My So-Called Creative Process

I’m the author of two books chronicling the daily rituals of master creatives. But my own method for writing is anything but honed.

As the author of two books about the daily routines and working habits of great creative minds — the second one, Daily Rituals: Women at Work, came out last month — I am often asked, not surprisingly, to describe my own writing schedule and habits. Indeed, my original plan for this essay was to write about “honing my own creative process,” which sounded like an excellent idea when I first discussed it with my editor. Except, on reflection, I have to admit that my process is anything but finely honed. Even after two books on the subject and a dozen or so years of writing professionally, I have cobbled together only the most rudimentary tactics for producing new work, which I cling to with a mixture of desperation and resignation. It is a process of sorts, but it often feels more like a crisis.

At least I’m not alone. Researching the habits of novelists, painters, poets, composers, filmmakers, and other artists for my Daily Rituals books, I have come to the conclusion that the creative process is inherently inefficient and unpredictable, and the rituals people use to get into their work are often arbitrary and, at best, semi-reliable. And I think that’s why I find this material so fascinating. Reading about the various ways that “great minds” have gotten down to work each day, there is a part of me that wants to glean actionable intelligence, to find small-bore strategies that I might borrow for my own life. But, more than that, I’m just looking for evidence that my own process is no clumsier or more painstaking than anyone else’s — that with all the halting, stop-and-start, brow-furrowing hours hunched over my laptop, I might even be on the right track.

So I offer the following breakdown of my so-called creative process in the spirit of transparency, camaraderie, and commiseration. This is what works for me, and has also worked for some of the people I’ve researched. Maybe some part of it will work for you, too.

I get up early in the morning

I get up at 5:30 a.m. most weekdays — but not, I swear, because I’m a model of self-discipline or productivity. It’s more like the opposite: I have learned through painful experience that I have only a brief window of focused mental energy a day, and, inconveniently, that window closes sometime around 9:00 a.m. After that I can still work, sure, sort of — but it’s just not the same. I’m hardly original or unique in finding something special about the early-morning hours. Among writers, there are Anthony Trollope (5:30 a.m.), Ernest Hemingway (sunrise), Toni Morrison (before sunrise), Haruki Murakami (4:00 a.m.), Octavia Butler (as early as 2:00 a.m.), and many others.

I try to create a bubble

In a 1933 speech, Virginia Woolf said that the novelist “has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy,” one in which “nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.” That seems about right to me. I know that with any new project I have to wallow in it a while, let myself daydream, space out, scribble half-formed ideas that may or may not be relevant to the task at hand. Most important, I have to create a window of time in which I allow myself to ignore completely any other responsibilities or obligations that are waiting for me that day. This is another reason why the early mornings are congenial — no one really expects you to be available.

Not talking to other people is a crucial part of this state — in my experience, even the briefest and most innocuous chat can pop the bubble. Here, too, I have plenty of company. The composer Gustav Mahler couldn’t bear to see or speak to anyone before his morning work period. The artist Agnes Martin was fiercely protective of her solitude. “You must gather together in your studio all of your sensibilities and when they are gathered you must not be disturbed,” she wrote. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning agreed: “An artist must, I fancy, either find or make a solitude to work in, if it’s to be good work at all.”

Of course, the contemporary worker also has to contend with email, and the constant background dread and sense of obligation that can accompany particularly clogged inboxes. Here the bubble sometimes needs reinforcing. The novelist Isabel Allende and the composer Julia Wolfe, for instance, work on computers without email access. On her writing days, Miranda July enables Internet-blocking software on her computer for anywhere from three to six hours. Many artists I’ve interviewed make a point of putting off email until the afternoon, after they’ve finished their most important work for the day. My personal approach is closer to that of the writer Sheila Heti, who told me: “I try not to check my email till mid-day but I fail at this nearly every day.”

I let myself produce total garbage

Rarely am I completely satisfied with any piece of writing, but at the very least I can console myself that the end result is much better than where I started. Because where I start is bad; oh, man, does it stink. But somehow you have to clear out all the inane, derivative, hackneyed ideas before you can move on to something better. This part is not fun. As the poet Gwendolyn Brooks once put it, “You flail and you falter and you shift and you shake, and finally, you come forth with the first draft.” Joyce Carol Oates’s description is even more memorable: “Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”

I toggle between print and digital

Eudora Welty wrote first drafts on a typewriter — “It gives me the feeling of making my work objective,” she said — and she revised by cutting out passages and pinning them to the bed using dressmakers’ pins, rearranging the pieces until she had figured out the right structure for her story. Nowadays, of course, this kind of rearranging can be easily accomplished on-screen — but many writers, myself included, find it useful to toggle among handwritten notes, on-screen files, and printed drafts; the change of mediums helps reestablish the objectivity Welty mentions, if only briefly. It’s not just writers who work this way. The composer Morton Feldman said that the most important advice he ever received was from John Cage: “He said that it’s a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop and then copy it,” Feldman said. “Because while you’re copying it, you’re thinking about it, and it’s giving you other ideas. And that’s the way I work. And it’s marvelous, just wonderful, the relationship between working and copying.”

I listen to my boredom

“Boredom is a tremendous indicator,” the artist Bridget Riley once said of the creative process. “Your energy goes; it caves in on you; you can’t do anything. That’s very frightening but you must listen because you are being told that whatever it is you are doing is not quite right. It may only need a small adjustment or it may need more drastic treatment.” For me, this is the hardest part of the process. When a new piece of writing isn’t going well, is it because that’s just the nature of first drafts and I need to keep grinding away at it? Or is it because there is some fundamental flaw with my approach, and I need to step back and reevaluate? Sometimes it can be tricky to tell when you’re on the verge of a breakthrough or just digging yourself deeper and deeper into a hole. But, as Riley suggests, there is often a gut-level indication. “It’s not right if it doesn’t feel right,” she has said. That is a slender reed to cling to, but it’s also exhilarating: Each new work is a fresh opportunity to try and get it right, even if it never quite feels that way.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.