Read Online Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey - Free Book Online
Authors: Mason Currey
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is often unable to stick to this routine. (He tries to schedule all meetings and phone calls for after 4:00 P.M. , but has found that this is not always possible.) When he does find the time to work, he never lacks for ideas. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.” While he paints, he likes to have the TV or the radio playing in the background—particularly if there’s a juicy political scandal happening. “My finest hours were Watergate, Iran-Contra, the impeachment,” he says. The constant chatter can be distracting, he admits, but he claims that this is actually a good thing: “I like a certain amount of distraction. It keeps me from being anxious. It keeps things at a little bit more of an arm’s length.”
Francine Prose (b. 1947)
The American author has found that literary success has made literary productivity increasingly difficult. She writes:
Back in the day, when my kids were little and I lived in the country and I was an unknown novelist, I had a schedule so regular that it was practically Pavlovian,and I loved it. The school bus came, I started to write. The school bus returned, I stopped. Now that I’m in the city and my kids are grown and the world, it seems, will pay me to do anything BUT write (or in any case para-literary activities often seem more lucrative and frequently more seductive than actual writing) my routine is more haphazard. I write whenever I am able, for a few days or a week or a month if I can get the time. I sneak away to the country and work on a computer that’s not connected to the Internet and count on the world to go away long enough for me to get a few words down on paper, whenever and however I can. When the writing is going well, I can work all day. When it’s not, I spend a lot of time gardening and standing in front of the refrigerator.
John Adams (b. 1947)
“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,” Adams said in a recent interview. “Because creativity, particularly the kind of work I do—which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music—is just, it’s very labor-intensive. And it’s something that you can’t do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself.” Adams works most days in a studio in his Berkeley, California, home. (He keeps another, mirror-image studio in a remote wooded location along the California coast, where he goes towork for short periods.) “When I’m home, I get up in the morning and I have a very active dog, so I take the dog up into the high mountains behind where we live,” he says. Then he heads into the studio and works from 9:00 A.M. until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, taking breaks to go downstairs and make “endless cups of green tea.” Otherwise, Adams says that he doesn’t have any particular creative rituals or superstitions: “I find basically that if I do things regularly, I don’t have writer’s block or come into terrible crises.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that all his studio time is spent in concentrated creative work. “I confess that I’m not as Zen disciplined or as pure as I’d like,” he says. “Often after an hour of working I’ll yield to the temptation to read my e-mail or things like that. The problem is that you do get run out of concentration energy and sometimes you just want to take a mental break. But if you get tangled up into some complicated communication with somebody, the next thing you know you look up and you’ve lost forty-five minutes of time.” In the evening, Adams generally tries to switch off. He doesn’t listen to a lot of music; after spending the day composing, he’s usually had enough. “At the end of the day I’m more apt to want to cook a nice meal or read a book or watch a movie with my wife,” he says.
Although he maintains a regular working schedule, Adams also tries
Francine Prose (b. 1947)
The American author has found that literary success has made literary productivity increasingly difficult. She writes:
Back in the day, when my kids were little and I lived in the country and I was an unknown novelist, I had a schedule so regular that it was practically Pavlovian,and I loved it. The school bus came, I started to write. The school bus returned, I stopped. Now that I’m in the city and my kids are grown and the world, it seems, will pay me to do anything BUT write (or in any case para-literary activities often seem more lucrative and frequently more seductive than actual writing) my routine is more haphazard. I write whenever I am able, for a few days or a week or a month if I can get the time. I sneak away to the country and work on a computer that’s not connected to the Internet and count on the world to go away long enough for me to get a few words down on paper, whenever and however I can. When the writing is going well, I can work all day. When it’s not, I spend a lot of time gardening and standing in front of the refrigerator.
John Adams (b. 1947)
“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,” Adams said in a recent interview. “Because creativity, particularly the kind of work I do—which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music—is just, it’s very labor-intensive. And it’s something that you can’t do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself.” Adams works most days in a studio in his Berkeley, California, home. (He keeps another, mirror-image studio in a remote wooded location along the California coast, where he goes towork for short periods.) “When I’m home, I get up in the morning and I have a very active dog, so I take the dog up into the high mountains behind where we live,” he says. Then he heads into the studio and works from 9:00 A.M. until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, taking breaks to go downstairs and make “endless cups of green tea.” Otherwise, Adams says that he doesn’t have any particular creative rituals or superstitions: “I find basically that if I do things regularly, I don’t have writer’s block or come into terrible crises.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that all his studio time is spent in concentrated creative work. “I confess that I’m not as Zen disciplined or as pure as I’d like,” he says. “Often after an hour of working I’ll yield to the temptation to read my e-mail or things like that. The problem is that you do get run out of concentration energy and sometimes you just want to take a mental break. But if you get tangled up into some complicated communication with somebody, the next thing you know you look up and you’ve lost forty-five minutes of time.” In the evening, Adams generally tries to switch off. He doesn’t listen to a lot of music; after spending the day composing, he’s usually had enough. “At the end of the day I’m more apt to want to cook a nice meal or read a book or watch a movie with my wife,” he says.
Although he maintains a regular working schedule, Adams also tries
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