Many writers are known for distinctive habits or peculiar rituals that range from the meticulous to the outright bizarre, all in pursuit of fostering creativity or banishing distractions. Here are some of the more unusual methods used by renowned writers.
The French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas had a specific color-coded system for the shade of paper on which he wrote. For poetry, he used yellow paper, for fiction, blue paper, and for articles, pink paper. Supposedly, he once ran out of blue paper when writing a work of fiction and had to resort to a cream-colored pad instead. Dumas believed his fiction suffered as a result!
The American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe also required specific writing materials. Poe used long, narrow sheets of parchment, and then sealed them together using wax. After finishing writing, he would roll the parchment into scrolls and store them in his writing desk. Jack Kerouac, the famed pioneer of the Beat Generation, would use a similar method decades later when writing his classic 1957 novel On the Road. Kerouac used a single 120-foot (36.6-m) roll of paper that he taped together so he wouldn’t need to interrupt his writing flow to reload his typewriter. This allowed Kerouac to keep up a rapid pace and he finished the book in three weeks, aided by the copious amounts of coffee and Benzedrine he consumed.
Kerouac certainly wasn’t the only author to boost his creative process with the help of stimulants. The English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley advocated the creative benefits of LSD, while Hunter S. Thompson allegedly started his writing days at 3 pm, fueled by alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine. The English author Agatha Christie, famous for her successful detective novels, had a more wholesome writing routine. She found creative inspiration by eating apples in the bathtub, a ritual that apparently helped with developing her mystery plot lines. Another writer with a fondness for apples was Friedrich Schiller. However, the German poet and playwright preferred sniffing his apples for inspiration, rather than eating them. Schiller used to leave rotting apples in a drawer of his writing desk and would supposedly take a whiff of the foul odor when faced with writer’s block. According to his wife, “he could not live or work” without this strange ritual.
For some writers, a change of scene is crucial to encourage inspiration. Renowned memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou seldom wrote at home but preferred to rent a nearby hotel room to do her writing. Rising early, she wrote until the afternoon, insisting on uninterrupted solitude by instructing staff to leave her in peace and remove all pictures from the walls to eliminate distractions. In a similar pursuit of isolation for undisturbed writing, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw went one step further and built a shed specifically for this purpose. The shed was mounted on a revolving base, which meant it could be moved to allow sunlight to enter throughout the day or for a change of scenery. Shaw named the shed “London,” which helped him avoid interruptions. When asked about Shaw’s whereabouts, his house staff could honestly answer that he was “in London.”
What’s weird about that?
- Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, supposedly puts on a pair of gravity boots and hangs upside down when struggling for inspiration.
- Chilean-American author Isabelle Allende always starts writing her novels on the same day, January 8th.
- When writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo locked away his clothes and wrote in a long knitted shawl to discourage himself from being tempted to leave the house and abandon his writing desk.
