Born in a log cabin overlooking the Hudson River, Barnes briefly studied art in New York before leaving school to work as a newspaper reporter, specializing in impressionistic observational pieces and what would now be called stunt journalism. (For one article, she allowed herself to be force-fed by doctors and reported on the experience, then in the news because of hunger-striking suffragettes.) In 1920, McCall’s sent Barnes on assignment to Paris, and she stayed there for the better part of the next two decades, turning from journalism to fiction and becoming one of the wittiest and most stylish members of the city’s expatriate community of writers and artists. In Paris, she also fell in love with the sculptor and silverpoint artist Thelma Wood; the breakup of their relationship after eight years inspired the writing of Barnes’s masterpiece, Nightwood, published in 1936.
Barnes wrote and revised much of the novel in the summers of 1932 and 1933 at Hayford Hall, an English country manor rented by the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who would become Barnes’s most important benefactor, giving her a monthly stipend for decades. Guggenheim rented Hayford at the suggestion of her lover John Ferrar Holms, a dashing but alcoholic Englishman who loved to stay up all night drinking and holding forth on fifteenth-century poetry and other objects of his considerable erudition. He, Guggenheim, and Barnes were joined at Hayford by the writers Emily Coleman and Antonia White, as well as by Guggenheim’s two children from her previous marriage and White’s son—but the children stayed in a separate wing so that the adults wouldn’t be disturbed in the morning, an important consideration given their marathon late-night drinking sessions filled with boisterous literary discussion and sometimes contentious games of Truth.
Djuna Barnes, Paris, 1920s
For Barnes, the atmosphere was pretty near to ideal for her writing. The endless literary talk was intellectually stimulating, and she could hole up in her bedroom for most of the day working. According to the biographer Phillip Herring, Barnes’s routine at Hayford was “to write in bed until lunch, read, then take a walk on the moor or hit a few tennis balls.” The walks were somewhat fraught; Barnes later recalled that “the moors of Hayford Hall terrified me, because of the dead bones, horse skulls, and because the dog would dart at a rabbit & bring it (still warm & jerking) up to me or John or Peggy—finally I would not go out at all on the moor, because I simply could not endure it.”
Otherwise, however, she couldn’t complain. In the evenings, she would read aloud from her progress on the novel, and she would occasionally give pages to Holms for his editorial suggestions. Barnes would never be this productive again; she didn’t publish her next work—a verse play called The Antiphon—until 1958, twenty-two years after Nightwood. Apparently, it wasn’t for lack of trying. In an attempt to encourage Antonia White with her own literary efforts, Barnes once wrote:
It’s getting the awful rust off the spirit that is almost insurmountable. It’s why working every day is important—one may write the most lamentable balls but in the end one has a page or two that might not otherwise have been done. Keep on writing. It’s a woman’s only hope, except for lace making.
Kollwitz studied art in her native Königsberg, Germany, and later in Berlin and Munich. Her engagement in 1889 to a medical student was a minor scandal among her fellow students at the Women’s School of Art in Munich, where it was assumed that art and marriage were incompatible. But Kollwitz thought she could reconcile the roles of artist and wife, or at least she hoped to. “There were grave contradictions in my own feelings,” she admitted in her diary. “In the end I acted on this impulse: jump in—you’ll manage to swim.”
Soon after their marriage, the couple moved to a working-class district of Berlin, where Kollwitz’s husband set up his medical practice on the second floor of a corner tenement; Kollwitz’s studio was next door. Knowing that they would be unable to afford an apartment with a proper painting studio, Kollwitz abandoned her longtime dream of becoming a painter and stuck with the smaller-scale drawings and etchings that had been her focus up until that point. She soon became pregnant, apparently unintentionally, and gave birth to the first of two sons. As soon as they could afford it, the family hired a live-in maid to manage most of the housekeeping and child-rearing duties—then a common arrangement among middle-class German families. It was a crucial intervention for Kollwitz, who was able to continue working steadily despite her growing family. According to the biographer Martha Kearns,
She followed a rigorous discipline she had practiced as a student, beginning work early in the morning, and stopping in mid- or late afternoon. She continued with her drawing and attempted to improve her etching. Requiring quiet for concentration, she demanded absolute silence from her family when she was working, and was therefore sometimes called a tyrant.
But quiet was elusive, for most of [her husband’s] clientele, waiting next door, were babies, children, and mothers of the working class—in Käthe’s estimation, the most beautiful subjects to draw. When she did not have quiet, which was so often the case, she went next door and drew poor women as they waited to visit her husband.
By the late 1890s, Kollwitz’s powerfully expressive drawings of working-class women and their children had made her one of the foremost artists in Germany, with her work shown in major exhibitions in Berlin and Dresden. Even so, according to her son Hans, “She constantly swung between long periods of depression and inability to work and the much shorter periods when she felt that she was making progress in her work and mastering her task. She suffered terribly during these spells of emptiness. Several times in her diaries she attempted to graph these periods and determine their course in advance. But this did not help her; she had to wait for the new surge of strength.” Getting older seemed to help, or at least it reduced the length of her unproductive periods. “At no other time does Death seem so close or unwanted as when I am working on something that is important to me,” Kollwitz wrote to an old art-school friend as she neared her sixtieth birthday. “Then I am very economical with my time. But when I can’t work, I am lazy in every way and waste my time. So wish me a long life, so I can finish!”
Hansberry finished her landmark play A Raisin in the Sun in 1957, when she was twenty-seven years old; when it opened two years later, Raisin was the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway, and Hansberry became the youngest playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The Chicago-born writer enjoyed the acclaim, but she had trouble repeating the success of her first play, and by the early 1960s she was suffering frequent bouts of writer’s block. “The days pass and pass and I do nothing,” she wrote in her journal in July 1961. “Such times have been before. I just sit all day or traverse the streets in pointless rounds—and then sit at this desk and smoke cigarettes. Would like to be working but am in awful trouble with it.” A few months later Hansberry noted that the “Blobby-globby days” were back again, and that she felt “that awful jackass feeling that I suppose is inextricable from being a writer.”
Things improved the next year, after Hansberry and her husband bought a house in Croton-on-Hudson, about forty miles north of their apartment in Greenwich Village. In the fall of 1962, Hansberry went there alone, planning to “work or perish.” She had never followed a regular writing schedule, and she didn’t try to adopt one at her new residence. “They say that one should set a schedule and keep to it no matter what: ‘write’ no matter what,” she wrote in her journal. “I can’t help it—I think that’s awfully silly, this sitting down and ‘writing’ like a duty. People celebrate it so much because it makes them feel that the writer isn’t quite so precarious a creature.” Hansberry did, however, believe in creating the proper surroundings for work. About five weeks after settling in “Chitterling Heights,” as she jokingly called her country house, she described her new home office in her journal:
Lorraine Hansberry, Greenwich Village, 1959
I have rearranged the work space after the advice of Leonardo; large airy house (not too large) with small, compact, rather crowded even, work area: desk, machine, drawing board hem me in. I love it. It is as I wish it.
On the wall before me, my photo of Paul Robeson—and Michelangelo’s David. At my shoulder the bust of Einstein. At the top of the stairs—[the Irish playwright Sean] O’Casey. The company I keep! But—just to keep things in perspective—I have made me a rather large reminder which is now tacked in the most prominent place of all. It reads:
“BUT”—THE CHILD SAID—“THE EMPEROR ISN’T WEARING ANY CLOTHES. . . .”
The new setup seemed to help—ten days later, Hansberry was writing again. “The magic has come: about an hour ago!” she wrote in her journal. “A torrent of what I have been trying to write all along. . . . It will be all right now—a lot of work. But I know what I am writing now. It came all at once while I was in the kitchen and I wrote fourteen pages in an hour that will hardly need revision I think. Thank God, thank God! I could not have stood much more.”
Ginzburg was an Italian novelist, essayist, translator, and playwright, often considered the most important female writer of postwar Italy. In the preface to a collection of interviews with Ginzburg, her granddaughter Lisa recalled watching the author go about her day:
There was a silence in her, a deep and intimate silence. . . . In the noise of her very active days you could hear the echo of the solitary hours at dawn spent writing, stealing time from sleep to obey what she herself called her “master”: the vital, unquestionable, absolute need to give time to her writing. It was an internal silence that you could read in her face, in the way she would half-shut her eyes, absorbed in the effort of listening carefully to what was going on around her, listening so that later she could “chew it over.” The “ruminating” of thoughts was an idea of which she was particularly fond, the same one she used to defend her periods of sheer idleness. The idleness is useful, she would say, because only when we are idle does the mind “ruminate.”
