I have long been interested in routines. It seems like I am always trying to come up with the perfect routine that I will adhere to with discipline leading to increased productivity. I have read productivity works by modern writers that advocate for daily routine. Some of these writers include Laura Vanderkam and Elizabeth Saunders. These works have been helpful in my attempts to develop routine, but a volume I read last night is a particularly delicious overview of routines of accomplished creatives.
In Daily Routines: How Artists Work, Mason Currey survey the daily routines of more than 150 well-known and productive writers, composers, painters, choreographers, play writes, poets, philosophers, sculptors, filmmakers, and scientists. The book is a marvelous peak into how so many of our most creative minds use routine to fuel their process and product.
Some of the routines that really spoke to me include waking early, using walks to fuel creativity, napping, settling for just a little productivity every day that adds up, copying what you have written, keeping a notebook bedside for nighttime note taking, and using a conduit to transition to the creative process. For some this conduit to the creative process is meditation, for Toni Morrison, is is the transition from darkness to light at dawn, and for Ingmar Bergman it was music. Since I am particularly interested in writing, I was also particularly intrigued by the habit of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Kingsley Amis to stop writing when they knew what would come next in order to make it easier to begin again the next day.
Many have had interesting things to say about the relationship between routine and productivity, and some of the best gems in the book are quotes about the usefulness of productivity:
“Routine in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition.”
“I cannot imagine a life without work as really comfortable.”
“Recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action.”
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
“We have failed to recognize our great asset: time. A conscientious use of it could make us into something quite amazing.”
Some artists claim it is not necessarily old routines, but rather the promise of a new routine that works for them:
“What I’ve found with daily routines 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 poetch 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. If find I have to do it for each book, have something different.”
In the end, perhaps the most universal advice on routine comes from Bernard Malamud:
“There’s no one way, there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
All in all, I am convinced that routine can be a powerful part of the creative process, and I recommend Currey’s book as a delicious source of what has worked for some of our most creative minds. May you find a routine that helps fuel your creative process!
To read more about this book on the atonement bookshelf, click here.
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