•Victor Hugo wrote both Les Misèrables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in the nude so he wouldn’t be tempted to leave
his house. He even had his valet hide his clothes.
•Demosthenes shaved half his head so that he would be too embarrassed to leave home until his writing was finished.
•Honoré de Balzac would down black coffee so he could write for long stretches—often for more than 48 hours at a time.
•Ernest Hemingway stood while he met his 500-word-per-day, self-imposed quota. His writing regimen was to be “done
by noon and drunk by three.”
•Truman Capote, George Orwell, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Winston Churchill, and Marcel Proust all preferred to write
while lying in bed.
•Charles Dickens would go for walks (20 miles or so every day) and try to get lost in order to spark his creativity.
•James Joyce felt that it was a productive day if he composed just three sentences.
•Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards in no particular order. One of his books consisted of 2,000 index cards.
•William Wordsworth would recite his poetry to his dog while taking strolls. If the dog barked or was upset as he read, he
would rewrite the draft.
•Friedrich Schiller kept a drawerful of rotten apples in his study. His wife claimed that he could not live or work without the
awful aroma.
•Alexandre Dumas could only write poetry on yellow paper, articles on pink paper, and novels on blue paper.
•Edgar Allan Poe’s beloved cat, Catterina, would sit on Poe’s shoulders while he wrote.
•French novelist Colette always plucked fleas from her bulldog until she was ready to write.
•Gertrude Stein claimed that she wrote best while seated in a parked car.
•Agatha Christie wrote while taking baths and eating apples.
•For many years, Maya Angelou only worked in the plainest of hotel rooms, solely accompanied by a dictionary, a Bible, a deck
of cards, and a bottle of sherry.
•Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road on 120 feet of taped-together paper so that his stream-of-consciousness writing style
would not be interrupted by the need to add new sheets of paper to the typewriter.
•John Steinbeck insisted on writing exclusively in pencil. He used over 300 of them to create The Grapes of Wrath.
•T.S. Eliot would tint his face green with powder to look like he was dead