The master of Russian literature held himself to account daily in "an experimental project aimed at exploring the nature of self: the links connecting a sense of self, a moral ideal, and the temporal order of narrative," Irina Paperno writes. A March 1851 excerpt: "At home did not study English (insufficient firmness). At the Volkonskys’ was unnatural and distracted, and stayed until one in the morning (distractedness, desire to show off, and weakness of character)."
Writers and writing
Ann Beattie writes at night. Hemingway started at daybreak. Balzac started even earlier, at 1 a.m., which may explain his drinking 50 cups of coffee per day. These and other work habits of famous writers are quoted by Jack Limpert from Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, in which author Mason Currey "researched or asked lots of writers how they dealt with the procrastination muse and many talked about how they prepared themselves to write."
Sam Stephenson interviews Dr. C.O. Simpkins about his 1975 biography of John Coltrane, and Simpkins describes how he handled his book's tense racial context: "The audience I developed in my mind’s eye was an audience of black children, as though I was talking to my own children. Something about writing for children imposed an absolute truth in my effort. I thought that was the best way for me to put the truth out there without any compromise."
One year before The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote a letter to his editor about L’Affaire Lettuceberg, a book he had just completed: "This is going to be a hard letter to write … this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest." A satire based on a 1936 lettuce workers' strike, the book "was full of tricks to make people ridiculous," Steinbeck wrote. "I’m not ready to be a hack yet."
Sven Birkerts recounts the frightening moment when the muse abandoned him — and the relief he felt when it finally returned on an afternoon in Central Park: "The matter sounds so simple. All of a sudden, I found myself wanting to write sentences again and, when I did, it felt to me like the rains had finally come, stirring up life in the dry land. I don’t know if I even shifted in my place, but whatever it was has since brought something back that had gone missing."
Larissa MacFarquhar interviews writers ranging from Joseph Heller to Toni Morrison about the editor they all worked with, the legendary Robert Gottlieb, and Gottlieb comments on what they say, at times uncomfortably: "Of course, if anybody says nice things about me in print it’s pleasant. But the fact is, this glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome thing. The editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one."
Stephen King has sold 350 million books but he still fears failure, he tells Rolling Stone: "I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing – that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it." Marcy McKay writes that reading about King's fears freed her from her own self-doubt: "Most of us will never be as prolific as the author of Carrie, Stand By Me and The Green Mile … It should still give us hope. Endless."
From the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Joel Achenbach interviews a half-dozen of his fellow students and writes about learning from the master of non-fiction, who has influenced several generations of writers in the class he has taught for four decades: "Perhaps there are writers out there who make it look easy, but that is not the example set by McPhee. He is of the school of thought that says a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than for other people."
The legendary talk show host wrote jokes — quickly — for Paar and Carson. But his speed left him when he started writing his own material: "That was a real shock — to learn that I could fill a page and annoy the other writers on the staff of The Tonight Show by having my stuff ready and handed in before they were half finished … So imagine the awfulness of learning that I can’t just put my name at the top of the page and write stuff for my nightclub act at zip speed."
Michelle Nijhuis recalls what the 1962 children's science fiction novel meant to her growing up, and now as a parent: "Madeleine L’Engle and her characters encouraged my appreciation for science and scientists … A Wrinkle in Time has always had its detractors, young readers who find it boring, or unbelievable, or annoying. But many more boys and girls dive in deep, as I did, and remember it as adults with a kind of desperate fondness."