobiography, which killed his reputation for decades because people wanted to think of writing as suffering.

Louis Begley (The Art of Fiction No. 172, 2002_24ya):

INTERVIEWER: How do you balance your writing with your work as a lawyer?

BEGLEY: I don’t balance it. My work as a lawyer and my work as a novelist coexist. I practice law during the week, and do my writing on weekends and holidays if I am not interrupted by office work. Naturally, I have had to give up taking naps, going to the movies even when there is a film I very much want to see, and, much more painful, reading as much as I would like.

Luisa Valenzuela (The Art of Fiction No. 170, 2001_25ya):

Each work finds its own time. For many years I wrote at night. Then I became scared of writing at night, probably on account of the ghosts that you call to mind when you are writing, mostly when dealing with the subject of torture and other dark political issues. I’ve returned to the night shift just recently, and am rediscovering the pleasure of total silence. But I still enjoy jumping out of bed and onto the computer—from dream to word, with no time to repent.

Karl Shapiro (The Art of Poetry No. 36, 1986_40ya)

INTERVIEWER: What are your normal working hours?

SHAPIRO: I don’t have normal working hours. Although since I’ve been writing my autobiography, I’ve been working about three or four hours a day. Usually in the late morning or early afternoons.

INTERVIEWER: At the typewriter?

SHAPIRO: I write prose on the typewriter. I don’t like to work in the evening or after, partly because when I use the typewriter, I think I’m keeping people awake upstairs.

Kay Ryan (The Art of Poetry No. 94, 2008_18ya):

INTERVIEWER: Do you maintain a daily writing schedule?

RYAN: I used to be much more disciplined. For twenty-five years, I’d get up, make breakfast for Carol and myself, pack her some lunch, get her off to school, and then have the house to myself. I’d go back to bed, and I’d read a little bit of something great, take out my yellow tablet, and do some writing….Always in bed. Draft after draft. Many times I’d still be in my pajamas at noon or one. I’ve always liked the uniform of the poet. I’ve gone through some nice pajamas. This was in the old days. My discipline is interior now.

INTERVIEWER: How long does it take you to write a poem?

RYAN: Who can answer that? An artist friend of mine once gave me a great pencil sketch of a sink. She said it only took about half an hour to draw. But it took years for everything to combine into that half hour. But practically speaking, I usually spend one very intense morning writing a poem. For me a poem isn’t a knitting project I keep in my workbasket and add a few more purls to every couple days.

Manuel Puig (The Art of Fiction No. 114, 1989_37ya):

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your schedule as a writer. Do you write every day?

PUIG: I adore routine. I cannot work away from it. It has to be the same thing every day. It takes a long time for me to wake up, so in the morning I write letters, revise translations—things that don’t demand too much. At noon, I go to the beach and swim for twenty minutes. I come back, eat, and take a nap. Without that nap there is no possibility of creation. From four to eight I really work. Then I have dinner and that’s it. I cannot work after eating. I stop and see something on the video machine. I hate to interrupt this for weekends. Then it’s very hard to go back to work.

Marguerite Young (The Art of Fiction No. 66, 1977_49ya)

…“I was enchanted by the whole project. I hear music when I am writing, and I worked from nine to five, for what was to be eighteen years of breathless writing. I never stopped. I was never bored. If I was bored, I would have stopped. I realized somewhere along the line, early, that it would take a long time. I wanted it to be a book of books, a song of songs. I knew for sure that nothing else in life was going to interfere: I would not easily marry, I would not easily travel. I wanted to write this book—and I don’t regret it.”

INTERVIEWER: How do you get started in the morning?

YOUNG: I always leave off the day before, as Thomas Mann advised, “When the going is good . . . ,” when you know exactly where you are, and you are in a moment of exuberance; you stop. When I hook on the next morning, if the going was good, I just go. I feel it emotionally, almost in the blood, the pulse, the excitement. I always hear inner music when I write; I hear strange music. I have all my life, which is very odd, because I am not at all musical.

Margaret Drabble (The Art of Fiction No. 70, 1978_48ya)

I used to work in the evenings when the children were small, but now I work in the morning. I can’t write the whole day long. I have a room where I go because I can’t work at home—the telephone and other distractions. I start work about quarter to ten, work through till lunchtime. Sometimes I work in the afternoon. During the school holidays I don’t get very much done. I’ve only been able to put in the longer hours since the children have become more accommodating. Even then I feel a bit mean. I always have my head in somebody else’s book or my own.

Marilynne Robinson (The Art of Fiction No. 198, 2008_18ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you keep to a schedule?

ROBINSON: I really am incapable of discipline. I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don’t feel like writing, I absolutely don’t feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can’t say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there’s not something on my mind that I really want to write about, I tend to write something that I hate. And that depresses me. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to live through the time it takes for it to go up the chimney. Maybe it’s a question of discipline, maybe temperament, who knows? I wish I could have made myself do more. I wouldn’t mind having written fifteen books.

Mark Helprin (The Art of Fiction No. 132, 1993_33ya)

When I’m not distracted by other things, I arise at five a.m., am at my desk by five-thirty, and work until about nine. Then I run and do other exercises—rowing, gymnastics, weights—for about two hours. It used to be longer, but I’m now forty-five and I can’t run twelve miles every day. Then I read the papers and do the mail, which can take hours, take a nap if possible, and do a little work in the late afternoon before the day dissolves into dinner, putting the children to bed, reading, lights out. When I have a deadline, I just work all night and all day, like an architect on charrette.

2024 interview:

Russ Roberts: Do you have a writing routine that’s been constant throughout your career as a writer, or has it evolved or changed over time?

Mark Helprin: Oh, I don’t know. I can only write about 3 hours at a time, and that passes like that. It’s as if, when I finish, I think, ‘This was 3 hours?’ It seems like one minute. I’m not aware of time when that happens.

But, on the other hand, I can’t write any more than that, so I do other things. And that counts—these days, anyway.

Editing, too. I used to write—I used to do all kinds of things in the day: lots of exercise and other type of work. Reading. Tremendous amount of reading: newspapers, journals, books, magazines, whatever. And then, when I was younger, I’d have dinner and have a mug of tea and about 3 boxes of cookies, and then work until about one o’clock in the morning.

But, I can’t do that anymore. These days, I try to work in the morning when I’m fresh.

R Roberts: Do you work 7 days a week? Do you try to write every day?

M Helprin: No, because I can’t. There’s too many interruptions for that. But, when I’m going, yeah, I do, actually. If I can get to a point where it’s sort of like a potter’s wheel—you keep on pushing; it has an even—it keeps on going around and around at the same velocity. When I get at that point, then yeah, I do. I never stop.

I mean, for instance, this is Sunday and I’ll be working today. It’s just like any other day. Of course, this is Yom Rishon in Israel where it is a work day [ie. because he is Jewish and ‘Sabbath’ is Friday–Saturday rather than the Christian Sunday]. But yeah, I confess: I even work on Shabbat.

Mario Vargas Llosa (The Art of Fiction No. 120, 1990_36ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you write by hand, on the typewriter, or do you alternate?

VARGAS LLOSA: First, I write by hand. I always work in the morning, and in the early hours of the day, I always write by hand. Those are the most creative hours. I never work more than two hours like this—my hand gets cramped. Then I start typing what I’ve written, making changes as I go along; this is perhaps the first stage of rewriting. But I always leave a few lines untyped so that the next day, I can start by typing the end of what I’d written the day before. Starting up the typewriter creates a certain dynamic—it’s like a warm-up exercise.

INTERVIEWER: Hemingway used that same technique of always leaving a sentence half-written so he could pick up the thread the next day . . .