Although her granddaughter recalls Ginzburg writing in the early morning, this was not always her habit. In 1940, Ginzburg’s husband, the anti-Fascist activist and journalist Leone Ginzburg, was exiled by the Fascists to a remote, impoverished village in the Abruzzi, in central Italy, and Ginzburg and their two young children joined him there. Over the previous couple of years, Ginzburg had been too overwhelmed by motherhood to continue the fiction writing that had been her passion since childhood. “I could not understand how anyone could sit herself down to write if she had children,” she later wrote. But in the village Ginzburg was inspired to try writing again; she felt that she was able to “control” the feeling that she had for her children and separate herself from them enough to again create a fictional world. She found a girl in the village who would look after the children in the afternoons, allowing Ginzburg to write from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m., hours when she worked “greedily and joyfully” on the story that would become her first novel, The Road to the City, published in 1942.
Despite the family’s political exile, Ginzburg said that the novel was written from a place of great happiness. Her next novel, by contrast, was written in a state of “profound melancholy,” after the murder of her husband by the Italian police. (The fall of Mussolini had allowed him to return to Rome, only to be captured and tortured in the Regina Coeli prison; he was thirty-four.) One of Ginzburg’s best-known essays, “My Vocation,” reckons with the difference between writing out of happiness and out of misery—both states of mind that, Ginzburg argued, set traps for literary creation. In periods of happiness, she wrote, it is easy to exercise the imagination and invent characters and situations outside one’s own experience—but those characters may not be invested with the compassion necessary for great literature, and the fictional world may lack “secrets and shadows.” By contrast, works written from unhappiness can be weighed down by the author’s intense sympathy for the characters, which are often too close to his or her own situation and are a transparent attempt to process personal grief. Ginzburg thought that it was impossible to console oneself through writing. “You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation,” she wrote.
But looking back on that essay many years later, Ginzburg said that her thinking had changed slightly over the ensuing decades: “I have to say that as life went on I understood that when you are more adult, a state of mind is less important to writing, in that at a certain stage in your life you have so many losses that there is always an underlying unhappiness. And therefore it influences less. You learn to write in any state of mind, and you feel more . . . I wouldn’t say distant from your own life but a bit readier to dominate it.”
Brooks started submitting poems to literary magazines as a teenager, but she didn’t succeed in selling one to a well-known magazine until she was twenty-eight. “This should encourage youngsters who feel discouraged at not getting anything published,” she said much later. “All you have to do is stick it out for fourteen years.”
Brooks continued to stick it out even as, to all appearances, she was “primarily a housewife, which is the last thing I’m really interested in being,” she said. The year after her first child was born, she “scarcely put pen to paper,” she said. But apart from that she “managed to keep at it.” In 1945, when her son was five years old, she published her first book of poetry. Four years later, she published her second book, and the following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, making Brooks the first African American to receive the award for poetry.
In 1973, an interviewer asked Brooks if poems arrived to her complete. “A poem rarely comes whole and completely dressed,” she replied.
As a rule, it comes in bits and pieces. You get an impression of something—you feel something, you anticipate something, and you begin, feebly, to put these impressions and feelings and anticipation or rememberings into those things which seem so common and handleable—words.
And you flail and you falter and you shift and you shake, and finally, you come forth with the first draft. Then, if you’re myself and if you’re like many of the other poets that I know, you revise, and you revise. And often the finished product is nothing like your first draft. Sometimes it is.
For Brooks, the amount of time that passed between the initial idea and a finished poem was totally unpredictable. Sometimes it took fifteen minutes, she said; sometimes, fifteen months. “It is hard work,” she said. “It gets harder all the time.”
In 1957, the BBC was preparing a radio adaptation of Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, and it placed an advertisement asking for anyone with knowledge of the author’s whereabouts to get in touch. At the time, Rhys hadn’t published anything in almost two decades, and many of her acquaintances had lost track of her and assumed that she had died of suicide or alcoholism—believable ends for the Dominica-born author, who seemed to have a gift for self-destructive behavior, and who had spent much of her twenties and thirties destitute and depressed, reeling from one doomed relationship to the next, self-medicating with alcohol. But the BBC advertisement did turn up news—Rhys herself wrote back. She was living with her third husband in Cornwall, and not only was she alive, she was working on a new novel. She soon signed a contract for the book, telling her editors that she expected to be done with it in six to nine months.
