Working in a creative industry and being self employed takes discipline… or not. It all depends on which school of creative working you come from. Nose to the grindstone or head in the clouds. I prefer serendipitous encounters with inspiration. Gazing out the window (not the 6th ave. and 52nd one so much), browsing the newsstand, visiting the MoMA bookstore and trolling (in the fishing sense) websites but then of course shit gets done when you make lists and hammer away at them all day. It’s a balance I guess. As a side note, producers always seem to be going ten times faster than everyone else but maybe it just appears that way because I’m on a different pace.

Daily routines is a website that chronicles the habits of creative people (here).

Chris Ofili
First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, “nothing statements, which have no function.”

James Thurber
I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.”

Anthony Trollope
He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next.

Truman Capote
I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.

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11 Comments

  2. According to the Book of Lists, a book I once revered, Victor Hugo would remove all his clothes, step into a room absolutely empty of everything except a desk, a chair, paper, and a pen, and lock himself in. That’s the sign of a serious procrastinator, and he didn’t even have to contend with the internet.

    It’s a tactic I will be using to finish the snaz media site between now and my departure for OR.

  3. Lists do it for me…for the creative side, a long hot shower is where I get my best ideas

  4. Ya know – it’s interesting to ponder that a little… I only seem to have good ideas when I’m traveling, because being in a hotel halfway across the country, or in an airport with nothing but a pair of headphones and a magazine… being away from the daily routine is the only time I get to disconnect, stop, breathe, and look for a new way forward, or really dwell on the stuff I want to do.

  5. I remember Flaubert wrote this somewhere: “Yesterday, I worked for sixteen hours, today the entire day and tonight I have finally finished the first page” While on the same day I read that I was told that Bertrand Russell wrote up to 10000 words a day. Thankfully there isn’t a single, right way for creativity. I’m somewhere in between those two extremes I guess

  6. yesterday was a don’t get in the shower until 8PM kinda day. I think today is going to be a list day.

    I was thinking about designating one day a week as ‘boring day’ – the day when all the stupid errands and phone calls to billing departments and insurance companies.

    and now I’m wasting time by trying to think of something else clever to say…

  11. It’s always just as I have finished work and I am too tired to do anything about it. That’s when I have all the ideas…Sophie

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