Graham Greene (1904-1991)
In 1939, with World War II fast approaching, Greene began to worry that he would die before he could complete what he was certain would be his greatest novel, The Power and the Glory, and that his wife and children would be left in poverty. So he set out to write another of his “entertainments”–melodramatic thrillers that lacked artistry but that he knew would make money–while continuing to grind away at his masterpiece. To escape the distractions of home life, Greene rented a private studio whose address and telephone number he kept secret from everyone but his wife. There he maintained regular office hours, devoting his mornings to the thriller The Confidential Agent and his afternoons to The Power and the Glory. To manage the pressure of writing two books at once, he took Benzedrine tablets twice daily, one upon waking and the other at midday. As a result he was able to write two thousand words in the morning alone, as opposed to his usual five hundred. After only six weeks, The Confidential Agent was completed and on its way to being published. (The Power and the Glory took another four months.)
Greene did not keep up this kind of productivity (or the drug use) throughout his career. By his sixties he admitted that, where he once required five hundred words of himself each day, he was now setting the bar as low as two hundred words. In 1968, an interviewer asked if he was “a nine-till-five man.” “No,” Greene replied. “Good heavens, I would say I was a nine-till-a-quarter-past-ten man.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey