How Great Writers Work
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013)
by Mason Currey
Is there some peculiar madness to the method of great writers, I had always wondered.
As if in response to my ceaseless prayers for clues to achieving fame and fortune via the pen, Mason Currey has put out Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.
The book is mostly about writers with a few painters, composers, filmmakers, sculptors, etc. thrown into the mix. That suited me just fine because I’m not passionate about painting, composing, movies or sculpting. Even the Mona Lisa left me unmoved although I’ve been known to glance at a Vermeer twice.
Daily Rituals does an adequate job and the author captures most of the big names: George Orwell, Henry Miller, Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens, P.G.Wodehouse, Joseph Heller, William Styron, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy make an appearance. I was, however, surprised at the omission of Winston Churchill, the most famous politician and writer of the last century.
Joseph Heller (of Catch 22 fame) was “a chronic fiddler” but not obsessive about work.
Some writers like Saul Bellow could work amid chaos and distractions while Dickens and Tolstoy needed absolute quiet to work. I have read elsewhere (in Paul Johnson's Creators) that Carlyle, Wagner and Proust too needed absolute quiet to get their creative juices flowing.
Haruki Murakami is a disciplined writer and sticks to a routine.
Neither Samuel Johnson nor his biographer James Boswell were disciplined. “My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness,” Johnson confided to his diary. Well, I can now brag that Johnson and I have two things in common.
Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, was a workaholic.
Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first drafts in pencil on index cards.
Given their fertile imagination it’s unsurprising that some writers would have bizarre habits. American novelist Thomas Wolfe liked to stand by the window and stroke his organ (not the musical kind) to get his juices flowing (we presume only of the creative kind)!
Bottom line, there's no single technique that creative types follow in pursuit of their art.
It’s a shame Daily Rituals fails to touch upon the working habits of a single Indian writer.
Is there not one writer among the 1.4 billion Indians worthy of notice?
I’d have loved to learn the work habits of four prolific Indian writers of my generation: Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple. I suspect Tharoor a la Winston Churchill hires researchers to do much of the grunt work while Guha and Dalrymple do all the drudgery themselves. As for Rushdie's working habits, I have no clue.
N.B: William Dalrymple is a Brit but I have "granted" him honorary Indian citizenship for his prodigious writings on Indian history, and since he's also made his home in Mera Bharat Mahan.
