A bottle of vodka by her bed
The habits of happy (and deeply unhappy) artists
There was a time when I was very keen to hear about the habits of creatives, artists and anyone building out bodies of work. My thinking went like this; ‘If only I can land upon the perfect process (set of habits), my future life as a writer will be guaranteed.’
At the time I didn’t know much about building habits. I assumed that the perfect process or set of habits would do the work for me. I thought that my job was to find that process.
It took me years to flip the lens on that understanding. To see that it’s the person who makes their habits and processes work, not the other way around.
Browsing through Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work gives you a sense of how varied our habits can be. It reminds the reader that great work will unfurl from the most inhospitable of places.
Patricia Highsmith, author of (amongst others), The Talented Mr Ripley took a stiff drink before she started to write to ‘reduce her energy levels, which veered toward the manic’.1 In later years Highsmith, who wrote in the morning on her bed, ‘kept a bottle of vodka by her bedside, reaching for it as soon as she woke.’
Jean-Paul Satre slept badly and took barbiturates to knock himself out for a few hours each night. Over time this escalated to Corydrane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin. He was supposed to take one or two tablets, twice a day. ‘Satre took twenty a day, beginning with his morning coffee and slowly chewing one pill after another as he worked. For each tablet, he would produce a page or two of his second major philosophical work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason.’2
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (although not mentioned in Currey’s book) had an opium addiction - he took it to numb the pain of a toothache and facial neuralgia - and wrote one of his greatest poems Kubla Kahn in an opium-induced dream.
Like the seedling that takes root in a desert, creativity isn’t dependent on specific environments to express itself. In fact, the habits and environments that spark creativity can be deeply unhealthy.
However… if you also have aspirations toward a happy or healthy life, then it’s healthy habits that form the bridge between artistic greatness and happy artist.
When you combine habits that tend to your well-being, with habits that nurture your work, you might even find yourself creating from a place that has eluded many creatives over the centuries; contentment. You might even be kind to your family in the process; not insisting that they sit in silence at the dedicated lunch hour because you’re mid-composition (something that Igor Stravinsky imposed on his own family because the ‘slightest sound, a murmur, even a whisper, could ruin his concentration’3).
Your work is an extension of you. Would Satre’s take on existentialism have changed if he hadn’t been popping Corydrane every hour? Perhaps his clarity would have been greater if his nervous system hadn’t been amped up on amphetamines. Would Kubla Kahn exist if Coleridge hadn’t been in pain? Perhaps meditation would have taken him into that same space. Or music. Or lying on the grass staring at clouds.
We’ve been living in a world of binaries since at least the inception of patriarchy4 which divided the genders and put them into a relationship of hierarchy with one another. Choosing between great art or becoming a healthy, well-adjusted person is just one of those binaries.
It’s curious that this particular binary has been put on such a pedestal when there are so many instances of how to combine creative expression with healthy life choices.
Maya Angelou wrote in hotel rooms because she needed plain environments in which to write. ‘I can’t write in a pretty surrounding. It throws me’ she said. So she wrote each day in anonymous spaces from approximately 7am to 2pm. In an interview she said, ‘When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind. I shower, prepare dinner, so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work.’5
Pytor Illich Tchaikovsky wrote from 9.30am to noon. After lunch he then - almost religiously - went for 2 hour walks. At 5pm put in another two hours of work.
Joseph Heller spent 2 or 3 hours a night, for 8 years, writing Catch 22. He said; ‘I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch 22. I couldn’t imagine what Americans did at night when they weren’t writing novels.’
Gertrude Stein sat down to write after traipsing around in nature with Alice Toklas looking for the ideal spot. Once she found it, she would write quickly for up to 30 minutes a day.
Jane Austen wrote after organising the family breakfast at 9am. Not wanting people to know she was a writer, she would write in the family sitting room upon small pieces of paper that could easily be put away or covered as she was ‘subject to all kinds of casual interruptions’. She progressed in this way until the main meal between 3 and 4pm. She would then read her progress to her family at night.6
Creativity can be sparked by nature and/or harmonious family relationships. Tchaikovsky was far from a perfect person, but his long walks were a healthy choice that fuelled his creativity (he would often stop mid-walk, jotting down ideas to flesh out later). In Austen’s case, having her family as nightly readers surely encouraged her to be as bitingly witty as possible.
We’re each at choice about how we build our body of work. We can build it with our families around us or in splendid isolation. We can develop ourselves as we develop our work, or, inspired by Pablo Picasso, we can devolve into artistic narcissism.
The keys to actually getting the work done seem to be:
making a commitment to the work,
knowing yourself well enough to know what you need to follow through on that commitment, and
creating the best environment you can given your circumstances.
It doesn’t matter if your time frame is akin to Stein’s very slim 30 minutes a day or Heller’s 3 hours or Angelou’s 7. The work you do on an individual day matters not very much. It’s the accumulation of days that makes the difference. And it’s the quality of those days that make for a happy artist.
‘Daily Rituals: How Artists Work’, Mason Currey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) p.11
ibid. p.97
‘Stravinsky’s Lunch: Two women painters and the claims of life and art’, Drusilla Modjeska (Pan MacMillan, 1999) p. 16.
We’ll be exploring ‘Stravinsky’s Lunch’ in more detail in our visibility immersion guide for July. Visibility immersion guides are deep dives into a section of a book, podcast, movie, or tv show, and drawing out the visibility lessons it contains. They’re just one of the bonuses we share with our paid subscribers each month. If you’d like to access those bonuses, come on over here and join us!
Which may be as old as 10,000 to 12,000 years old, originating during the Neolithic Revolution
‘Daily Rituals: How Artists Work’, Mason Currey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) p. 122
All of these examples are drawn from ‘Daily Rituals: How Artists Work’, Mason Currey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). NB: In 2019 Currey produced a second volume of work ‘Daily Rituals: Women at Work’ after realising that his first volume was very limited when it came to women’s stories. Of the 161 people mentioned. Only 27 were women. The result is a second book that focuses exclusively on women and is more culturally diverse. It’s a slightly different book because not all the women had the luxury or desire for a regular schedule.
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