Daily Rituals – how artists work

Daily Rituals is a book about the working habits of creative people, from artists and composers to philosophers and scientists. How and when they work, and how they get from a blank sheet to a finished piece. I initially came across it when it was a blog, Daily Routines. As I do creative work I was really interested in how other people create their work and browsed through the blog for a while. It was really interesting, but found it kind of disjointed and difficult to digest. It also hadn’t been updated for a while, so I copied it into my RSS reader to catch anything new posted. A while after that Mason Currey, the author, posted that he was releasing the content of the blog as a book, I jumped at the chance to get it.

While the blog had been largely a stream of consciousness effort, with Currey adding pieces as he found them, the book is a more polished work. It provides tons of examples of autobiographical or anecdotal accounts of artists working habits. They are ordered so that you deal with several related, or contemporaneous, people at once. It’s an interesting experience to dive into the working habits of different people from different centuries, seeing how they went about finding their muse. There were some artists in the book who took a very measured approach. Rising at the same time each morning, putting in a solid 8 hours work and then finishing for the day. While other worked in fits and starts. Spending weeks frequenting cafes or avoiding working to then engage in mammoth writing sessions for up to 20 hours a day. I initially read the book through, devouring all that it had to offer, but one of the advantages of this book is that you can flip it open on any page and find something interesting and useful.

Daily Rituals is a really interesting book. Currey did a great job of collecting a wealth of creative working habits from across the spectrum. I’m interested now to see if I can incorporate some of the working habits from the different artists into my own routines. If their ideas about how and when work should be done will allow me to increase my creativity and productivity.

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