VARGAS LLOSA: Yes, he thought he should never write out all he had in mind so that he could start up more easily the next day. The hardest part, it always seems to me, is starting. In the morning, making contact again, the anxiety of it . . . But if you have something mechanical to do, the work has already begun. The machine starts to work. Anyway, I have a very rigorous work schedule. Every morning until two in the afternoon, I stay in my office. These hours are sacred to me. That doesn’t mean I’m always writing; sometimes I’m revising or taking notes. But I remain systematically at work. There are, of course, the good days for creation and the bad ones. But I work every day because even if I don’t have any new ideas, I can spend the time making corrections, revising, taking notes, et cetera . . . Sometimes I decide to rewrite a finished piece, if only to change the punctuation. Monday through Saturday, I work on the novel in progress, and I devote Sunday mornings to journalistic work—articles and essays. I try to keep this kind of work within the allotted time of Sunday so that it doesn’t infringe on the creative work of the rest of the week. Sometimes I listen to classical music when I take notes, as long as there’s no singing. It’s something I started doing when I lived in a very noisy house. In the mornings, I work alone, nobody comes up to my office. I don’t even take phone calls. If I did, my life would be a living hell. You cannot imagine how many phone calls and visitors I get. Everyone knows this house. My address unfortunately fell into the public domain.

Mary McCarthy (The Art of Fiction No. 27, 1962_64ya)

INTERVIEWER: Does it matter to you at all where you write?

McCARTHY: Oh, a nice peaceful place with some good light.

INTERVIEWER: Do you work regularly, every morning, say?

McCARTHY: Normally; right now I haven’t been. Normally I work from about nine to two, and sometimes much longer—if it’s going well, sometimes from nine to seven.

INTERVIEWER: Typewriter?

McCARTHY: Typewriter, yes. This always has to get into a Paris Review interview! I very rarely go out to lunch.

Mary Lee Settle (The Art of Fiction No. 116, 1990_36ya)

INTERVIEWER: I want to talk about the writing process, that is, you as a writer at work. What is the most productive time of day for you?

SETTLE: Morning. By the time I am deep into a book, it is very early. I once worked late in the afternoon, and then I realized that I was missing most of the human race, so I kept setting my work time back until now it is a joke—the sun and I get up at the same time. I go straight upstairs to my workroom; if I don’t, if I stop at all, I’m lost. There are all those vastly important things to do, like the laundry! So I go there, and I meditate, and I wait. Waiting for the voices is for me the most important part.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about waiting for the voices.

SETTLE: How can I tell about silence? I think that that period of being able to wait until the sound and vision of a book forms unconsciously like a dream, and then is allowed to reach your conscious mind so that you can hear it, see it, and tell about it, is the single moment that separates the fiction writer from all the others who depend on craft, real memory and intelligence… When I’m finally going I write about a thousand words in an hour. Then I’m totally wiped out, and I garden or fuss around to recover.

INTERVIEWER: What is the maximum number of hours you can write in a day? Fiction, I mean.

SETTLE: Just about that hour until the end, and then I move into a hotel, inn, whatever. Wake up, write, go to sleep, wake up, write, a twenty-four hour schedule. The novel tends to be so powerful by then for me that it takes me with it. I do it so that what energy I have by the end can all go onto the page. I learned long ago, reading Thomas Hardy, that the end of a book can be ruined by letting the writer’s fatigue creep into it.

May Sarton (The Art of Poetry No. 32, 1983_43ya)

INTERVIEWER: Everyone wants to know about a writer’s work habits . . .

SARTON: I do all my work before eleven in the morning. That’s why I get up so early. Around five.

INTERVIEWER: Have you pretty much stuck to the same kind of discipline over the years?

SARTON: Yes, I have. That I got from my father. I think the great thing he gave me was an example of what steady work, disciplined work, can finally produce. In not waiting for “the moment,” you know, but saying: “I’m going to write every day for two or three hours.” The trouble, for me, is the letters. They interrupt, and I give much too much energy to that. It’s an insoluble problem.

INTERVIEWER: Would it be helpful, say, if you were stuck in your work, to switch over to the letters?

SARTON: I sometimes start the day with the letters. Just to get the oil into the machine.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have other ways of getting oil into the machine?

SARTON: Music. I play records, mostly eighteenth-century music. I find that the Romantics—Beethoven—don’t work for me. I love them to listen to, but not to work with, alongside of, whereas Mozart, Bach, Albinoni . . . Haydn, I love. I feel the tremendous masculine joy of Haydn. That gets me going.

Mavis Gallant (The Art of Fiction No. 160, 1999_27ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is a typical day? Do you organize your day around writing or do you not need a schedule?

GALLANT: I write every day except when I am traveling—I gave up trying even to keep a travel journal years ago; it always sounds artificial. When I’m here, chez moi, I write every day as a matter of course. Most days in the morning but some days anytime, afternoon or evening. It depends on what I’m writing and the state of the thing. It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

INTERVIEWER: Has it ever been impossible to write? Have you never not had something in mind to write?

GALLANT: I can’t imagine not having something in mind.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any habits that help you write?

GALLANT: Reading some poetry early in the morning is a habit—I read it before I start to work. Whenever people say, Nobody reads poetry anymore, I think, Well, I do.

Octavio Paz (The Art of Poetry No. 42, 1991_35ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a schedule for writing?

PAZ: I’ve never been able to maintain a fixed schedule. For years, I wrote in my few free hours. I was quite poor and from an early age had to hold down several jobs to eke out a living. I was a minor employee in the National Archive; I worked in a bank; I was a journalist; I finally found a comfortable but busy post in the diplomatic service, but none of those jobs had any real effect on my work as a poet.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have to be in any specific place in order to write?

PAZ: A novelist needs his typewriter, but you can write poetry any time, anywhere. Sometimes I mentally compose a poem on a bus or walking down the street. The rhythm of walking helps me fix the verses. Then when I get home, I write it all down. For a long time when I was younger, I wrote at night. It’s quieter, more tranquil. But writing at night also magnifies the writer’s solitude. Nowadays I write during the late morning and into the afternoon. It’s a pleasure to finish a page when night falls.

Maya Angelou (The Art of Fiction No. 119, 1990_36ya)

INTERVIEWER: You once told me that you write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible…And is the bottle of sherry for the end of the day or to fuel the imagination?

ANGELOU: I might have it at six-fifteen a.m. just as soon as I get in, but usually it’s about eleven o’clock when I’ll have a glass of sherry.

INTERVIEWER: When you are refreshed by the Bible and the sherry, how do you start a day’s work?

ANGELOU: I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an orderly dinner—proper, quiet, lovely dinner; and then I go back to work the next morning. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go into the room and there’ll be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the sheets. We think they are moldy. But I only allow them to come in and empty wastebaskets. I insist that all things are taken off the walls.

…“I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop—I’m a serious cook—and pretend to be normal. I play sane—Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967_59ya. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.”

Pablo Neruda (The Art of Poetry No. 14, 1971_55ya)

Conversations for the interview were held in short sessions. In the morning—after Neruda had his breakfast in his room—we would meet in the library, which is a new wing of the house. I would wait while he answered his mail, composed poems for his new book, or corrected the galleys of a new Chilean edition of Twenty Love Poems. When composing poetry, he writes with green ink in an ordinary composition book. He can write a fairly long poem in a very short time, after which he makes only a few corrections. The poems are then typed by his secretary and close friend of more than fifty years, Homero Arce.

…INTERVIEWER: What are your working hours?

NERUDA: I don’t have a schedule, but by preference I write in the morning. Which is to say that if you weren’t here making me waste my time (and wasting your own), I would be writing. I don’t read many things during the day. I would rather write all day, but frequently the fullness of a thought, of an expression, of something that comes out of myself in a tumultuous way—let’s label it with an antiquated term, “inspiration”—leaves me satisfied, or exhausted, or calmed, or empty. That is, I can’t go on. Apart from that, I like living too much to be seated all day at a desk. I like to put myself in the goings-on of life, of my house, of politics, and of nature. I am forever coming and going. But I write intensely whenever I can and wherever I am. It doesn’t bother me that there may be a lot of people around.

