Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (9 page)

“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 twelve 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.”

Baker’s novels display a near-obsessive interest in the mundane details of daily life, so it’s not surprising that, in his own life, the author pays a lot of attention to his writing schedule and habits. “What I’ve found with daily routines,” he said recently, “is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You know, you could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work. Maybe that’s not completely true. But there’s something to just the excitement of coming up with a slightly different routine. I find I have to do it for each book, have something different.”

While he was writing his first book,
The Mezzanine
, Baker worked a series of office jobs in Boston and New York. Then his routine was to write on his lunch break, taking advantage of this “pure, blissful hour of freedom” in the middle of the day to make notes for a novel that was, appropriately, about an office drone returning to work from his lunch hour. Later, Baker worked a job outside of Boston that required a ninety-minute commute, so he bought a mini–cassette recorder and dictated his writing while he drove. Eventually he quit that job and took
a couple of months, writing eight or nine hours a day, to pull all his lunch-hour and commuting notes together into a coherent novel.

For subsequent books, Baker says that he was not terribly strict about his writing schedule. “There was a lot of putting off,” he admits. “I would read stuff and try to get revved up, and sometimes I wouldn’t get started writing until about two-thirty in the afternoon.” It took another day job to force him into more consistent habits. From 1999 until 2004, Baker and his wife found themselves running the American Newspaper Repository, a nonprofit dedicated to saving a collection of newspapers that would otherwise have been destroyed (one of the subjects of Baker’s 2001 nonfiction book,
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
). Since he was busy during the day, Baker, inspired by the example of Frances Trollope (see
this page
), resolved to write in the early mornings. Initially he tried to get up at 3:30
A.M.
, but “that didn’t work too well” so he revised it to 4:30. “And I liked it, I liked the feeling of getting up really early,” he says. “The mind is newly cleansed but it’s also befuddled and you’re still just plain sleepy. I found that I wrote differently then.”

Baker liked the early-morning feeling so much that he has stuck with this schedule ever since—and, more recently, has developed a strategy to squeeze two mornings out of one day. He says, “A typical day for me would be that I would get up around four, four-thirty. And I write some. Make coffee sometimes, or not. I write for maybe an hour and a half.
But then I get really sleepy
. So I go back to sleep and then I wake up at around eight-thirty.” After waking for the second time, Baker talks with his wife, drinks another cup of coffee, eats a
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and goes back to his writing, this time focusing on “daylight kind of work,” like typing up notes for a nonfiction piece, transcribing an interview, or editing what he wrote during the first morning session. He continues to work more or less all day, stopping to have lunch, walk the dog, and run errands as necessary. Occasionally, if he’s feeling a lot of deadline pressure, he will write late at night as well, but he generally says good night to his wife and kids around 9:30
P.M.

The founder of behavioral psychology treated his daily writing sessions much like a laboratory experiment, conditioning himself to write every morning with a pair of self-reinforcing behaviors: he started and stopped by the buzz of a timer, and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph. In a 1963 journal entry, Skinner provided a detailed description of his routine:

By the time Skinner retired from his Harvard teaching post in 1974, that nightly hour of sleeplessness had become an integral part of his routine. His timer now rang four times a day: at midnight, 1:00
A.M.
, 5:00
A.M.
, and 7:00
A.M.
, for one hour of nocturnal composition in addition to his usual two hours at dawn. He followed this routine seven days a week, holidays included, until only a few days before his death in 1990.

The renowned cultural anthropologist was always working; indeed, not working seemed to agitate and unsettle her. Once, during a two-week symposium, Mead learned that a certain morning session had been postponed. She was furious. “
How dare they?” she asked. “Do they
realize
what use I could have made of this time? Do they know I get up at five o’clock every morning to write a thousand words before breakfast? Why did nobody have the politeness to tell me this meeting had been rescheduled?” On other occasions, Mead would schedule breakfast dates with young colleagues for 5:00
A.M.
“
Empty time stretches forever,” she once said. “I can’t bear it.”

The eighteenth-century preacher and theologian—a key figure in the Great Awakening and the author of the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—spent thirteen hours a day in his study, beginning at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. (He noted in his diary, “
I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave very early.”) To break up these long hours of private study, Edwards engaged in daily bouts of physical activity: chopping wood in the winter, walking or horse riding when the weather was good. On his walks, he carried a pen and ink to record his thoughts. For the horseback rides, he employed a mnemonic device, described by the biographer George W. Marsden: “
For each insight he wished to remember, he would pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with the thought. When he returned home he would unpin these and write down each idea. At the ends of trips of several days, his clothes might be covered by quite a few of these slips of paper.”

In James Boswell’s
The Life of Samuel Johnson
, Johnson tells his future biographer that he “
generally went abroad at four in the afternoon, and seldom came home till two in the morning.” And apparently he did much of his writing upon returning home, working by candlelight while
the rest of London slept—the only time, it seems, that he could avoid the city’s plentiful distractions. Boswell quotes the recollections of Rev. Dr. Maxwell, a social friend of Johnson’s:

Johnson readily admitted that he suffered from procrastination and a lack of discipline. “
My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness,” he wrote in his diary, and he told Boswell that “
idleness is a disease which must be combated.” Yet, he added, he was temperamentally ill equipped for the battle: “I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.”

“
As soon as I am awake, I remember my duty, and like a brisk mariner I give the lash to indolence and bounce up with as much vivacity as if a pretty girl, amorous and willing, were waiting for me,” Boswell boasted in his journal in 1763. In fact, the great British diarist and biographer often had a terrible time getting out of bed in the morning, and frequently fell prey to the “
vile habit of wasting the precious morning hours in lazy slumber.” For a while he even considered trying to rig up some sort of anti-oversleeping mechanism: “
I have thought of having my bed constructed in a curious fashion. I would have it so that when I pulled a cord, the middle of the bed would be immediately raised and me raised with it and gradually set up on the floor. Thus I should be gently forced into what is good for me.”

Yet, at other times, Boswell seemed perfectly content to laze about in bed before confronting the day. The fullest description of his routine comes from February 1763. “
My affairs are conducted with the greatest regularity and exactness,” he wrote in his diary.