Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway in 1939

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 yet in his lifetime only published seven novels, some collections of short stories and two non-fiction works.

His writing started in Paris in the 1920’s, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. He carried a notebook and pencil in his pocket and liked to write in cafés, drafting his famous novel The Sun Also Rises. 

Later at his home in Key West, Florida, Hemingway did most of his writing in his bedroom, which was cluttered with books on and heaps of newspapers. His typewriter was permanently set up on top a cluttered bookcase, which he called his ‘work desk’. 

He liked to start early, sometimes not even bothering to dress and once said, ‘By writing in the mornings, you make sure that writing does get done. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next.’

His initial drafts were usually made with pencils and written on onionskin typewriter paper, kept on a clipboard to the left side of his typewriter. His handwriting has been described as ‘boyish’, without much concern for punctuation or capital letters and he had a habit of marking an X at the end of sentences. He kept half a dozen sharp pencils and said, ‘Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.’  .

When he was content with the draft, Hemingway liked to type it standing up, often for several hours without a break, with his typewriter at chest height. He used several different typewriters over the years, including Coronas and an Underwood Noiseless Portable, as well as Royal and Halda portables. (See video below.) At the end of the day’s writing, Hemingway would count the number of words he had written and record his progress on a chart made from the side of a cardboard box pinned permanently to the bedroom wall. He considered he’d done well if he could average five-hundred words a day.

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s writing habits

I remember discovering John Steinbeck’s work as a teenager. He redefined what I expect from a novel, evoking the lives of ordinary people in a way no film version ever can. Deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath and the Nobel Prize for Literature, he will always be one of my favourite writers.

Steinbeck used a large notebook to write his first drafts and each morning would ‘warm up’ by writing a note to his editor at Viking Press, Pascal ‘Pat’ Covici, on the left-hand page, before starting to write his novel on the right-hand side. He explained he felt the need to ‘have to dawdle a certain amount before I go to work.’

His original choice of pencil was a Mongol 2 3/8 F which he described as ‘quite black and holds its point well.’ Steinbeck would keep dozens of them in his pencil tray and sharpen them all with his electric pencil sharpener while he waited for inspiration to come. He insisted that his pencils must be round, as a hexagonal pencil hurt his fingers after holding it for up to six hours a day. He later progressed to a special type of pencil, the ‘Blackwing 602’. Now discontinued, it was advertised as the best pencil ever made and had wax added to the lead, so it required less effort to write with.

When ideas did come to him, Steinbeck would write as rapidly as possible and had a rule never to revise or rewrite it until the whole ideas was captured on paper.  He once said ‘Rewriting as a process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.’  He firmly believed that writing a page a day was good progress, even if he took all day.

When he was writing dialogue, Steinbeck liked to say it aloud as he wrote, arguing that it was the only way to have the sound of real speech. Interviewed by Nathaniel Benchley for The Paris Review, he said ‘I always smoke a pipe when I work, and now I have taken the black off my desk again, clear down to the wood, and have put a green blotter down. I am never satisfied with my writing surface.’

Steinbeck liked to type up his manuscripts with an olive green ‘Hermes Baby’, one of the first portable typewriters.  Less than 40cm high and 10cm wide, the Hermes Baby was way ahead of its time. Steinbeck bought it in Geneva when he was on an assignment for Colliers Magazine and couldn’t find a typist. He carried it with him on his travels and scratched the words ‘The Beast Within’ on its cover. Steinbeck’s ‘Baby’ was eventually donated by his son to the San Jose University Steinbeck Centre, where it can be seen today.

Interestingly, Steinbeck's breakthrough novel, Tortilla Flat, was rejected numerous times before being accepted by New York publisher Pascal Covici and going on to win the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco as the year's best novel by a Californian. Sadly Steinbeck's father died just before his critical success and never knew his son would become one of America’s best known and most successful writers.

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Dame Agatha Christie earned her place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist in the world with sales of over four billion books. She is also the third most widely translated author, beaten only by William Shakespeare and the Bible.

Reassuringly for anyone struggling to follow in her footsteps, after four years working on her first novel, even she was rejected by all the leading publishers of her day, before The Bodley Head press took a chance with her.

