“I like things to be orderly,” Lynch told a reporter in 1990.
For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee-with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.
When he’s not shooting a film, most of Allen’s creative energy goes toward mentally working out the problems of a new story. This is the hard part; once he’s satisfied with the story elements, the writing itself comes easy (and the filmmaking is mostly a chore). But to get the story right requires “obsessive thinking,” Allen has said. To keep from getting stuck in a rut, he’s developed a few reliable tricks.
In 1916, when he was thirty-six years old, Stevens accepted a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed as an insurance lawyer until his death. Far from stifling his creativity, the job seemed to suit Stevens’s temperament and even encourage his poetry. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me,” he once said. “It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life. I am just as free as I want to be and of course I have nothing to worry about about money.”
In 1912, Yeats described his routine in a letter to his fellow poet Edwin Ellis: “I read from 10 to 11. I write from 11 till 2, then after lunch I read till 3:30. Then I go into the woods or fish in the lake till 5. Then I write letters or work a little till 7 when I go out for an hour before dinner.” According to another literary friend, Yeats always made sure to write for at least two hours every day, whether he felt inclined to it or not. This daily discipline was crucial for Yeats both because his concentration faltered without a regular schedule–“Every change upsets my never very resolute habits of work”–and because he worked at a snail’s pace. “I am a very slow writer,” he noted in 1899. “I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” This meant that a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took about three months of hard labor. Fortunately, Yeats was not so careful about his other writing, like the literary criticism he did to earn extra money. “One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”
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.)
“Maugham thought that writing, like drinking, was an easy habit to form and a difficult one to break,” Jeffrey Meyers noted in his 2004 biography of the British writer. “It was more an addiction than a vocation.” The addiction served him well; in his nearly ninety-two years, Maugham published seventy-eight books. He wrote for three or four hours every morning, setting himself a daily requirement of one thousand to one thousand five hundred words. He would get a start on the day’s work before he even sat down at his desk, thinking of the first two sentences he wanted to write while soaking in the bath. Then, once at work, there was little to distract him–Maugham believed that it was impossible to write while looking at a view, so his desk always faced a blank wall. When he wrapped up his morning’s work at about noon, Maugham often felt impatient to begin again. “When you’re writing, when you’re creating a character, it’s with you constantly, you’re preoccupied with it, it’s alive,” he said–adding that when you “cut that out of your life it’s a rather lonely life.”
In 1911, Picasso moved from the Bateau Lavoir, a conglomeration of low-rent studios in Paris’s Montmartre district, to a much more respectable apartment on the boulevard de Clinchy in Montparnasse. The new situation suited his growing fame as a painter, as well as his lifelong bourgeois aspirations. As the biographer John Richardson has written, “After the shabby gentility of his boyhood and the deprivations of his early days in Paris, Picasso wanted a lifestyle which would permit him to work in peace without material worries–‘like a pauper,’ he used to say, ‘but with lots of money.’ ” The Montparnasse apartment was not without its bohemianism, however. Picasso took over its large, airy studio, forbade anyone from entering without his permission, and surrounded himself with his painting supplies, piles of miscellaneous junk, and a menagerie of pets, including a dog, three Siamese cats, and a money named Monina.
“I get up at about eight, do physical exercises, then work without a break from nine till one,” Stravinsky told an interviewer in 1924. Generally, three hours of composition were the most he could manage in a day, although he would do less demanding tasks–writing letters, copying scores, practicing the piano–in the afternoon. Unless he was touring, Stravinsky worked on his compositions daily, with or without inspiration, he said. He required solitude for the task, and always closed the windows of his studio before he began: “I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me.” If he felt blocked, the composer might execute a brief headstand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.”