In fact, it took Rhys nine years to finish the book, Wide Sargasso Sea, now widely considered her masterpiece and one of the best novels of the twentieth century. The writing took so long, in part, because Rhys was a perfectionist who reworked the novel over and over until it met her exacting standards—and also because she was spectacularly inept at managing her day-to-day life and was almost continually derailed from the project. As one of her editors, Diana Athill, wrote, “Her inability to cope with life’s practicalities went beyond anything I ever saw in anyone generally taken to be sane.”
A few years into the new book, in 1960, the seventy-year-old Rhys and her husband relocated from Cornwall to a primitive cottage deep in the Devon countryside, where Rhys would live for the rest of her life. The move was her brother’s idea; after visiting the couple in Cornwall and being shocked by their squalid living conditions, he felt compelled to intervene, taking it upon himself to find and purchase a new house for them. He chose the remote location, it seems, because he figured Rhys couldn’t get into too much trouble there. Just to be on the safe side, he went to the village rector with a warning. “I’ve brought trouble into your parish,” he began.
It wasn’t long before Rhys justified her brother’s concern. Although she was thrilled by the idea of the new cottage, she quickly soured on the location. “This place, which I imagined would be a refuge, is a foretaste of hell at present,” she wrote soon after arriving. She disliked the constant rain, the suspicious-seeming villagers, the lack of libraries or bookshops, even the local animals—the cows “moo at me in a very disapproving way,” she wrote to her daughter. This wasn’t a joke, or at least not for long; Rhys grew increasingly disturbed that a neighboring farmer’s cows kept coming too close to her house, and she complained vociferously. The farmer put up a barbed-wire fence to keep the cows away—but Rhys took this gesture of kindness as some kind of affront, got roaring drunk, and made a scene, screaming at the neighbor and throwing milk bottles at the fence, while the rest of the village looked on in horror.
From then on, Rhys was an object of gossip and derision in the village; many of the locals wouldn’t speak to her, and one of Rhys’s neighbors accused her of being a witch. (Rhys chased her into the road with a pair of scissors, earning herself a weeklong stay in a mental hospital.) But in a stroke of luck, the village rector turned out to be one of her most important allies—a lover of classical literature, he took a look at Rhys’s novel-in-progress and was astute enough to recognize her talent. Thereafter, he visited regularly, doing whatever he could to insulate the sensitive author from her worries and keep her on track with the book. “She needs endless supplies of whisky, and endless praise,” he told his wife, “so that is what she must have.” He brought her a bed table so that she could write in bed—a longtime habit of hers—and he persuaded her to allow a doctor in for a checkup, which resulted in Rhys getting a store of “pep pills” that she took with mixed results. (She wrote in a 1961 letter, “I’ve some wonderful pep pills—they may do the trick though I feel very rum, extraordinary next day if I take more than two. Drink much safer in my opinion.”)
Even with the rector’s assistance, Rhys’s novel progressed slowly. She wrote in March 1962, “I feel I have been here for years, toiling away at my book—it’s like pulling a cart up a very steep hill.” A year later, she sounded much the same note in a letter to Athill: “I do feel that I am exhausting everybody. The only thing is that I’ve exhausted myself too—from rage to despair and back again.” In 1957, Rhys’s husband had suffered a stroke, and he was in and out of the hospital throughout the subsequent years. When he was home, Rhys was too occupied with his care to do much writing; when he was in the hospital, she was worried and lonely, although she was able to seize on these periods to work on the novel. She wrote to Athill in September 1964, a year and a half before the book was finally finished, “When I remember how light heartedly I began this book!—I thought it would be easy—my God! Quite apart from illness, moves, catastrophes and ructions galore there’s the effort to make an unlikely story seem possible and inevitable and right.”
The publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966—and the death of Rhys’s husband that same year—ushered in a period of relative calm for the author. She was freed of the burden of caring for her husband, and she had a measure of financial security and literary prestige that she had never enjoyed before. A letter to her daughter from late 1965 describes the routine she would follow more or less for the remainder of her life:
Such a funny existence here. I go to bed at eight p.m. Can you imagine it? But by that time it’s been dark for hours. So I take a shot of whisky (which is too expensive really) and pretend it’s bedtime. Then at three or four a.m. I’m broad awake. So I toss and turn a bit, then get up, still in the dark, and go into the kitchen for tea. It is, funnily enough, the best part of the day. I drink cup after cup, and smoke one cigarette after another, and watch the light, if any, appear at last.
