Is avoiding all ritual a ritual?
The Cat and the Devil, a children’s story by James Joyce, illustrated by Gerald Rose
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey “assembles the regimens of 161 assorted creative geniuses into a lean, engaging volume.”
The prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos believed that “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” And indeed, if there’s a drug the artists in Daily Rituals can agree on, it’s caffeine. Soren Kierkegaard preferred his coffee with sugar, or perhaps it was vice versa: “Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled above the rim,” his biographer observed. “Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.”…
James Joyce, we learn, woke daily around 10:00 a.m. He’d lie in bed for about an hour, then get up, shave and sit down at his piano, where he’d play and sing before writing in the afternoon and then hitting the cafes later that evening. John Updike, meanwhile, worked mornings, preferring to “put the creative project first,” as he put it. Of his discipline, he said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”
In our experience, it takes three hours of doing “nothing” (i.e. household chores, watching a movie, walking, grooming the cats) to produce one hour of writing.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
June 3rd, 2013 at 10:35
and all this time, i thought i was lazy because i always need to “bwelo” before the words start flowing.. :D