(Source: The New York Times)
(Source: The New York Times)
Barely a month after his 22nd birthday, the British reporter, novelist and pop critic Nik Cohn hunkered down in a cottage in Connemara, on Ireland’s craggy western coast. It was the spring of 1968. Political storms were whipping up in Prague and Paris and America. Connemara couldn’t have been farther away from it all, and that was the idea: writing 10 hours a day, no distractions and no breaks, and, at the end of a mere seven weeks, a book.
(Source: The New York Times)
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
(Source: theparisreview.org)
(Source: books.google.com)
‘Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.’ —Bill Cunningham
For [Haruki Murakami] that means waking between 4 & 5am to write. After about 5-hours in front of the keyboard (writing or no writing) he runs 10 km. And after that he spends a couple of hours in a record shop thumbing through the jazz section for rare vinyl. Next, he has some free time for hobbies. For him it might be swimming some laps. Then it’s back to his office for a few hours of translating his favorite American novels into Japanese or catching up on reading before turning in at 9pm.
(Source: weputwordsonpaper.com)
And I watched it over and over and over and over and over. And I looked at all the parts that I liked and all the parts that I didn’t like … and I said, ‘OK, maybe this part, if your breath control was different, and here, maybe you should try this step…’ I study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft.
(Source: ft.com)