  

It seems the writing process was not easy, even for such a prolific writer.  When asked how she went about her writing, Christie said “There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off."

Plotting ideas

Agatha Christie liked to keep an exercise book to hand for jotting down plot ideas and would carefully organise her notebooks with labels. She still managed to lose track of where she had jotted things down though, as she invariably had half a dozen notebooks on the go at the same time.

One of the first authors to understand her commercial genre, she would start with an idea for a method of murder, then move to the murderer and come up with an interesting motive. Only then would she start plotting all the other suspects and what may motivate them. It was fairly easy then for her to devise the all-important ‘clues’ and plant a few false trails.

She said plots came to her suddenly. She was always on the lookout for a “neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would get it too soon”. Agatha would then go on long solitary walks across Dartmoor to think over her plot ideas and saying her dialogue out loud. At other times she said she would be walking along the street “when suddenly a splendid idea pops into your head.” She would also study the newspapers, looking for details of what she called “a clever bit if swindling.”

Developing characters

Agatha would observe people in restaurants and social gatherings as a starting point of creating her characters, jotting down their mannerisms and phrases. She had a strict rule about not using recognisable real people and felt strongly that the writer must always "make up something for yourself about them." She once said that the only time she tried to put a real person who she knew well into a book, it wasn’t a success.

She often worked on her favourite Remington Victor T portable typewriter on a sturdy table, as she didn't have a study until late in her career. Part of the secret of her astounding productivity was that she usually worked on at least two books at the same time.

Agatha also tried dictating to her secretary, Carlotta Fisher, but felt much happier writing in longhand and then typing it out, as this helped her keeping to the point.

In her later years, after she broke her ‘writing wrist’ she also used a Grundig Memorette dictaphone and said "It is odd how hearing your own voice makes you self-conscious and unable to express yourself."

Interestingly, her grandson Mathew Prichard, discovered over twenty of the old tapes in a cardboard box, long after her death. The tapes turned out to be the material on which her autobiography was based. Also discovered in 2005 were 73 handwritten notebooks, which have been published by Agatha Christie expert John Curran as Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, available on Amazon US and Amazon UK

Other Posts on the Habits of Famous Writers:

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling
(Wikimedia Image)

Rudyard Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the world in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907, at the age of 41, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature (the first English language writer to be awarded the prize and still its youngest recipient.) Kipling also declined the honour of becoming the British Poet Laureate and refused a knighthood.

After a writing career which took him around the world, Kipling settled down at Bateman's, a mansion house built in 1634 in the rural English countryside at Burwash, East Sussex. Bateman’s was Kipling's home from 1902 until his death in 1936.  It is now in the care of The National Trust and has been preserved with all its contents. Kipling’s study, with his pens, inkwell, paperweight and pipe are still there, just as he left them.

Kipling’s Writing Habits

Kipling tended to get up fairly late in the morning and would soon retreat to his study. The room was at the heart of the house and was also his library, with two walls lined with an eclectic mix of books from poetry to Pepys, naval history, bee-keeping and angling. He worked at a 17th-century walnut refectory table under the window.

He would write for several hours at a time. He was a heavy smoker and liked a messy environment, referring to his desk as ‘my dunghill’ and often screwing up the paper he was writing on and throwing it into a large Algerian wastepaper basket.

Despite his love of his untidy desk, his maid had the task of ensuring it was always laid out in a special way, with cleaned nibs on the pens and fresh supply of best quality black Indian ink in his inkwell (on which he carefully scratched the names of all his books as they were published.) As he was quite a small man, his chair was raised to the correct height for his desk on little wooden blocks.

His desk is also set out with boxes of pen nibs, rubber bands and clips. 

On his writing table sits a huge Imperial typewriter ‘The Good Companion’, of which he often complained "the beastly thing simply won't spell." Kipling only used it occasionally, asking his secretary to type out his handwritten manuscripts.

Kipling's Inspiration and 'hatching ideas'

When he needed inspiration Kipling would go for long walks in the local Sussex countryside developing ideas in his mind, which he called his ‘hatching.’ He also kept what he called his day-bed In the corner of his study, where he would sit and wait for inspiration. He once explained he was listening for his ‘daemon’ that inspired his writing and had a mantra, which was ‘drift, wait, obey.’ 