Once she was up, Rhys spent almost her entire day in the kitchen, “the one place where I could stop feeling anxious or depressed, where the silence was bearable,” she wrote. “I can see the sun rise from one corner, the sun set from another.” (The kitchen was also, for many years, the only room in the house Rhys could afford to heat.) After a while, the newspapers and the mail would arrive, and Rhys would read and write—replying to letters, working on her last book, the autobiography Smile Please. Eventually, if she was hungry, she would plan an elaborate meal, her first of the day. If she wasn’t hungry, she would dine on bread, cheese, and a glass of wine. It was a solitary existence, but after the turmoil and anxiety that had characterized so much of her life, not an unhappy one. As Rhys wrote, “Isn’t the sadness of being alone much stressed and the compensations left out?”
Bishop came to New York from Detroit at sixteen, a high school graduate intending to study commercial art and become an illustrator. “Then something happened to me,” she said many years later. What happened was that Bishop discovered the modern art movement, and with the aid of a monthly stipend from a wealthy relative, she switched from illustration to painting, enrolling in the Art Students League in 1920. After six years of studies there, she rented a studio on 14th Street overlooking Union Square, then “a rather shabby business region of New York,” with a constant churn of office workers, department-store shoppers, soap-box sermonizers, unemployed loiterers, and fellow artists. For the next six decades, Bishop drew on the life of Union Square for her “romantic realist” paintings, often sitting on a bench to sketch people as they made their daily rounds, paying special attention to the dress and gestures of the emerging class of career girls then filling the city’s offices. But she endured years of dissatisfaction and self-doubt before she found an effective method of capturing that life on canvas. “I was trying everything very hard,” she remembered later. “I was very miserable. Frustrated. One tries, and it doesn’t [work]—one ‘blows in’ one way and it comes out another way. In the end it isn’t at all what one wanted. And yet, whatever validity can be found in one’s work has to be found there, in what one didn’t consciously or deliberately intend.”
Over time, Bishop developed a painstaking process for realizing her paintings. She began with a rough sketch, then made a series of more developed drawings. Next she made an etching—and after that an aquatint (a type of etching in which the plate is exposed to acid to create a surface that will hold ink, allowing for watercolor-like prints). Only then would she begin the actual painting, and here again she used an extremely laborious process, borrowed from the Flemish Baroque artist Rubens. “I do use a very complex technique I’m sorry to say,” Bishop said. “Not because I wanted to be complex, but in an effort to make the painting speak back to me. I’d do anything to get that result.” Often, it took her a year to complete a single painting. She positioned her easel so that she could look out the window at Union Square while she worked, in order to “verify what I was doing,” she said. The question she would ask herself at these moments was “Is it so?”—i.e., was the painting doing justice to the real-life scene below? “It was like eating, like nourishment,” she said, “to look out and see people, going in all directions, a kind of ballet, very ornate.”
Isabel Bishop in her studio, 1959
In her early twenties Bishop suffered an unhappy love affair and made three suicide attempts. But she recovered and, in 1934, married a brilliant young neurologist, Harold George Wolff, and moved into his house in Riverdale, a wealthy suburban enclave in the Bronx. Wolff was a rigid man—one neighbor recalled arriving for dinner parties and being handed a three-by-five-inch card with a neatly typed agenda listing the exact time for each portion of the evening, including when guests were expected to leave—but he strongly supported Bishop’s art career. “It was very important that he took that attitude and it was very unusual for that time,” Bishop said. “We left the house together every morning; he went to his work and I went to my studio. There was never any question about it.” They worked from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., taking the train together from Riverdale to Grand Central Terminal, where Bishop would catch the subway to Union Square; and then they would follow the reverse commute home. After their only child, a son, was born in 1940, Bishop quickly resumed the routine; her mother-in-law lived in their house and handled the childcare duties while Bishop and her husband worked. (This arrangement was not entirely tension-free. “It was helpful,” Bishop said later. “And it was difficult.”) Apparently, their work encompassed weekends as well—in a 1970s interview, Bishop said that as long as her son was at home, she went to her studio six days a week and took off Sundays to spend time with the family; once her son left the house, she resumed her seven-day-a-week work schedule.
On the wall of her studio, Bishop hung a quote from Henry James’s story “The Middle Years”: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Asked about the quote in a 1977 interview, and about how she arrived at her lifelong commitment to “the madness of art,” Bishop said: “I’ve thought about it a great deal. In my case, it just happened gradually, anything but deliberately. One simply found oneself in a state of commitment. And after that, there wasn’t any choice except jumping off a roof.”
