In April 1870, a twenty-eight-year-old James made a cautionary note to himself in his diary. “Recollect,” he wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action–and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser–never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” The importance of forming such “habits of order” later became one of James’s great subjects as a psychologist. In one of the lectures he delivered to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1892–and eventually incorporated into his book Psychology: A Briefer Course–James argued that the “great thing” in education is to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
Kant’s biography is unusually devoid of external events. The philosopher lived in an isolated Prussian province for his entire life, rarely venturing outside the walls of his native Königsberg and never traveling even so far as the sea, only a few hours away. A lifelong bachelor, he taught the same courses at the local university for more than forty years. His was a life of ordered regularity–which later gave rise to a portrait of the philosopher as a sort of characterless automaton. As Heinrich Heine wrote:
“I’m not really a morning person,” the American composer said recently. “I would say, if you look at everything I’ve ever written, ninety-five percent of it would have been written between noon and twelve midnight.” Reich uses the hours before noon to exercise, pray, eat breakfast, and make business phone calls to London, where his European agent is based. Then, once he settles down in front of the piano or the computer, he’ll aim for a few good chunks of concentrated work over the next twelve hours. “If I can get in a couple hours of work, then I just have to have a cup of tea, or I have to run an errand to get a little bit of a break,” he says. “And then I come back. But those can be very fruitful pauses, especially if there’s a little problem that comes up. The best thing to do is to just leave it and put your mind somewhere else, and not always but often the solution to that problem will bubble up spontaneously. Or at least a possible solution, which will either prove to be true or false.” Reich doesn’t believe in waiting for inspiration to strike, but he does believe that certain pieces are more inspired than others–and that, with continual work, you can look forward to hitting these patches of inspiration from time to time. “There are no rules,” he says. “one has to be open to the reality–and it’s a very wonderful reality–that the next piece is going to hold some surprises for you.”
“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,” Adams said in a recent interview. “Because creativity, particularly the kind of work I do–which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music–is just, it’s very labor-intensive. And it’s something that you can’t do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself.” Adams works most days in a studio in his Berkeley, California, home (He keeps another, mirror-image studio in a remote wooded location along the California coast, where he goes to work for short periods.) “When I’m home, I get up in the morning and I have a very active dog, so I take the dog up into the high mountains behind where we live,” he says. Then he heads into the studio and works from 9:00 A.M. until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, taking breaks to go downstairs and make “endless cups of green tea.” Otherwise, Adams says that he doesn’t have any particular creative rituals or superstitions: “I find basically that if I do things regularly, I don’t have writer’s block or come into terrible crises.”
“In an ideal world, I would work six hours a day, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon,” Close said recently.
That’s what I always liked to do. Especially since my kids were born. I used to work at night, but when my kids were born I couldn’t just work at night and sleep during the day. So that’s when I started having a kind of regular, nine-to-five work schedule. And if I work more than three hours at a time, I really start screwing up. So the idea is to work for three hours, break for lunch, go back and work for three hours, and then, you know, break. Sometimes I could go back and work in the evening, but basically it was counterproductive. At a certain point, I’d start making enough mistakes that I would spend the next day trying to correct them.
“I am not able to write regularly,” Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993. “I have never been able to do that–mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.” Indeed, for much of her writing career, Morrison not only worked a day job–as an editor at Random House–but taught university literature courses and raised her two sons as a single parent. “It does seem hectic,” she admitted in 1977.
When he is writing a novel, Murakami wakes at 4:00 A.M. and works for five to six hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), runs errands, reads, and listens to music; bedtime is 9:00. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.” [continue reading…]
The English composer and conductor hated the Romantic cliche of the creative artist waiting for inspiration to strike. He said in a 1967 television interview:
That isn’t the way I work. I like working to an exact timetable. I often thank my stars that I had a rather conventional upbringing, that I went to a rather strict school where one was made to work. And I can without much difficulty sit down at nine o’clock in the morning and work straight through the morning until lunchtime, then in the afternoon letters–or, rather more important, is that I go for a walk, where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk. I then come back. After tea, up to my studio and work through until about eight o’clock. After dinner I usually find I’m too sleepy to do much more than read a little bit, and then go to bed rather early.