When ideas came to him he would leap up and write furiously.Kipling loved the process of writing. He would often prepare four or five drafts and once lost an entire chapter of one of his books in the mess. When he was happy with a draft he would leave it for a while, then go back to it with good black Indian ink on a brush and ‘paint out’ anything he thought wasn’t necessary. He said he always knew when a piece was finished because he heard a ‘click’ in his head.

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Visiting Thomas Hardy’s house at Max Gate

Max Gate is just outside Dorchester in Dorset and was the home of author and poet Thomas Hardy.  Originally trained as an architect, Hardy designed the house in 1885 commissioned his father and brother (both master masons) to build it.  The house was built on a one and a half acre plot which had been the site of the cottage and tollgate of a ‘turnpike keeper’ called Mack, hence the name ‘Max Gate’.  (It was later found that the house was right in the middle of a neolithic stone circle and an early Roman cemetery.)

Hardy lived at Max Gate for most of his working life and it was there that he wrote his most famous novels, including Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge  and my own favourite, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Many famous writers were regular visitors to Max Gate, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H G Wells, Robert Graves and George Bernard Shaw.

Thomas Hardy's Study

I was disappointed to realise that almost all the contents of Max Gate were sold before it was acquired by the National Trust  but largely thanks to the ‘encouragement’ of the Thomas Hardy Society,  they have tried their best to recreate the ‘feel’ of the place with similar furniture of the period.  All is not lost, however, as under a condition of his will the entire contents of Hardy’s study was relocated to the Dorset Museum, where it can be seen today.  The display includes Hardy’s collection of over four hundred books, many of which are his own first editions.  (Interestingly, Hardy moved his study at Max Gate to a different room with every book he wrote.)

It was particularly poignant to climb the narrow twisting stairway to the attic rooms of Hardy’s first wife Emma.  She asked Hardy to create her a private space where she could retreat from the world, and he was happy to do so.  Unfortunately, Emma became something of a recluse, spending most of her time in these small rooms until her death in 1912 at the age of 72.  After Emma died, Hardy searched her attic bedroom and found her writing, a small book she had written about her early life called ‘Some Recollections’  and a notebook entitled ‘What I Think Of My Husband’.  (After reading it he carefully burned the notebook in the garden, then spent the rest of his life full of remorse for the unhappiness he had caused her.)

Thomas Hardy lived in the house from 1885 until his death on 11th January, 1928. His youngest sister Kate bought Max Gate when it was auctioned in 1938 and bequeathed the house to the nation when she died in in 1940. Her wish was that income could be generated to pay for the purchase and upkeep of the old cottage at Higher Bockhampton where her brother had been born 100 years earlier.  (See Visiting Thomas Hardy's Birthplace.)

Visiting Thomas Hardy's Birthplace

There is a road leading directly to the first home of writer Thomas Hardy in Bockhampton but I recommend taking the narrow footpath through the woods.  Set in a particularly peaceful and tranquil part of the Dorset countryside, the evocative smell of wood smoke drifts towards you before the old thatched cottage comes into sight. Even though my visit was on a hot summer afternoon, The National Trust, who own the cottage, had a log fire burning to help visitors travel back in time.

Built by Hardy’s great-grandfather and unaltered since his time, his early novels Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd were written there.  The thatch on the roof needs replacing and the original contents of the cottage have long since disappeared but I liked the way the National Trust have recreated how it may have looked, keeping a sense of a family home that was actually lived in.

Thomas Hardy was born in the cottage on 2^nd June 1840 six months after his parents were married.  His father, also called Thomas, was a stonemason and local builder. His mother Jemima was a servant and cook and reportedly had no wish to marry before she became pregnant. (She warned the young Hardy not to make the same mistake, a theme he explored several times in his writing.) Surprisingly literate, Jemima educated Thomas until he started school at the age of eight. His father taught him to play the fiddle and paid for him to attend a reputable school in Dorchester, a three-mile walk away.  Hardy did well at school and went on to qualify as an architect, although his ambition n was always to be a successful writer.