INTERVIEWER: You cut yourself off totally from what surrounds you?

NERUDA: I cut myself off, and if everything is suddenly quiet, then that is disturbing to me.

Nadine Gordimer (The Art of Fiction No. 77, 1983_43ya)

INTERVIEWER: What conditions do you find to be most conducive to writing?

GORDIMER: Well, nowhere very special, no great, splendid desk and cork-lined room. There have been times in my life, my God, when I was a young divorced woman with a small child living in a small apartment with thin walls when other people’s radios would drive me absolutely mad. And that’s still the thing that bothers me tremendously—that kind of noise. I don’t mind people’s voices. But Muzak or the constant clack-clack of a radio or television coming through the door . . . well, I live in a suburban house where I have a small room where I work. I have a door with direct access to the garden—a great luxury for me—so that I can get in and out without anybody bothering me or knowing where I am. Before I begin to work I pull out the phone and it stays out until I’m ready to plug it in again. If people really want you, they’ll find you some other time. And it’s as simple as that, really.

INTERVIEWER: How long do you usually work every day? Or do you work every day?

GORDIMER: When I’m working on a book I work every day. I work about four hours nonstop, and then I’ll be very tired and nothing comes anymore, and then I will do other things. I can’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary; one has got to keep in touch with that. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with aphids is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back. I have formed the habit, over the last two books I’ve written, of spending half an hour or so reading over what I’d written during the day just before I go to bed at night. Then, of course, you get tempted to fix it up, fuss with it, at night. But I find that’s good. But if I’ve been with friends or gone out somewhere, then I won’t do that. The fact is that I lead a rather solitary life when I’m writing.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a time of day that’s best?

GORDIMER: I work in the morning. That’s best for me.

…INTERVIEWER: There’s no specific routine that gets you from the bedroom or the living room into the writing room, bridging that terrifying gap between not writing and writing?

GORDIMER: No—that’s the advantage if you’re free to choose the time you’re going to write. That’s the advantage of writing in the morning. Because then one gets up and in one’s subconscious mind one knows: I am going to write. Whatever small thing you have to do, such as talking to other people at breakfast, it’s only done with one part of you, so to speak; just done on the surface. The person with whom I live, my husband, understands this and has for a very long time. And he knows that to say to me at breakfast, “What shall we do about so-and-so?” or, “Would you read this letter?”—he knows that isn’t the time to ask. I get irritable, and irritated; I don’t want to be asked to do things then. And I don’t want to phone an order to the grocer at that time. I just want to be left alone to eat my breakfast. Ideally, I like to walk around a bit outside, which you can do, of course, with a garden. But I often think that even that becomes a kind of procrastination because it’s so easy then to see a weed that one has to stop and pull up and then one sees some ants and wonders, Where are they going? So the best thing to do is to go into the room and close the door and sit down.

Paul Muldoon (The Art of Poetry No. 87, 2004_22ya)

MULDOON: When I was nineteen or twenty I’d already had lots of poems broadcast on the BBC, and when an ad appeared in the local paper looking for radio producers I thought I would apply. At the interview—I’m quite confident this is what got me the job—I came in, and about thirty seconds later the tea trolley came in. It was parked right beside me so, being a credit to my mother for once in my life, I said, Well, can I pour you some tea? So I poured them all tea. Which, of course, when you get right down to it is really what a radio producer is. A tea pourer. I worked quite hard for a couple of years and then I sort of got fed up with it all. But they took me in at the BBC. I kept a Dylan Thomas quote over my desk for thirteen years: ‘In olden days poets ran away to sea. Nowadays they run away to the BBC.’

INTERVIEWER: You were writing poems over your lunch breaks.

MULDOON: For many years. And that’s still how I write. The lunch breaks have got longer. I think it’s fair to say that I’m disciplined. I say that because I work almost every day. Does that equal discipline? I’m not sure. But I’m in the habit of writing. It’s what I do. I suppose I could be cleaning windows, and that could be a discipline, window cleaning.

Nathalie Sarraute (The Art of Fiction No. 115, 1990_36ya)

For the past twenty years Sarraute has gone every morning to write at the same neighborhood café in Paris. The following interview took place at her home in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the Musée d’Art Moderne.

INTERVIEWER: You have written all your books, from the first to the latest in the same café, where you work every day. Why not at home?

SARRAUTE: At first because the house was full of children; my husband was a lawyer and received his clients here, so I couldn’t work. Going to a café is like traveling—you get out of your own environment and its distractions. Writing is difficult; it is like jumping into the void. One tries to avoid it by any means—looking for a lost piece of paper, making a cup of tea, anything. In a café you jump in. Nobody disturbs me there and I don’t hear the conversations. I had the same set-up in the country, until one day they installed a jukebox in the café where I worked, and that does stop you from thinking. So I arranged a cowshed across the courtyard, and every morning I go there and work.

Naguib Mahfouz (The Art of Fiction No. 129, 1992_34ya)

INTERVIEWER: Turning once more to your writing: do you work according to a regular schedule?

MAHFOUZ: I have always been compelled to. From eight till two I was at work. From four until seven I wrote. Then from seven until ten I read. This was my schedule every day except Friday. I have never had time to do as I please. But I stopped writing about three years ago.

Peter Levi (The Art of Poetry No. 24, 1979_47ya)

INTERVIEWER: If I may return to your own writing, perhaps you could say something about the way you approach your work. Do you have any sort of writing routine?

LEVI: I write when I have the leisure to. Up until last Christmas it’s been when I didn’t have a lot of unanswered letters. Do you remember Lowell speaks somewhere about a “malignant surf of unanswered letters?” I know what he means. Or after doing some job, when I felt I really deserved a few days to myself. And frequently I write poetry when I think, Now I have leisure; now I have peace; now I can do some scholarly thing. I sit down at my desk and it isn’t a scholarly thing at all; I write poetry for a few days. But I seldom write more than a poem a fortnight. Sometimes, three in three days. Very occasionally two in a day. A poem can take two or three days to finish, usually two at the most because I can’t stand the strain, can’t hold it together. Though sometimes I go back to an old poem and finish it, when I thought I was going to leave it unfinished forever. Suddenly one feels relaxed and gleeful, and does anything.

Philip Larkin (The Art of Poetry No. 30, 1982_44ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is your daily routine?

LARKIN: My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

INTERVIEWER: You didn’t mention a schedule for writing . . .

LARKIN: Yes, I was afraid you’d ask about writing. Anything I say about writing poems is bound to be retrospective, because in fact I’ve written very little since moving into this house, or since High Windows, or since 1974_52ya, whichever way you like to put it. But when I did write them, well, it was in the evenings, after work, after washing up (I’m sorry: you would call this “doing the dishes”). It was a routine like any other. And really it worked very well: I don’t think you can write a poem for more than two hours. After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on. The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the University there. Another top-floor flat, by the way. I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings, then went to the University bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two. The first part of the evening had the second part to look forward to, and I could enjoy the second part with a clear conscience because I’d done my two hours. I can’t seem to organize that now.

Norman Mailer (The Art of Fiction No. 32, 1964_62ya):

MAILER: They vary with each book. I wrote The Naked and the Dead on the typewriter. I used to write four days a week: Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

INTERVIEWER: Definite hours?

