Well, maybe that’s putting it strongly. But earlier in the week I mentioned how one writer I know has been trying to find her own process, to find how she works best. And how then by chance another writer I know blogged about how there is no such thing as one process that we can all adopt.
That friend, Ken Armstrong, refers to how there is a belief that creative people must work to a certain pattern yet he doesn’t agree with that. Now Casey N Cep of Pacific Standard says of this that:
Charles Dickens wrote while blindfolded. Virginia Woolf took three baths a day, and always with ice-cold water. Stephen King eats a blood orange at every meal whenever he is working on a book. Joyce Carol Oates writes only in Comic Sans.
None of those things is true. Before you go and stock your kitchen with blood oranges or switch the font on your word processor, let me assure you that I invented every one of those writerly habits. But what if I hadn’t? What if you had read them in an interview or in any one of the million aggregations of writerly routines? Would you really stop taking hot showers or start blindfolding yourself when you write?
Yes.
I’d do anything.
In particular, I would do anything rather than write. Hot showers balancing an orange on your throat? Easier than writing. Give me a list of habits I must adopt and I’m happy.
The idea that any one of these habits can be isolated from the entirety of the writer’s life and made into a template for the rest of us is nonsense. What none of these lists tell you is that sometimes these highly creative people weren’t waking so early on their own, but were woken by domestic servants. Or that some of these highly productive writers also had spouses or children or assistants enlisted in the effort. Or that often the leisurely patterns of drafting and revising were possible only because generous familial support made the financial demands of everyday life irrelevant.