It has been said that Thomas Hardy was reticent about his humble upbringing and silent about his birthplace until well into his seventies. From what I know of him I think he would be proud, however, to see how his birthplace has become a worthy monument to his writing talent.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hardys-birthplace/

Book Review: Stephen King: On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ is a useful read for anyone who writes – or would like to.  I grew up on Stephen King’s thrillers without really knowing anything about the man who wrote them.  I read ‘On Writing’ when it was first published but have written several books since then, so it was interesting to see if it was still as good.

It was better.  Ten years have done nothing to diminish the power of the story telling that runs through this book.  There are also some great quotes that passed me by on the original reading (or perhaps slipped into my subconscious)  such as ‘the editor is always right’ and ‘2^nd draft = 1^st draft – 10%.’  It’s easy to see how King has drawn on his childhood experiences in character development.  Growing up in poverty was an adventure - and no TV seems to have been a distinct advantage.  Undaunted by his growing pile of rejection slips, Stephen King just knew he was meant to write and nothing was going to stop him.

I really liked his description of the moment he had his first big advance  (for Carrie).  The early draft had been rescued from the waste bin by his wife. (She smoothed out all the crumpled balls of paper and said she wanted to hear the rest of the story.  The film version made $33.8 million in the U.S. alone).

Although there are plenty of useful tips for writers throughout, the most thought provoking part of this book is the final section, ‘On Living: A Postscript.’  King explains, ‘Writing is not life, but I think that it can be a way back to life.  That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.’  You have to read it.

George Bernard Shaw's Rotating Writing Hut

Shaw Corner

It was fascinating to visit George Bernard Shaw’s Edwardian villa, ‘Shaw Corner’ in the tiny Hertfordshire village of Ayot St Lawrence, where he lived for over 40 years from 1906 and wrote some of his most famous plays.  Born in Dublin, on 26 July 1856, George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar (for his contributions to literature and the film My Fair Lady, based on his play 'Pygmalion'.)  A passionate Socialist, Shaw used his fame to campaign for improvements to social injustice and equality.

Shaw Corner has been preserved by The National Trust much as he left it, so there is a real sense of how it must have been to live and work there.  I was particularly interested in his study, where his writing desk faces the window looking out across the lawns and gardens.  Shaw wrote fifty-two plays and five novels in his lifetime and always aimed to write at least five pages every day, regardless of whatever else was going on in his life. 

George Bernard Shaw's study

The Remington typewriter on his desk was apparently reserved for correspondence, however, as much of his writing was done in a shed at the bottom of his garden. Still in good condition, Shaw’s hut is famous for a special design feature that meant it could be easily rotated to make best use of the available light. (Shaw called his writing hut ‘London’ so that unwanted visitors could be told he was ‘visiting the capital’.)  A report in the 1932 Modern Mechanix  magazine  said "Mr. Shaw has a plan to keep the sun shining on him constantly while he works. He has constructed a small hut on his grounds that is built on a turntable. When the morning sun shifts, he merely places his shoulder against the side of the hut and gives it a push so that the warming beams fall through his window at the correct angle.  Mr. Shaw’s plan to keep the sun shining on him is a simple health measure, and not a wanton eccentricity.  The author has spent most of his life out of doors, but when he moved to London he didn’t get as much sun as he thought he needed.  Hence the hut."

Shaw's Rotating Writing Hut

George Bernard Shaw's writing hut also featured in The Guardian's Writers' Rooms series, where his biographer Michael Holroyd points out that this was also where Shaw went to hide from people. As well as the turntable technology, Shaw’s writing hut included “an electric heater, a typewriter, a bunk for Napoleonic naps and a telephone to the house which could be used for emergencies such as lunch: surely everything a writer could need."  

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Box
(Courtesy of the British Library) 

Jane's Writing Habits

Most of Jane Austen’s best known writing was done at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, where she revised Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey and wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion.