MAILER: Yes, very definite hours. I’d get up about eight or eight-thirty and I’d be at work by ten. And I’d work till twelve-thirty; then I’d have lunch. I’d get back to work about two-thirty or three, and work for another two hours. In the afternoon I usually needed a can of beer to prime me. But I’d write for five hours a day. And I wrote a great deal. The average I tried to keep was seven typewritten pages a day, twenty-eight pages a week. The first draft took seven months, the second draft—which really was only half a draft—took four months. The part about the platoon went well from the beginning, but the Lieutenant and the General in the first draft were stock characters. If it had been published at that point, the book would have been considered an interesting war novel with some good scenes, no more. The second draft was the bonus. Cummings and Hearn were done in the second draft. If you look at the book you can see that the style shifts, that the parts about Cummings and Hearn are written in a somewhat more developed vein. Less forceful but more articulated. And you can see something of the turn my later writing would take in the scenes between Cummings and Hearn.

Mailer also refers to writing in the morning in his second TPR interview in 2007_19ya.

Norman Rush (The Art of Fiction No. 205, 2010_16ya)

I try to be very diligent about writing every morning. On an ideal day, and there aren’t many of those, I would get upstairs by nine and work until lunch on new material, then spend the afternoon revising it, or doing other literary work: reviews, introductions, and so on. Generally I produce a very raw, highly associative, difficult-for-anybody-else-to-interpret version in the morning, which I then break down, edit, and try to make readable in the afternoon. But my work life has been irregular.

Patrick O’Brian (The Art of Fiction No. 142, 1995_31ya; paralleled in 2024 interview with stepson)

Our house is built on the side of a steep slope: the terrace and the balcony therefore jut out, providing two long, low, sheltered rooms. In one, which is lined with bookshelves, I do work that requires continual reference: in the other, which I try to keep clear, I make my attempts at purely creative writing. There is also a small stone house in the mountain vineyard to which I can retire when there is too much noise in the village. I write or sit at my desk with paper before me just after breakfast and work or ponder until lunch. Unless writing is flowing very well, the afternoon is usually free—garden, mountain vineyard, lagoon, or seeing friends. Then after tea I go on until about dinnertime.

Paula Fox (The Art of Fiction No. 181, 2004_22ya)

Well, now that I’m nearly eighty-one it takes me longer to get up the stairs in the morning. I used to go to work at eight; now I get up there at around nine-thirty. If I can’t work that day I just sit and think about things and scrawl. I do everything by hand on yellow legal pads, and then I transfer and broaden and deepen on the typewriter. And I put down notes. I start keeping a notebook as soon as I’m writing a book. The way people talk to one another will be something I scrawl down…So I work for about three or four hours. I used to work five hours. I can’t work all day long because I get very tired in the afternoon.

P. D. James (The Art of Fiction No. 141, 1995_31ya)

When I first started writing I got up early and wrote from six to eight, as I had to go to work. The habit has stuck and I still get up early and write in the morning. When I’m writing a book, I get up before seven, go down to the kitchen and make tea, listen to the news on the radio, and have a bath, then I settle down to work. I find that after a few hours I can’t go on and I stop around twelve. The rest of the day is given to all other matters.

Penelope Lively (The Art of Fiction No. 241, 2018)

INTERVIEWER: What was your writing life like in those early years, when your children were still young? Did you treat it like a day job?

LIVELY: Well, I wouldn’t have hoped to write during the school holidays. It would’ve been strictly during term, and that would have meant getting to the desk as soon as I possibly could once they’d gone off to school, but it was very much what I knew I was going to do forever. I had no idea how successful it would be, but The Road to Lichfield was published, and then it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, which was encouraging.

INTERVIEWER: What did your writing day used to look like?

LIVELY: I’d come down and have breakfast, then be at my desk by about half past nine. Theoretically, I would stay there all day, till about five o’clock, with a break for lunch. That wouldn’t mean writing all the time. It never does. Hours might have been spent looking out of the window. I never worked in the evening unless there was some deadline that I absolutely had to make. I’ve never been an evening worker. I had to juggle my time back then, and obviously, if you’ve got children, there are always going to be interruptions. Jack always interrupted, too. He never saw writing as a sacred activity.

Robert Pinsky (The Art of Poetry No. 76, 1997_29ya)

INTERVIEWER: Is your adult writing life more routine than your childhood culinary life was?

PINSKY: It’s one of my peculiarities that I hate to concede having any routines at all. I panic at questions like, When do you get up in the morning? or, What do you have for breakfast? I write with a felt-tip or fountain pen, and I write with a computer. Sometimes I write in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes late at night. Sometimes my handwriting is rather neat, sometimes sloppy. Often, the characters are very small, but not always. Having been a poor student in high school, I am always amazed that I can get anything done, and I almost have to sneak up on myself to do it, to feel I’m playing hooky: ‘It’s between times—I’m not supposed to write now.’

Peter Taylor (The Art of Fiction No. 99, 1987_39ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is your working schedule?

TAYLOR: When I’m teaching I don’t work much on my manuscripts. I keep them open on my desk, look at them every morning, but I don’t press myself. But that’s just September to Christmas. After Christmas it’s different. I devote myself entirely to my writing. I tell myself that my mornings are my writing time, no matter where I am. After an early breakfast I go to my study. Now I may not really write. Often my mind wanders off, I do other things. It may be eleven before I really get going. I’ll be there daydreaming, and then suddenly the thing just starts coming. Then I go on until I eat lunch at two or so. But I have got to the point now where I can write pretty well anywhere at any time. Writing is almost like ladies’ knitting—I always have it with me.

P. G. Wodehouse (The Art of Fiction No. 60, 1975_51ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is your working schedule these days?

WODEHOUSE: I still start the day off at seven-thirty. I do my daily dozen exercises, have breakfast, and then go into my study. When I am between books, as I am now, I sit in an armchair and think and make notes. Before I start a book I’ve usually got four hundred pages of notes. Most of them are almost incoherent. But there’s always a moment when you feel you’ve got a novel started. You can more or less see how it’s going to work out. After that it’s just a question of detail…If I’ve got a plot for a novel worked out and I can really get going on it, I work all the time. I work in the morning, and then I probably go for a walk or something, and then I have another go at the novel. I find that from four to seven is a particularly good time for working. I never work after dinner. It’s the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out. I like to think of some scene, it doesn’t matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story.

INTERVIEWER: How many words do you usually turn out on a good day?

WODEHOUSE: Well, I’ve slowed up a good deal now. I used to write about two thousand words. Now I suppose I do about one thousand.

INTERVIEWER: Do you work seven days a week?

WODEHOUSE: Oh, yes, rather. Always.

Philip Roth (The Art of Fiction No. 84, 1984_42ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you work best at any particular time of the day?

ROTH: I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think other writers work such long hours?

ROTH: I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.

Ray Bradbury (The Art of Fiction No. 203, 2010_16ya)

INTERVIEWER: What time of day do you do most of your writing?

BRADBURY: I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they’re gone. That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you. Also, I always have taken naps. That way, I have two mornings!

Raymond Carver (The Art of Fiction No. 76, 1983_43ya)

INTERVIEWER: What are your writing habits like? Are you always working on a story?

CARVER: When I’m writing, I write every day. It’s lovely when that’s happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don’t even know what day of the week it is. The “paddle-wheel of days,” John Ashbery has called it. When I’m not writing, like now, when I’m tied up with teaching duties as I have been the last while, it’s as if I’ve never written a word or had any desire to write. I fall into bad habits. I stay up too late and sleep in too long. But it’s okay. I’ve learned to be patient and to bide my time. I had to learn that a long time ago. Patience. If I believed in signs, I suppose my sign would be the sign of the turtle. I write in fits and starts. But when I’m writing, I put in a lot of hours at the desk, ten or twelve or fifteen hours at a stretch, day after day. I love that, when that’s happening. Much of this work time, understand, is given over to revising and rewriting. There’s not much that I like better than to take a story that I’ve had around the house for a while and work it over again. It’s the same with the poems I write. I’m in no hurry to send something off just after I write it, and I sometimes keep it around the house for months doing this or that to it, taking this out and putting that in. It doesn’t take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts. It’s instructive, and heartening both, to look at the early drafts of great writers. I’m thinking of the photographs of galleys belonging to Tolstoy, to name one writer who loved to revise. I mean, I don’t know if he loved it or not, but he did a great deal of it. He was always revising, right down to the time of page proofs. He went through and rewrote War and Peace eight times and was still making corrections in the galleys. Things like this should hearten every writer whose first drafts are dreadful, like mine are.