In 1949, Lessing arrived in London with her six-year-old son, Peter, and the finished manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. She was traveling from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she had grown up the child of British parents, and where, before the age of thirty, she had married twice, divorced twice, and had three children. When she left for London, the first two children, ages ten and eight, stayed behind with her first husband, and Lessing would see them only occasionally during the remainder of their childhoods—facts that, once she became a famous author, would be forever dredged up by journalists, to Lessing’s dismay and irritation. Repeatedly confronted with this act of abandonment, Lessing always said that she had no real choice in the matter. She had married her first husband at age nineteen, already pregnant with their first child, and within a couple years had found herself an unsatisfied housewife in a cultural backwater, with no energy or time for the writing she was determined to make her life’s work. So she left her husband and two young children to pursue the life she wanted, finding a job and an apartment of her own, writing and getting involved in left-wing politics (and later remarrying and having a third child); her eventual move to London was just an extension of that first break. She never pretended that she had behaved admirably. “This was a terrible thing to do,” Lessing said in 1997, “but I had to do it because I have no doubt whatsoever if I had not done it, I would have become an alcoholic or ended in the loony bin. I couldn’t stand that life. I just couldn’t bear it.” In her more exasperated moments she gave less nuanced replies. “No one can write with a child around,” she said once. “It’s no good. You just get cross.”
Doris Lessing, London, circa 1950
But of course Lessing did write with her son Peter around. Indeed, she later said that having a child to take care of upon her arrival in London had saved her; otherwise, she would have been seduced by 1950s Soho. (“There was a constellation of talents, but mostly they drank and talked their gifts away,” she wrote.) Instead, Lessing arranged their lives so that Peter was looked after and she had time for her writing. At first she found secretarial work to pay their expenses, but then a modest advance for her next book allowed Lessing to quit that job and write full-time. In the second volume of her autobiography, Lessing described her routine during those early days in London:
I woke at five, when the child did. He came into my bed, and I told or read stories or rhymes. We got dressed, he ate, and then I took him to the school up the street. I shopped a little, and then my real day began. The feverish need to get this or that done—what I call the housewife’s disease: “I must buy this, ring So-and-so, don’t forget this, make a note of that”—had to be subdued to the flat, dull state one needs to write in. Sometimes I achieved it by sleeping for a few minutes, praying that the telephone would be silent. Sleep has always been my friend, my restorer, my quick fix, but it was in those days that I learned the value of a few minutes’ submersion in . . . where? And you emerge untangled, quiet, dark, ready for work.
As the day went on Lessing would constantly dip in and out of work, taking breaks to putter around the house, washing out a cup, tidying a drawer, or making herself a cup of tea. “I walk and I prowl, my hands busy with this and that,” she wrote. “You’d think I was a paragon of concern for housekeeping if you judged by what you saw.” But all the time her mind was elsewhere, on the writing project under way—and according to the biographer Carole Klein, these aimless-sounding writing days could be astonishingly productive, with Lessing aiming for at least seven thousand words a day. Throughout her career, the daily wool-gathering proved essential to Lessing’s writing process. She considered “the physical as a road into concentration” and compared herself to a painter in this regard. “They wander about the studio, apparently at random,” she wrote. “They clean a brush. They throw away another. They prepare a canvas, but you can see their minds are elsewhere. They stare out of the window. They make a cup of coffee. They stand for a long time in front of the canvas, the brush on the alert in their hands. At last, it begins: the work.”
Perhaps because she had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to arrange her life in a way that permitted her to write, Lessing was sympathetic to the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for stories about writers’ daily routines and working habits. “When we [writers] go about, having temporarily become talkers, standing on platforms and holding forth, we are always asked, Do you use a word processor, a pen, a typewriter; do you write every day; what is your routine?” Lessing wrote.
These questions are a fumbling instinct towards this crucial point, which is: How do you use your energy? How do you husband it? We all of us have limited amounts of energy, and I am sure the people who are successful have learned, either by instinct or consciously, to use their energies well instead of spilling them about. And this has to be different for every person, writers or otherwise. I know writers who go to parties every night and then, recharged instead of depleted, happily write all day. But if I stay up half the night talking, I don’t do so well the next day. Some writers like to start work as soon as they can in the morning, while others like the night or—for me almost impossible—the afternoons. Trial and error, and then when you’ve found your needs, what feeds you, what is your instinctive rhythm and routine, then cherish it.