The HEA Cafe

http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/ 

From the above site I was able to have a peak into some authors daily routines. Enjoy a glimpse of how others work.

Alice Munro

As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children’s nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968 when Munro was thirty-seven.The Atlantic, December 14, 2001
My comment: Alice was so dedicated it scares me. Her stories must have burned at her brain until she had to write around everything else in her life. But I like the idea of using slivers of time.

Toni Morrison

INTERVIEWER
You have said that you begin to write before dawn. Did this habit begin for practical reasons, or was the early morning an especially fruitful time for you?
MORRISON
Writing before dawn began as a necessity–I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama–and that was always around five in the morning.
 

My comment: I’m tired just thinking of this. How did she function throughout the rest of the day.

Truman Capote

INTERVIEWER
What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTE
I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance. The Paris Review, Issue 16, 1957

My comment: if I tried writing horizontally I would fall asleep. Besides my arms hurt just thinking about it. But I do some of my best creative thinking while horizontal. I often use a small light to write notes during the night as my ideas begin to sort themselves out.

Isaac Asimov

His usual routine was to awake at 6 A.M., sit down at the typewriter by 7:30 and work until 10 P.M. 

In “In Memory Yet Green,” the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1979, he explained how he became a compulsive writer. His Russian-born father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn that were open from 6 A.M. to 1 A.M. seven days a week. Young Isaac got up at 6 o’clock every morning to deliver papers and rushed home from school to help out in the store every afternoon. If he was even a few minutes late, his father yelled at him for being a folyack, Yiddish for sluggard. Even more than 50 years later, he wrote: “It is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6 A.M. anyway. I am still showing my father I’m not a folyack.” The New York Times, April 7, 1992

My comment: LOL. Sounds like a great work ethic. Sometimes, too many times, authors wait to FEEL like writing. Issac’s comments prove that getting at the work is more important that sitting around waiting for something inspirational to drive us to it.

Roger Ebert

Morning routine: I usually get up around 7. I make oatmeal in my rice cooker. Then I take an hour-long walk: outside if the weather’s good; on my treadmill if it’s cold. Then I shower, shave and go to the first of three movies I see on many weekdays. The New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2005

My comment: What? Going to the movies is work? Bring it on. Shaping thoughts and whispy ideas into a story and getting words on the page, now that’s work.

‘Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.’

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