Reynolds Price (The Art of Fiction No. 127, 1991_35ya)

“For some reason or other I was born an avid observer and witness. Both my parents were tremendous watchers of the world. I can remember from my childhood that one of the things my mother loved most was just to drive downtown, park, and sit in the car watching people walk by. Europeans and Middle Easterners do that in their piazzas and souks. Of course, if we try it now in Bryant Park or Central Park, we’re dead by sundown. But I love to watch the world, and that visual experience becomes, in a way I couldn’t begin to chart or describe, the knowledge I possess; that knowledge produces whatever it is that I write. From the very beginning of my serious adult work, when I was a senior in college, my writing has emerged by a process over which I have almost no more conscious control than over the growth of my fingernails. The best I can do is to live as if I were training for the Olympics. I try to keep my mind, which is an organ of something called my body, in the best possible physical shape; if I do that, I find that it does my work for me. I think artists of almost all sorts would say that—from great athletes and dancers to poets and composers. There’s a huge amount of discipline and training and specific technique that can be learned; but ultimately it’s a matter of arriving each morning at the desk and finding that the cistern filled up in the night—or that it didn’t, which is mostly my fault…I wish I had a little bit less of a one-track mind; but the creating, unconscious portion of my mind works best and most reliably when it’s allowed to do one thing. I’ve mentioned this endlessly in interviews and to students, but a novelist friend of mine said one of my favorite things: The unconscious is like children and dogs. It loves routine and hates surprises. If you’ll think about that, there are probably no exceptions. If you get your whole mind to where it’s supposed to be at nine o’clock tomorrow morning—or you name the hour—whatever the chore is, your chances are far better for doing the chore if you feed your mind when it expects to be fed and then let it do what you’ve told it to. The mind, after all, resides in a physical organ—the brain, whose needs are known.”

INTERVIEWER: The unconscious is a great resource, I think, for all serious writers. Quite clearly in your writing about your own writing you’ve made it clear that you rely upon that dreaming pool.

PRICE: I think it’s so absolutely amazing—that I go to sleep at night and whatever’s needed in the morning is there. I don’t say this in rapt self-love, but I do assume that almost all the work I’ve written has been of interest and use to a few more human beings than myself, so I assume that I’m not psychotic.

INTERVIEWER: Or that we are!

PRICE: Alas, a great many of our human brothers produce narrative that is absolutely sealed from you and me. We presently call them schizophrenic; and there are probably a dozen within three blocks of here as I speak, if not more. You and I, when we unburden our unconscious at breakfast, or in whatever we make in the course of a day, tend to produce something that actually communicates with another member of the species Homo sapiens; so we’re not stuck with that awful but prevalent curse, “the sound of one hand clapping.” Someone whom we call mad in our culture is stuck with the sound of one hand clapping, and I’m grateful that my unconscious hasn’t stuck me with that, though a time or two it’s backed me up a mute, black alley!

…“Sometimes I’ll say, I’m going to begin it full time on my father’s birthday, or, I’m going to begin it on the anniversary of so-and-so. That might be six weeks ahead or three weeks ahead, and I pack in the complex carbohydrates and begin the physical and mental training. And then that morning I cut the ribbons and go in and start it—the actual novel, no more plans or guesses. In recent years I’ve written at the rate of somewhere between three to ten pages a day; and that will constitute a first draft—written six days a week, more or less all day and sometimes at night. Then I’ll completely run the first draft back through my fingers on the keyboard. Then I’ll print it out. Then I start revising by hand on paper. After x number of those cycles, I feel that it’s finished; it falls off the tree, and I ship it away.”

Richard Powers (The Art of Fiction No. 175, 2002_24ya)

INTERVIEWER: Describe the apartment in Long Island.

POWERS: It was a fantastic kind of monk’s cell. It had an extremely low ceiling that I couldn’t stand upright in. I’m six-foot-four, so standing up in any kind of low-ceiling room becomes a real ordeal. I wrote on a bed with a notebook computer resting on my chest. I would get up at the crack of dawn and have an unbroken day. I was averaging maybe thirteen hundred words a day. Which is double what I usually do.

…INTERVIEWER: Where do you write now?

POWERS: In the cocoon of my bed. My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that. You’re at the still point of the turning world. The only thing that I am touching is a cordless, one-pound keyboard. The sense of umbilical connection to the world is minimal. I’m free to make myself a recipient of all this remembered agitation—to “recollect in tranquility,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase. Since the computer is on the other side of the other side of the room, I don’t feel as if I’m tethered to it; the machine is a distant, non-intrusive recipient of the words that I’m thinking across the room. Later I go and collect them and note where they’ve stuck.

INTERVIEWER: When do you write?

POWERS: Pretty much from sunup to sundown. The day will start with a period of last-day revision at the sentence level, which for me functions simply to bring me from zero to sixty-five and back into the full register of the piece, where I was when I left off the night before. That may be forty-five minutes to an hour. At which point I hit my cruising speed, and I can do that for a long period of time without many breaks. I bring squirreled-away food to the bed and pretty much work through whatever period of sustenance I give myself. I’ll continue to do that till late afternoon. The period from seven in the morning till five in the evening will be intermixed with reading when the occasion calls for it. But as the day goes on, that ratio between stopping to read for research and resuming writing will shift in favor of reading. I’ll read from five or six till ten or eleven at night. And that’s a nice way to prime the pump for the next day.

Richard Price (The Art of Fiction No. 144, 1996_30ya):

It’s important to me to have a place to work outside of where I live. So I have always found myself an office. I go off to work as if I had a clock to punch; at the end of the day I come home as if I had just gotten off the commuter train. I need to impose a structure on myself. Otherwise I can go three or four days without looking at a piece of paper. I try to keep it as close to a nine-to-five job as I’m able, probably closer to ten to four. I spend the first hour reading the Daily News, answering phone calls, lining up paper clips, doing anything but working. Toward the end of the end of the morning, I realize I have no choice but to finally get to work. Sometimes I’ll be transported by the work; sometimes it just won’t come. The most painful part of the day is getting to the moment when I see I have no choice but to do it.

Roberto Calasso (The Art of Fiction No. 217, 2012_14ya)

In the morning I try not to have much to do with the publishing house. I prefer to simply write, to work on my books. Then, around three thirty, I go to Adelphi and I stay there until seven. Well, in truth, that is how things should be, but they are disrupted practically every day. Every morning I am called, I have to call, there are e-mails coming, so I never feel totally separated from the publishing house. Thankfully I have such bright collaborators, people with whom I get on very well, and we don’t have those endless meetings that are the torture of publishing life. So I can’t complain. I am very happy it works this way. For a house that publishes by now eighty to ninety new titles a year, it is indispensable. On Friday, before you came, we had one of those rituals called a “sales conference,” and I had to talk about twenty-eight books, giving each roughly three minutes, so that our eighty salespeople would go off and speak for thirty seconds to the booksellers about each of the same books. It is rather harrowing.

W. D. Snodgrass (The Art of Poetry No. 68, 1994_32ya)

INTERVIEWER: Do you work every day?

SNODGRASS: I try to, but I don’t actually do it. I try to get up early. When you get old you quit sleeping, or at least when I got old I quit sleeping. I wake up often at five or six in the morning, so I figure, OK, the first thing every morning I will go to my desk and put in at least an hour or two. And I do. Sometimes.

