Book Review: Daily Rituals

After Adorning the Dark reminded me that everyone is creative, I investigated how some of the most famous creative individuals get their work done. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey grew out of a blog. Currey, fascinated by people’s rituals, started a blog about them. One day an agent emailed suggesting he could make a book from the blog and, viola, now we can hold his findings in our hands. 

This book was fascinating. Of course, it didn't surprise me that some creatives turn to smoking, drinking, and drugs to prompt their creative juices (everything from cigars and coffee to alcohol and amphetamines). But some statistics were staggering. The book said Balzac sometimes consumed 50 cups of coffee a day. How is that even possible? And Sarte, well, let’s just say that man had a major problem with drugs and alcohol. 

I knew Dickens often turned to walking for his inspiration. He wasn’t alone in this reliance on long walks to clear the head and set ideas aglow. Tchaikovsky took a two-hour walk every day. Darwin, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Hobbes were also walkers. When I used to work on fiction, I needed a half-hour preliminary walk to process the characters and plot.

However, it thoroughly surprised me how many artists claimed to be procrastinators. Or that some discarded what they considered wasted effort. The output of many of these individuals stunned me, as well. H. L. Mencken worked 12 to 14 hours daily and replied to every letter he received within the same day. Not only that, he claimed his only regret was that he “didn’t work even harder.” Sheesh! Both George Sand and Saul Bellow wrote 20 or more pages a day. Faulkner claimed to have written ten thousand words in one day. (As a former Nanowrimo participant, 10 thousand sounds like a staggering number – I think my highest in one day was something between 5 and 6 thousand.) An emphasis on writing every day seemed to spring from page after page. Discipline makes many an artist. 

I laughed as Richard Strauss compared his writing to milking a cow. Then, in the small biographical sketch for Milton, the image appeared again. This time it seemed especially compelling. Because of Milton’s blindness, he would work for a few hours memorizing lines in his head and then when his secretary returned he would say it was time for him to be milked. For a time after Trevor’s birth, I had to use a machine to express the liquid gold of breast milk. I imagine famous writers produce liquid gold just as valuable. 

My daily writing ritual never nets gold, yet I cling to the practice. Every morning, as soon as I have completed my devotions, BSF lesson, and prayers, I pull out the lined paper and write between 1 and 2 pages a day. I sit at a desk (never lying down as some of these writers work). When working on fiction, I follow the advice Hemingway offered of breaking off in mid-thought with a rough idea of where I’m headed, to pick it up again the next day. However, I haven’t plowed effort into fiction for quite a while. Maybe I have given it up entirely. I may not produce at the rate or quality of the individuals highlighted in Currey’s book, but my ritual helps to clear my mind and process everything raging inside. So, for me, I suppose it is gold.