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.