T. S. Eliot (The Art of Poetry No. 1, 1959_67ya)

INTERVIEWER: There’s a good deal of interest now in the process of writing. I wonder if you could talk more about your actual habits in writing verse. I’ve heard you composed on the typewriter.

ELIOT: Partly on the typewriter. A great deal of my new play, The Elder Statesman, was produced in pencil and paper, very roughly. Then I typed it myself first before my wife got to work on it. In typing myself I make alterations, very considerable ones. But whether I write or type, composition of any length, a play for example, means for me regular hours, say ten to one. I found that three hours a day is about all I can do of actual composing. I could do polishing perhaps later. I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I’d done after the three hours were up was never satisfactory. It’s much better to stop and think about something else quite different.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever write any of your nondramatic poems on schedule? Perhaps the Four Quartets?

ELIOT: Only “occasional” verse. The Quartets were not on schedule. Of course the first one was written in ’35, but the three which were written during the war were more in fits and starts. In 1939_87ya if there hadn’t been a war I would probably have tried to write another play. And I think it’s a very good thing I didn’t have the opportunity. From my personal point of view, the one good thing the war did was to prevent me from writing another play too soon. I saw some of the things that were wrong with Family Reunion, but I think it was much better that any possible play was blocked for five years or so to get up a head of steam. The form of the Quartets fitted in very nicely to the conditions under which I was writing, or could write at all. I could write them in sections and I didn’t have to have quite the same continuity; it didn’t matter if a day or two elapsed when I did not write, as they frequently did, while I did war jobs.

Robert Stone (The Art of Fiction No. 90, 1985_41ya)

Although the Stones have lived in many parts of the country, and for four years in London, changes of locale have rarely altered the writer’s routine: “I get up very early, drink a pot of tea, and go for as long as I can.” Stone says he stops only when he has left himself a clear starting point for the following day. For weeks on end he will take few days off if his work is going well. “My imagination will still be functioning,” he says with a laugh, “twelve hours after my brain is dead.”

Russell Banks (The Art of Fiction No. 152, 1998_28ya):

INTERVIEWER: How do you manage the day-to-day stuff of writing?

BANKS: It has changed over the years, much as my life’s circumstances have changed. When I was younger and had young kids, I wrote from ten at night till two in the morning and then got up in the morning and got the kids ready for school and went off to my teaching job. Now that I am in my middle fifties, happily I have a lot more time but unfortunately I have a lot less energy. In the mornings I go down the hill to my cabin—an old, renovated sugarhouse that I’ve used as a studio for the last eight years—and crank it up and work until I start to get stupid or at least start to feel stupid. Actually, I feel stupid rather quickly but usually it’s perfectly obvious that I am stupid after about four to five hours.

INTERVIEWER: Four or five hours is quite a bit of writing.

BANKS: But when you are working well it goes by so fast. You look up and, my God, it’s one o’clock and I’m hungry.

INTERVIEWER: Do you try to keep on a regular schedule?

BANKS: I try. I am able most of the time to work seven days a week, although now and then I take a day or two off for a short holiday or to come into the city on business. But generally I work every day and then hold the afternoons free for everything from hiking in the mountains, to doing laundry, to answering letters, to editing, to paying bills.

Salman Rushdie (The Art of Fiction No. 186, 2005_21ya):

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk about your procedure when you sit down at the desk?

RUSHDIE: If you read the press you might get the impression that all I ever do is go to parties. Actually, what I do for hours, every day of my life, is sit in a room by myself. When I stop for the day I always try to have some notion of where I want to pick up. If I’ve done that, then it’s a little easier to start because I know the first sentence or phrase. At least I know where in my head to go and look for it. Early on, it’s very slow and there are a lot of false starts. I’ll write a paragraph, and then the next day I’ll think, Nah, I don’t like that at all, or, I don’t know where it belongs, but it doesn’t belong here. Quite often it will take me months to get underway. When I was younger, I would write with a lot more ease than I do now, but what I wrote would require a great deal more rewriting. Now I write much more slowly and I revise a lot as I go. I find that when I’ve got a bit done, it seems to require less revision than it used to. So it’s changed. I’m just looking for something that gives me a little rush, and if I can get that, get a few hundred words down, then that’s got me through the day.

INTERVIEWER: Do you get up in the morning and start writing first thing?

RUSHDIE:“Yes, absolutely. I don’t have any strange, occult practices. I just get up, go downstairs, and write. I’ve learned that I need to give it the first energy of the day, so before I read the newspaper, before I open the mail, before I phone anyone, often before I have a shower, I sit in my pajamas at the desk. I do not let myself get up until I’ve done something that I think qualifies as working. If I go out to dinner with friends, when I come home I go back to the desk before going to bed and read through what I did that day. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is to read through what I did the day before. No matter how well you think you’ve done on a given day, there will always be something that is underimagined, some little thing that you need to add or subtract—and I must say, thank God for laptops, because it makes it a lot easier. This process of critically rereading what I did the day before is a way of getting back inside the skin of the book. But sometimes I know exactly what I want to do and I sit down and start on it. So there’s no rule.”

Samuel R. Delany (The Art of Fiction No. 210, 2011_15ya):

INTERVIEWER: What was your daily routine like in those days?

DELANY: At six-thirty or seven I’d get up, scramble Marilyn some eggs—she was eighteen, I was nineteen; we’d been married that August—make toast and coffee. She’d go out to work, and I’d start writing. I’d work all day, with a couple of breaks for extracurricular sex in the local men’s rooms and a stop at the supermarket for dinner makings. Right before five, I’d start cooking again. In general, I believe I work a lot harder today than I did then. Today I’m a five-o’clock-in-the-morning riser. Although I do stare at the wall a lot.

INTERVIEWER: Stare at the wall?

DELANY: I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently. My daughter, who recently graduated from medical school, once told me, ‘Dad, I’ve never known anyone who works as hard as you. You’re up at four, five o’clock in the morning, you work all day, then you collapse. At nine o’clock, you’re in bed, then you’re up the next morning at four to start all over again.’

Shirley Hazzard (The Art of Fiction No. 185, 2005_21ya):

INTERVIEWER: The long interval between The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire prompts a few nuts-and-bolts questions. First, do you write every day?

HAZZARD: If only I could write every day. I look back to the far-off time when I did so, mostly early morning and then late in the day. I do write in my head every day–I’m tempted to say all the time. One does instinctively reserve a part of oneself as the writing self, visiting it secretly while doing and saying all the daily things. I envy writers who feel compelled to write–John Updike, for instance–who are overflowing into reviews and articles and lectures. I have rarely felt that way–only when I was first writing, one short story after another, even though I had my bureaucratic job then, still full-time. Mostly I have to goad myself to it. And these days I’m beset by so many interruptions and by a sense of obligation. And there are the precious pleasures. It is hard to do. Yet one is never happy unless one is doing it.

(The Art of Fiction No. 158, 1999_27ya):

There’s no better feeling in the world than to lay your head on the pillow at night looking forward to getting up in the morning and returning to that desk. That’s real happiness.

T. Coraghessan Boyle (The Art of Fiction No. 161, 2000_26ya):

Of course, if you’re very, very lucky—and I have been lucky—the first stirrings of the next story come. With a novel, you’re locked-in, committed, and you sure do know what you’re going to be doing tomorrow morning…After I finished East Is East in 1990_36ya, I felt exhilarated. I was up in the mountains, and I had an entire day to think about things—the kind of day you have when you’re a child, where there is nothing to do but wonder and enjoy. At nine o’clock in the morning I was sitting in the woods reading a book. I napped, hiked, fished, felt the sun warm on my face. Next day I was so bored I started a new story…I really think it would be difficult to write were I to know that no one would ever read it. I suppose I would anyway—as a writer, you must do it . . . you really have no choice. Like everyone, I was dealt my share of problems, but I also burn with a pure gemlike flame, if I can quote Pater out of context. My flame, though, is more like a retro-rocket that launches me out of bed each morning rigid with the necessity of getting my hands round the throat of the world and applying a little persuasive pressure.

Tahar Ben Jelloun (The Art of Fiction No. 159, 1999_27ya):

INTERVIEWER: How do you organize your work?

BEN JELLOUN: I leave home every morning and come here. I work all day, and go home to spend the evening with my family, my wife, and my four children.

John Cheever, as described by Tobias Wolff (The Art of Fiction No. 183, 2004_22ya):

I began this whole writing enterprise with the idea that you go to work in the morning like a banker, then the work gets done. John Cheever used to tell how when he was a young man, living in New York with his wife, Mary, he’d put on his suit and hat every morning and get in the elevator with the other married men in his apartment building. These guys would all get out in the lobby but Cheever’d keep going down into the basement, where the super had let him set up a card table. It was so hot down there he had to strip to his underwear. So he’d sit in his boxers and write all morning, and at lunchtime he’d put his suit back on and take the elevator up with the other husbands—men used to come home for lunch in those days—and then he’d go back to the basement in his suit and strip down for the afternoon’s work. This was an important idea for me—that an artist was someone who worked, not some special being exempt from the claims of ordinary life.

Tobias Wolff (The Art of Fiction No. 183, 2004_22ya)

INTERVIEWER: So do you go to work every day like Cheever?

WOLFF: Generally I do.

INTERVIEWER: Do you write in the house?

WOLFF: No, I have a study in the basement of the university library. They offered me a nice place to work with a view of the Stanford hills, and I turned it down for this dump in the stacks because I’m so easily distracted. All I need is a window to not write. The only books I keep with me are a dictionary and some other reference books. If I have a good novel in the room with me, I’ll end up reading that. Writing’s hard. You’ll take any out, if you can. I work best away from the house because I’m too tempted to check for calls and my mail and deal with tradesmen and run an errand, go out for lunch.

…INTERVIEWER: What’s your writing day like?

WOLFF: Boring, if you’re not me. I take a walk or go for a swim, then go to work, eat, take a walk, write, come home. I never go to movies about writers because writers lead very boring lives if they’re actually working. When I was a kid and saw these pictures of Hemingway on safari or fishing in Idaho, or Fitzgerald in Paris, I thought, What an exciting life writers must lead. What I didn’t know is that’s what they do when they’re not writing. What’s exciting is finding a word that’s been dodging you for days, or deciding to cut something you’ve spent weeks on. The excitement’s in the writing. It doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, I’m afraid. Routine becomes invaluable to writers, and that’s why once they hit their stride, their biographies make very poor material.

“Think about the way other people work—lawyers, for example. They get up from their desk, they walk into the doorway of the office next door, and say, Hey, do you remember that Warthog v. Warthog case from two years ago? and they talk about it, and that’s work. They go out, meet clients and take depositions, they have meetings where they discuss strategies for pursuing a particular case—it’s a very social profession. I wonder how much of their time is actually spent dead alone, producing hard solitary thought for hours a day. That’s what writing is and in that way it’s very hard work and it absolutely requires all the conditions that make one a bore: You have to be alone a lot, you have to be rather sedentary, you have to be a creature of routine, you have to fetishize your solitude, and you have to become very, very selfish about your time.”

Thomas McGuane (The Art of Fiction No. 89, 1985_41ya):

INTERVIEWER: Working here at the ranch must make your writing habits a lot different than those of most writers. What kind of routine do you have?

McGUANE: Let me give you what my dream day would be, if I could stick to it. It would be to get up early, get all the horses and cattle fed so that wouldn’t be hanging over our heads, eat a bowl of cereal and make some coffee, and then go to some really comfortable place and just read for three or four hours. Most of my morning reading for the past ten years has been some form of remedial reading, my personal list of things I feel I should have read, all those books that make me feel less than prepared when I sit down as a writer. For example, this last year during the winter—a season when I have lots of time to read here—I read the King James Old Testament. I’d never read it. I’ve known for thirty years that I was supposed to have read it, but I never did. All this type of reading is a steady scrubbing away of the possibilities of guilt, of the fear of pulling my punches when I sit down to write because I feel inadequate in my education. I think you should expect a writer to be a true man of literature—he should know what the hell he’s talking about, he should be a professional. So this kind of preparation is one thing I’m trying to get covered, knowing, of course, it’s a lifetime project. Anyway, after I read I spend three or four hours in the afternoon writing, and then I go back working on the horses until dinnertime comes, eat dinner, and then spend the evening reading things I just want to read until it’s time to go to sleep. Of course, lots of things go wrong with that schedule. Part of it depends on the season, and there’s days you’ve promised to do things with the children, or days you’d rather go fishing or hunting, or days when there’s a problem with a horse and it takes four hours to get it straightened out. But that’s the pattern I strive for.

Tom Wolfe (The Art of Fiction No. 123, 1991_35ya):

INTERVIEWER: It wouldn’t be a Paris Review interview unless we asked you about your work habits.

WOLFE: To tell you the truth, I always find that a fascinating part of the Paris Review interviews. That’s the kind of thing writers always want to know: What are other writers doing? I use a typewriter. My wife gave me a word processor two Christmases ago that still stares at me accusingly from a desk in my office. One day I am going to be compelled to learn how to use it. But for the time being, I use a typewriter. I set myself a quota—ten pages a day, triple-spaced, which means about eighteen hundred words. If I can finish that in three hours, then I’m through for the day. I just close up the lunch box and go home—that’s the way I think of it anyway. If it takes me twelve hours, that’s too bad, I’ve got to do it. To me, the idea “I’m going to work for six hours” is of no use. I can waste time as handily at the desk as I can window-shopping, which is one of my favorite diversions. So I try to be very methodical and force myself to stick to that schedule.

INTERVIEWER: Is there any mnemonic device to get you going?

WOLFE: I always have a clock in front of me. Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in a half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. There’s a marvelous essay that Sinclair Lewis wrote on how to write. He said most writers don’t understand that the process begins by actually sitting down.

Vladimir Nabokov (The Art of Fiction No. 40, 1967_59ya):

Nabokov arises early in the morning and works. He does his writing on filing cards, which are gradually copied, expanded, and rearranged until they become his novels. During the warm season in Montreux he likes to take the sun and swim at a pool in a garden near the hotel. His appearance at sixty-eight is heavy, slow, and powerful. He is easily turned to both amusement and annoyance, but prefers the former. His wife, an unequivocally devoted collaborator, is vigilant over him, writing his letters, taking care of business, occasionally even interrupting him when she feels he is saying the wrong thing. She is an exceptionally good-looking, trim, and sober-eyed woman. The Nabokovs still go off on frequent butterfly-hunting trips, though the distances they travel are limited by the fact that they dislike flying.

Wallace Stegner (The Art of Fiction No. 118, 1990_36ya)

In person, what first impresses many people is Stegner’s appearance. Even at the age of eighty-one he looks exceptionally youthful and handsome. He wears his clothes well, whether an old bathrobe or a workshirt and jeans. He rises early—sometimes too early for a houseguest from Idaho—breakfasts, then retreats before first light to the manual typewriter inside the study adjoining the Stegner home. Both the house and the study overlook the woods and meadows of the Los Altos Hills. On cool mornings, Stegner lights a low fire in the stove and then writes until lunch.

William F. Buckley Junior (The Art of Fiction No. 146, 1996_30ya):

BUCKLEY: When I sit down to start writing every day in Switzerland, which is usually about a quarter to five to about seven-fifteen—two and a half hours—it’s inconceivable to me that I would write less than fifteen hundred words during that time. That’s much slower than Trollope, even though I have faster tools. So, although I write fast, I’m not a phenomenally fast writer.

