Writers are a habit-forming bunch

Novelists are, in the main, mysterious creatures. They must work alone -- sure, you might see one at a coffee shop with a laptop, but it’s still writer versus the void. The daily battle of the blank page. How does that humming machine turn out a complete novel, say, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”? Where did James’ Giant Peach come from?

A blog is compiling the daily routines of writers and other artists -- it is called, not inappropriately, Daily Routines (https://dailyroutines.typepad.). The idea is that looking at the daily work process of an author -- his caffeine intake, how long she sits and writes -- will somehow illuminate the ineffable creative process. Maybe having a cocktail at 8 p.m., as William Styron did, will enable any of us to write our own “Sophie’s Choice.” Maybe, like Truman Capote, we ought to write lying down.

The routines are found in biographies, the Paris Review Interview series and other sources and can be submitted to Mason Currey, who was inspired to launch Daily Routines in 2007 because of his own writer’s block. (He is an assistant editor at New York-based Metropolis magazine.)

“I was trying to work on a writing project on a Sunday afternoon, and making zero progress,” Currey says via e-mail. “To procrastinate and make myself feel better, I started looking for information about famous writers’ daily routines. I recalled reading that several writers I admire did their best work in the early morning. I couldn’t find a good source for this kind of information and realized that it could make a fun blog.”

The very first author was Vladimir Nabokov, quoted from a 1968 New York Times story:

“After waking up between six and seven in the morning, I write till ten-thirty, generally at a lectern which faces a bright corner of the room instead of the bright audiences of my professorial days. . . . Around eleven, I soak for 20 minutes in a hot bath, with a sponge on my head and a wordsman’s worry in it, encroaching, alas, upon the nirvana. A stroll with my wife along the lake is followed by a frugal lunch and a two-hour nap, after which I resume my work until dinner at seven.”

The authors are as varied as T.C. Boyle, Gertrude Stein, Elmore Leonard and Immanuel Kant. There are late risers and early risers, boozers and abstainers, drinkers of coffee and of tea. What they show us, sadly, is that there is no set road map for genius. There are many routines, but no set way to write right.

-- Carolyn Kellogg