Tea at Trianon: Ten Daily Rituals of Productive Writers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 6, 2020

Ten Daily Rituals of Productive Writers

From Inspired by Life and Fiction:

2. A set time to work. Most seemed to work for around 3-6 hours (not all day). Stephen King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and almost never quits before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words, which leads me to…

3. A predetermined page or word count. I most often saw goals of 1,000- 3,000 words a day.

4. Balancing other jobs or responsibilities. For some, writing was/is their entire life, but many juggled day jobs, families, or pursuits like gardening as do many of us. Mozart taught lessons, Joseph Heller (Catch-22) worked in Advertising, T. S. Eliot worked at a bank, and George Orwell worked in a London secondhand bookshop. A defined schedule allowed them to carve out writing time.

5. A reliance on coffee or tea (or both). Coffee or tea was mentioned by most, e.g. Beethoven rose at dawn and wasted little time getting down to work. His breakfast was coffee, which he prepared with great care—sixty beans per cup. French novelist Honoré de Balzac drank as many as fifty cups a day.

6. A quiet place to work with minimum distractions. Gustav Mahler composed in a stone hut, requiring distraction-free silence. Maya Angelou kept a shabby hotel room and wrote there daily. Dickens had an extra door installed to his study to block out noise. Anne Rice said, “What you have to do is clear all distraction. That’s the bottom line.” (Read more.)