Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
After being diagnosed with lupus in 1951 and told she would live only another four years, O’Connor returned to her native Georgia and moved in with her mother at the family farm in rural Andalusia. Years earlier, a writing instructor had advised O’Connor to set aside a certain number of hours each day to write, and she had taken his advice to heart; back in Georgia she came to believe, as she wrote to a friend, that “routine is a condition of survival.”
A devout Catholic, O’Connor began each day at 6:00 A.M. with morning prayers from her copy of A Short Breviary. Then she joined her mother in the kitchen, where they would share a Thermos of coffee while listening to the weather report on the radio. Morning mass was at 7:00, a short drive into town at the Sacred Heart. Her religious obligations fulfilled, O’Connor would turn to her writing, shutting herself away between 9:00 and noon for her daily three hours, which would typically yield three pages–although, she told a reporter, “I may tear it all to pieces the next day.”
By the afternoon, O’Connor’s energy was spent–the lupus caused her to tire early and experience flulike symptoms and mental fogginess as the day wore on. She passed these hours receiving visitors on the porch and pursuing her hobbies of painting and raising birds–peacocks, which she loved and often incorporated into her stories, as well as ducks, hens, and geese. By sundown she was ready for bed; “I go to bed at nine and am always glad to get there,” she wrote. Before bedtime she might recite another prayer from her Breviary, but her usual nighttime reading was a seven-hundred-page volume of Thomas Anquinas. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she said.
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey