Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Throughout his adult life Hemingway rose early, at 5:30 or 6:00, woken by the first light of day. This was true even when he had been up late drinking the night before; his son Gregory recalled that the author seemed immune to hangovers: “My father would always look great, as if he’d slept a baby’s sleep in a soundproof room with his eyes covered by black patches.” In a 1958 interview with The Paris Review, Hemingway explained the importance of those early-morning hours:
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 that next day that is hard to get through.
Contrary to popular lore, Hemingway did not begin each session by sharpening twenty number-two pencils–“I don’t think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time,” he told The Paris Review–but he did have his share of writing idiosyncrasies. He wrote standing up, facing a chest-high bookshelf with a typewriter on top, and on top of that a wooden reading board. First drafts were composed in pencil on onionskin typewriter paper laid slantwise across the board; when the work was going well, Hemingway would remove the board and shift to the typewriter. He tracked his daily word output on a chart–“so as not to kid myself,” he said. When the writing wasn’t going well, he would often knock off the fiction and answer letters, which gave him a welcome break from “the awful responsibility of writing”–or, as he sometimes called it, “the responsibility of awful writing.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey