I’m crazy about the blog Daily Routines (I did a post about them last month). Check it out. www.dailyroutines.typepad.com. Here’s what I stole from them today:
John Grisham
When he first started writing, Grisham says, he had "these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important."
"The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I'd jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week.
His goal: to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, sometimes an hour; ofttimes he would write for two hours before he had to turn to his job as a lawyer, which he never especially enjoyed. In the Mississippi Legislature, there were "enormous amounts of wasted time" that would give him the opportunity to write.
"So I was very disciplined about it," he says, then quickly concedes he doesn't have such discipline now: "I don't have to."
Feb. 5, 2008
(Thanks to Brenton Priestley.)
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As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children's nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968 when Munro was thirty-seven.
December 14, 2001
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