Daily Routines of Creative Minds
Recently The Guardian came out with an article digging into the daily rituals of “creative minds” ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Marcel Proust and Georgia O’Keefe to Patricia Highsmith. They came up with 6 routines common to many creative types:
1. Be a morning person
2. Don’t give up the day job
3. Take lots of walks
4. Stick to a schedule
5. Practice strategic substance abuse
6. Learn to work anywhere
Personally I’m down with all of those except #1: I am definitely a night person and after decades of writing, that simply is not going to change. [I reflected about my affinity and affection for nighttime writing in a blog post here.] To quote from The Guardian:
There is evidence that morning people are happier and more conscientious, but also that night owls might be more intelligent.
Yeah, we night owls are intelligent enough not to drag our ass out of bed before dawn. Staying up until dawn, that’s another question.
As for #2 [Day Job], because the life of a freelance writer can be so up and down, both emotionally and financially, it does make sense — at least until you are really well established as a writer — to maintain some other gig. That gives you the freedom to pursue the stories you want to write and not necessarily be beholden to what you perceive to be the current market trends.
I wrote about #3 [Walks] in the previous post, a big believer in cleaving one’s derriere from the chair and heading outside to engage with Nature and jog creativity to life. [It also helps to remind us how lucky we are to be alive!]
It should be apparent to anyone who follows the blog with its daily schedule of posts that I am completely in sync with #4. Stories are by their very essence organic, amorphous and magical. Creating a writing schedule compels us to enter into that story universe on a regular basis which increases the odds we will burrow into the heart and soul of the narrative, then have the discipline to translate that onto the printed page.
Why does #5 [Strategic Substance Abuse] remind me of Hank Moody in “Californication”:
We’ve all heard of writers or artists who descended into addiction, so the key word here would seem to be “strategic”.
#6 [Work Anywhere] is key, especially if you travel. As long as I have my laptop, noise-cancelling headphones, and am in a position to hunch so as to restrict my field of vision to the monitor, I can pretty much write in any location.
How about you? What are you daily writing rituals? Of these six, which is most relevant to your creativity? Do you have others you would add to the list?
For more of the article, go here.
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