Read Online Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mason Currey
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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 apeanut-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.
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990)
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:
I rise sometime between 6 and 6:30 often after having heard the radio news. My breakfast, a dish of corn flakes, is on the kitchen table. Coffee is made automatically by the stove timer. I breakfast alone. At the moment, I am reading a bit every morning of Bergen and Cornelia Evans’
Contemporary American Usage
. A couple of pages every day, straight through. The morning papers (
Boston Globe, N.Y.Times
) arrive, thrown against the wall or door of the kitchen where I breakfast. I read the
Globe
, often saving the
Times
till later.
At seven or so I go down to my study, a walnut-paneled room in our basement. My work desk is a long Scandinavian-modern table, with a set of shelves I made myself for holding the works of BFS, notebooks and outlines of the book I am working on, dictionaries, word-books, etc. On my left the big Webster’s
International
on a stand, on my right an open-top file containing all current and future manuscript materials. As I sit down I turn on a special desk light. This starts a clock, which totalizes my time at my desk. Every twelve hours recorded on it, I plot a point on a cumulative curve, the slope of which shows my overall productivity. To the right of my desk is an electric organ, on which a few minutes each day I play Bach
Chorales
etc.
Later in the morning I go to my office. These days I leave just before 10 so that Debbie can ride with me to her summer school class. Later, in cooler weather, I will be walking—about 1¾ miles. In my office I open and answer mail, see people if necessary. Get away as soon as possible, usually in time for lunch at home. Afternoons are not profitably spent, working in [the] garden, swimming in our pool. Summers we often have friends in for a swim and
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 apeanut-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.
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990)
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:
I rise sometime between 6 and 6:30 often after having heard the radio news. My breakfast, a dish of corn flakes, is on the kitchen table. Coffee is made automatically by the stove timer. I breakfast alone. At the moment, I am reading a bit every morning of Bergen and Cornelia Evans’
Contemporary American Usage
. A couple of pages every day, straight through. The morning papers (
Boston Globe, N.Y.Times
) arrive, thrown against the wall or door of the kitchen where I breakfast. I read the
Globe
, often saving the
Times
till later.
At seven or so I go down to my study, a walnut-paneled room in our basement. My work desk is a long Scandinavian-modern table, with a set of shelves I made myself for holding the works of BFS, notebooks and outlines of the book I am working on, dictionaries, word-books, etc. On my left the big Webster’s
International
on a stand, on my right an open-top file containing all current and future manuscript materials. As I sit down I turn on a special desk light. This starts a clock, which totalizes my time at my desk. Every twelve hours recorded on it, I plot a point on a cumulative curve, the slope of which shows my overall productivity. To the right of my desk is an electric organ, on which a few minutes each day I play Bach
Chorales
etc.
Later in the morning I go to my office. These days I leave just before 10 so that Debbie can ride with me to her summer school class. Later, in cooler weather, I will be walking—about 1¾ miles. In my office I open and answer mail, see people if necessary. Get away as soon as possible, usually in time for lunch at home. Afternoons are not profitably spent, working in [the] garden, swimming in our pool. Summers we often have friends in for a swim and
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