Mason Currey

During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10:00 A.M. and midnight—a personal record.) ‘I write when the spirit moves me,’ Faulkner said, ‘and the spirit moves me every day.’

‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ [Chuck] Close says. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’

[John Updike] told another interviewer that he was careful to give at least three hours a day to the writing project at hand; otherwise, he said, there was a risk he might forget what it’s about. A solid routine, he added, ‘saves you from giving up.’

[George Gershwin] was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year. It was better to work every day. ‘Like the pugilist,’ Gershwin said, ‘the songwriter must always keep in training.’

‘I must write every day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.’ This is Tolstoy in one of the relatively few diary entries he made during the mid-1860s, when he was deep into the writing of War and Peace.

[Maya Angelou] enjoys pushing herself to the limits of her ability. ‘I have always got to be the best,’ she has said. ‘I’m absolutely compulsive, I admit it. I don’t see that as a negative.’