Mason Currey - Zitate und Weisheiten

one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.

“Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

“He said that it’s a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop and then copy it. Because while you’re copying it, you’re thinking about it, and it’s giving you other ideas. And that’s the way I work. And it’s marvelous, just wonderful, the relationship between working and copying.” External conditions—having the right pen, a good chair—were important, too.

In his Autobiography, Franklin famously outlined a scheme to achieve “moral perfection” according to a thirteen-week plan. Each week was devoted to a particular virtue—temperance, cleanliness, moderation, et cetera—and his offenses against these virtues were tracked on a calendar. Franklin thought that if he could maintain his devotion to one virtue for an entire week, it would become a habit; then he could move on to the next virtue, successively making fewer and fewer offenses (indicated on the calendar by a black mark) until he had completely reformed himself and would thereafter need only occasional bouts of moral maintenance.

“After all,” as he wrote years later, “work is still the best way of escaping from life!”

“I find basically that if I do things regularly, I don’t have writer’s block or come into terrible crises.”

“If I can get in a couple hours of work, then I just have to have a cup of tea, or I have to run an errand to get a little bit of a break,” he says. “And then I come back. But those can be very fruitful pauses, especially if there’s a little problem that comes up. The best thing to do is to just leave it and put your mind somewhere else, and not always but often the solution to that problem will bubble up spontaneously.

Two hours. I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.”

I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time—some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next. Or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

Although he admitted to wondering what would have happened had he been able to write full-time, he also thought that two hours of composition in the evenings, after dinner and the dishes, was plenty: “After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on.”

consternation,

“routine is a condition of survival.”

“I often have to play music for an hour in order to feel exalted enough to face the act of composing,”

“We have failed to recognize our great asset: time. A conscientious use of it could make us into something quite amazing.”

“I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.” This is Tolstoy

Tchaikovsky set to work—composing at the piano only after he had dealt with any proofs or his correspondence, chores that he disliked. “Before setting about the pleasant task,” his brother noted, “Pyotr Ilich always hastened to get rid of the unpleasant.”

“Between books I take vacations that tend to linger on for months. Indolence-and-melancholy then becomes my major vice, until I get back to work. A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.

It’s always a search for the uninterrupted three- or four-hour stretch.”

King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30.

Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.

perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

“There are things which help me get in the mood to work. Cleaning for one. Ironing is great. Taking a walk is always inspiring. Because my work is often based on what I see, I am happy to keep collecting and changing images until the last moment.”