“Speechwriters get told by the president that he’s going to declare war the next day and to please draft an appropriate speech. And they do it. Or Tom Wicker—I’ve seen him write ten thousand words following one day’s trial proceedings, and all that stuff will appear in The New York Times. Now it’s not belletrism, but it’s good journalistic craftsmanship.”

INTERVIEWER: There’s no automatic merit in being fast or slow. Whatever works, works. Georges Simenon, who was a phenomenon of production, always got himself in shape to write each novel. I hate to mention this in your presence, but he usually wrote his novels in seven or eight days. He had a physical beforehand, I think perhaps particularly for blood pressure, and then went into a kind of trance and wrote the novel, and then was ordered by his doctor to go off and take a vacation.

BUCKLEY: “I’ll go you one better. Rotzan Isagner, who does not go to sleep until he has finished the book.”

William Faulkner (The Art of Fiction No. 12, 1956_70ya):

INTERVIEWER: Then what would be the best environment for a writer?

FAULKNER: Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn’t care where it is. If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in his society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him “sir.” All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir.” And he could call the police by their first names.

…INTERVIEWER: Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER: I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn’t seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldiers’ Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I’d finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn’t have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that’s how I became a writer.

William Gass (The Art of Fiction No. 65, 1977_49ya)

INTERVIEWER: What is a working day like for you?

GASS: Well, we usually get breakfast and the kids off to school by nine o’clock, and I start to work soon after. It’s essential that I be in the midst of something, so I try to quit work with new material that now needs revision in the typewriter. In the morning I can start right off working on those revisions and hope that by the end of the day the process of revising will have sent me forward into some new material. If I get interrupted while I am, in a sense, at the end of something—a sentence, a paragraph, a scene—then I’m liable to have trouble getting back into things. At Yaddo I worked all morning, all afternoon, a great part of the evening, every day. At home I usually work in the morning and for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Lately I have been getting some work done in the evening, but that’s because I have not been teaching at all. I haven’t been talking about grading papers, preparing lectures, that sort of thing. The real writing process is simply sitting there and typing the same old lines over and over and over and over and sheet after sheet after sheet gets filled with the same shit. And then I discard or abandon material for weeks, months, during which time I start something new. Usually I have a great many projects going at the same time—in the sense that a start of some sort has been made. I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. 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.

William S. Burroughs (The Art of Fiction No. 36, 1965_61ya)

I get up about nine o’clock and order breakfast; I hate to go out for breakfast. I work usually until about two o’clock or two-thirty, when I like to have a sandwich and a glass of milk, which takes about ten minutes. I’ll work through until six or seven o’clock. Then if I’m seeing people or going out, I’ll go out, have a few drinks, come back, and maybe do a little reading and go to bed. I go to bed pretty early. I don’t make myself work. It’s just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that there’ll be no interruptions and I’ve got eight hours is just exactly what I want—yeah, just paradise.

William Maxwell (The Art of Fiction No. 71, 1982_44ya)

MAXWELL: If you have any reason in the world for wanting to know, I’ll tell you . . . I like to work in my bathrobe and pajamas, after breakfast, until I suddenly perceive, from what’s on the page in the typewriter, that I’ve lost my judgment. And then I stop. It’s usually about twelve thirty. But I hate getting dressed. The cleaning woman (who may not approve of it, though she’s never said), my family, the elevator men, the delivery boy from Gristedes—all of them are used to seeing me in this unkempt condition. What it means to me is probably symbolic—you can have me after I’ve got my trousers on, but not before. When I retired from The New Yorker they offered me an office, which was very generous of them because they’re shy on space, but I thought, ‘What would I do with an office at The New Yorker? I would have to put my trousers on and ride the subway downtown to my typewriter. No good.’

INTERVIEWER: Maybe once you got there you could strip down.

MAXWELL: I don’t think it would work. It isn’t the same as going straight from the breakfast table.

Wright Morris (The Art of Fiction No. 125, 1991_35ya)

I am a creature of habit. As soon as I was able to establish my writing habits—which are to start work in the morning and write until hungry, then again in the afternoon until tired—I stuck to this routine most of the days of the week. Once I had learned to compose as I wrote—to make corrections as I went along with a crayon or marking pencil—I would average eight to twelve pages a morning. In time I learned that random breaks—walking around, having a smoke, saving the house from woodpeckers—were creatively helpful. They jogged the mind from its rut, resolved impasses, opened up unforeseen vistas. Since all of my books are closely related, thirty or forty pages into a new book, I would begin to have glimpses of where it was going, and what would follow. Ceremony in Lone Tree grew like a branch from a passage in The World in the Attic, The Field of Vision from War Games, and so on. The disadvantage of these links is that I was never encouraged to stop and take stock, or to consider what the public was reading. For better or for worse, I was on a time schedule I had invented, doing work I had assigned to myself. Recycling was part of the next step forward, or backward. The loop back before the step forward began with God’s Country and My People, a book of reappraisal before Fire Sermon and A Life. The multivoiced fiction of the fifties gave way to a relatively simple narration—the indulgently prodigal writer returning to beginnings.

William Trevor (The Art of Fiction No. 108, 1989_37ya)

INTERVIEWER: When do you get up?

TREVOR: Well, I used to get up at four o’clock and do most of my work—especially in the summer—between half-past four and breakfast time. But I stopped doing that some time ago—it had become just straightforward punishment. I now start work at about twenty minutes to eight and work until about twelve, and I might do a little more later in the day.

Janet Malcolm (The Art of Nonfiction No. 4, 2011_15ya)

INTERVIEWER: Could you could say a bit about the mechanics of your writing process? Do you work regular hours or in bursts of inspiration? Do you edit yourself? Do you approach writing in a workmanlike way? Are you are a cabinetmaker making a cabinet, or is there more drama or torment?

MALCOLM: I’m definitely more a cabinetmaker than a tormented artist. Not that writing comes easy. I don’t know about cabinetmakers, but I often get stuck. Then I get sleepy and have to lie down. Or I make myself leave the house—walking sometimes produces a solution. The problem is usually one of logic or point of view. I keep regular morning hours. The first hour is the most productive one. The two or three others are less so—they can even be completely fruitless. I sometimes work in the afternoon as well, but the morning is the obligatory work time. As for the “mechanics” of composition, all I can say about them is that the machinery works slowly and erratically and I am always a little nervous about it, though by now I’m pretty used to it. I guess I trust it more.

“As for self-editing: when I turn in a piece, I expect that there will be suggestions for changes, and I am not bad at using these suggestions to improve the text. But I need the hint that something isn’t right.”

Joyce Cary, John Burrows & Alex Hamilton interview:

The overall impression of the room in which he worked, as of the novelist himself, was of a man who, much as he himself might eschew the word, radiated “vitality.” He rose, he said, early, and was always at his desk by nine. We had ourselves already had more than the period of time he had agreed to give us. As we went downstairs and made again for the sitting-room, he looked anxiously at his watch; but we were there only to dig quickly among the deep cushions

Writers At Work:

In the case of one story by the late Joyce Cary, the “precious particle” was the, wrinkles on a young woman’s forehead. He had seen her on the little boat that goes around Manhattan Island, “a girl of about thirty”, he says, “wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, ‘I could write about that girl . . .’” but then he forgot her. Three weeks later, in San Francisco, Cary woke up at four in the morning with a story in his head—a purely English story with an English heroine. When he came to revise the story he kept wondering, “Why all these wrinkles? That’s the third time they come in. And I suddenly realized”, he says, “that my English heroine was the girl on the Manhattan boat. Somehow she had gone down into my subconscious, and came up again with a full-sized story.”

…Joyce Cary was another deletionist. Many of the passages he crossed out of his first drafts were those dealing explicitly with ideas. “I work over the whole book”, he says, “and cut out anything that does not belong to the emotional development, the texture of feeling.”