Book Thoughts | Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

What a delightful little read. You’ll find here one to two-page summaries about how some of the great artists, scientists, writers, movie makers, composers, and more worked. Each is short and sweet, perfect for a quick bit of motivation or inspiration between other tasks. It fills the place that exists between one project and another, one meeting and the next.

In fact, Daily Rituals was born out of one of those very moments. Mason Currey was under deadline and avoiding writing an article for the publication he worked for at the time. He began to research how the great writers worked, surfing the internet to find out. Before long, he had started a blog and was writing about the work habits of the men and women he was reading about. From that blog came the book.

I read it while walking into the office from the parking garage, occasionally skipping them if the individual–an artist or writer–was one with which I was unfamiliar. The peeks into the lives of these extremely successful people was fascinating, if massively abridged. The rituals, or routines, or, maybe lack of routines, were varied as the artists (let’s just call them all artists, and that includes all of them whether they were or not). Some worked mornings, some in the evening. Asimov worked all day every day; others, only for a few hours in the morning, or a few in the evening. In fact, many of them seemed to work a mere two to four hours each day. Darwin took decades to write his book, and he hated society, hiding from the world in his country home. Warhol would call his agent each morning to detail the entire previous day for a journal that was used for tax purposes. Dickens would take long walks through London to collect characters and scenes for his serialized stories.

It was a fun read and inspirational. I recommend it for a light and enjoyable jaunt through the lives of some of the great minds of history.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work Book Cover

Title: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
Author: Mason Currey
Genre: Nonfiction
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: April 23, 2013
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 304

Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”

Kafka is one of 161 inspired—and inspiring—minds, among them, novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, who describe how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do, whether by waking early or staying up late; whether by self-medicating with doughnuts or bathing, drinking vast quantities of coffee, or taking long daily walks. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator as his desk, dreamily fondling his “male configurations”. . . Jean-Paul Sartre chewed on Corydrane tablets (a mix of amphetamine and aspirin), ingesting ten times the recommended dose each day . . . Descartes liked to linger in bed, his mind wandering in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where he experienced “every pleasure imaginable.”

Here are: Anthony Trollope, who demanded of himself that each morning he write three thousand words (250 words every fifteen minutes for three hours) before going off to his job at the postal service, which he kept for thirty-three years during the writing of more than two dozen books . . . Karl Marx . . . Woody Allen . . . Agatha Christie . . . George Balanchine, who did most of his work while ironing . . . Leo Tolstoy . . . Charles Dickens . . . Pablo Picasso . . . George Gershwin, who, said his brother Ira, worked for twelve hours a day from late morning to midnight, composing at the piano in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers . . .

Here also are the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Rice, and Igor Stravinsky (he was never able to compose unless he was sure no one could hear him and, when blocked, stood on his head to “clear the brain”).