Do you think that famous writers are a little peculiar?
Does fiddling around with vowels and consonants all day drive our eccentricities, or were we just born that way?
Most of us probably aren’t as strange as we think we are… relatively speaking, of course! It turns out that having a propensity for peculiarities transcends both time and national origin. At least as far back as 384 BC, famous writers have famously had eccentric habits. Here are some examples of some of the most famous authors of all time who definitely had some, shall we say, unusual techniques for keeping the words flowing:
- American writers Mark Twain, Truman Capote, and Edith Wharton preferred to write while lying in bed. British natives George Orwell and Winston Churchill also preferred this method. Similarly, French novelist Marcel Proust enjoyed writing in bed. It’s intriguing to consider that the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Animal Farm could have been created like this.
- Demosthenes shaved half his head so that he would be too embarrassed to leave home until his writing was finished. Did Homer do anything similarly extreme when writing the Odyssey?
- French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac would down black coffee so he could write for long stretches—often for more than 48 hours at a time. (Is this really that weird, though?)
- American author 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.” This is undoubtedly the attitude that earned him the Pulitzer Prize.
- Charles Dickens took long walks every day, covering about 20 miles. He tried to get lost to spark his creativity. Perhaps Oliver Twist or Great Expectations were conceived in this manner?
- James Joyce felt that it was a productive day if he composed just three sentences. Given that Ulysses is 732 pages, this is quite an impressive feat of dedication.
- Science-fiction author H.P. Lovecraft tended to avoid going out in public during the day. He encouraged others to write short stories and fan-fiction about his work so that it would spread.
- J.R.R. Tolkien was widely known as a polyglot. He spoke 15 languages. He developed 15 different dialects for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. His mastery of the English language, in particular, is still highly regarded.
- J.K. Rowling, the pen name of Joanne Rowling, is comfortable “writing anywhere there is a surface of paper.” She always prefers writing by hand first. Then she types the next draft. The Harry Potter children’s books were drafted by many interesting practices from the New York Times best-selling author.
- Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, worked as a tax collector for most of his life. His work in this role led to his excommunication three times.
- Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. His wife claimed that he could not live or work without the awful aroma.
- Leo Tolstoy kept a strict list of rules to live his life by. Some of these rules include waking up at 5 AM. He went to bed by 10 AM. He ensured his naps lasted no longer than two hours. Not too surprising for the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
- Stephen King enjoys writing while listening to rock music.
- 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. What says “America” more than that?
- Jane Austen published her novels anonymously. She is believed to have edited at least one of them with a straight pin. Was Pride and Prejudice that novel?
- Agatha Christie wrote while taking baths and eating apples.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald was a rather heavy drinker. In one instance, he and a friend “tied a bartender to two chairs to see if they could saw him in half.” The Great Gatsby makes much more sense now.
- Gabriel García Márquez smoked around 60 cigarettes per day while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude.
- Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road on 120 feet of taped-together paper. He did this so that his stream-of-consciousness writing style would not be interrupted. He avoided the need to add new sheets of paper to the typewriter.
- Nobel Prize winner 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.
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
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