The novelist Patricia Highsmith worked in bed surrounded by cigarettes, an ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and a cup full of sugar. According to Mason Currey, the author of the entertaining and enlightening new book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work , she also liked to have a stiff drink before she settled down to write, “to reduce her energy levels, which veered toward the manic.”

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

Daily Rituals chronicles the routines of genius-level artists, writers, composers, and philosophers–Beethoven, Kafka, Chuck Close, and John Cheever are among those included. Their quotidian schedules tended to be as regular as they were idiosyncratic. Currey says the most surprising ritual came from the early 20th-century writer Thomas Wolfe, who would unconsciously “fondle his genitals” while working because it “fostered such a “good male feeling” and “stoked his creative energies.”

Even the most dissolute-seeming artists, like the painter Francis Bacon, who “lived a life of hedonistic excess, eating multiple rich meals a day, drinking tremendous quantities of alcohol, taking whatever stimulants were handy, and generally staying out later and partying harder than any of his contemporaries”–managed to keep a routine schedule of work, in his own libertine kind of way.

Here, Currey talks about the rituals that successful artists have in common, why enjoying your day job can help you with your personal output, and the importance of bathing on the creative process.

This may be sort of obvious, but everybody in the book found some way to carve out time [to work], either in the early morning, or before binge drinking the rest of the day like Francis Bacon. In some cases, it’s not that long. Gertrude Stein would only work for 30 minutes each day. Some other writers said two to three hours every day is great, but more than that wears them out and hurts the next day’s work. But they worked at the same time every day, regardless of their other obligations.





It’s the repetition that leads you to getting into a creative state. It’s not the rituals themselves–they don’t have any particular special power–that lead you into this zone. It’s more that these artists tried to stick with the same pattern every day.

So many behaviors in the book are ways to take a break. You can’t just work constantly on something that requires a high degree of focus and creative energy, whether it’s writing or composing or painting. No one can do it nonstop for hours on end. Taking a nap and drinking coffee were typical. Igor Stravinsky would do a headstand. Thomas Wolfe had the weird fondling-himself habit. Walking seems the most common, especially among composers. Composers all seemed to take a long walk every day.