Jane would try to write every day, close to a window for the light, using an amazingly small walnut table (which survives at the Chawton Cottage Museum) and a 'writing box' thought to have been a gift from her father. This can be seen at the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library and was donated in 1999 by Joan Austen-Leigh, a direct descendent of Jane Austen's brother James. Described as 'a small chest which opens to reveal a writing surface and storage space for inkpot and writing implements' this was a convenient way to make sure she could quickly start writing.  (I wonder what she would have made of modern lap tops which take an eternity to 'boot up')

She wrote initially on small slips of paper, which fitted easily into her writing box. (This may have given rise to the story that she would quickly hide her writing if she heard the door creak - now thought by some experts to be unlikely). As her style developed, Jane's manuscripts were mostly written on 'booklets' of about 190 x 120 mm, probably made by cutting down half sheets of ‘post’ writing paper to form quires of up to eight leaves (16 pages) which were assembled inside one another to make fatter booklets.

Jane wrote using a quill pen that she dipped in a small inkwell. I have tried writing with a quill and found it quite satisfying, once you become used to it. The ink used by Jane was made from iron gall, which was tannin mixed with iron sulphate, some gum arabic and a little water. As well as being indelible, it was cheap and readily available.  When exposed to the air the ink would change from a pale gray to a rich blue-black then gradually turn brown as the iron oxidises.

Her way of writing was to mane an initial draft, often crossing out phrases or whole sentences until she was happy with them, then revise the whole work. It seems that reading the draft aloud to her friends and family was an important part of the process, particularly to her sister Cassandra.

Looking at the surviving manuscripts it is easy to see that Jane was not troubled by perfecting the grammar or punctuation as she wrote.  Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University studied over a thousand original handwritten pages of Austen's unpublished writings and points out that they feature blots, crossing outs and "a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing".

 Draft manuscript of Jane Austen’s
unfinished novel The Watsons
(Courtesy of the Bodleian Library)

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Guest Post by Catherine Schaff-Stump: So, you want to be a writer, do you?

Catherine Schaff-Stump

Let's talk about the quality that all writers must have before all things. Before tenacity. Before skill. Before work ethic. Let's talk about patience.  Where is the first place you will encounter a need for patience? With your manuscript. You will finish it, and you will want to send it away. Don't. Put it in a drawer for a couple of months, and then work on revising it. 

Get some feedback on it, and then, after a few times through it, send it out. I rework mine several times, and if it's not taken on somewhere, chances are good I will do substantial revisions on it sometime in the future. Creating a good work of art isn't quick. I'm getting the years perspective in my mind's eye, you betcha.  

After completing the work, the next place you'll need patience is when you submit your work. The urgency you will feel as you wait for the world to give you feedback will be in direct contrast to the size of the abyss you send your work into. Be mellow about it. Own your patience. Get on with your life. You can't sit by the computer refreshing your inbox and hoping. If you wander the Internet landscape, you'll hear about writers getting book deals years after they've submitted to slush. Or worse, rejections, years after. Give over the response to the universe, and do something else.  

It can take a long time after you've gotten an agent to sell a book to an editor. It can take a long time to get your career balanced where you want it. It can take a long time to get an acceptance from a box store market. If your work is accepted, you'll need patience continually. Waiting for the edits, waiting for the publication, waiting for the proofs, waiting for the check, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

This is the nature of publishing. I've heard that the cycle of a book going from accepted manuscript to published product is about two years at a minimum after you've done all the writing, revising, and shopping around. Writing taken from this perspective seems to be an occupation for the self-flagellating type A. You'd best become a type B mellow person in regard to your writing life. Given this information, I think if you're looking for a life of recognition and fame, petty crime is better. 

There's another piece to this, and that's what happens to the impatient. Some writers give up. I say you should, absolutely, if you can. Waiting is not satisfying. Some writers self-publish. I say if you do, make sure you want to be a PR person, an editor, and a sales force, in addition to writing books. Some writers publish in small press, or publish for free. I have done this, but if you do it, consider the implications for your career. Strangely enough, this doesn't work linearly, like it does in almost every other occupation. Consider the reputation of the venue, how much you'll be paid for your work, and the overall impact on your writing career. I'll just assume you're waiting for one of those. Here I am. Waiting. 

Current manuscripts given over to the cosmos. Writing the next project. Walking the walk. Talking the talk. Waiting for the next opportunity to revise. Waiting for the agent, the sale, the publishing. Waiting for one short story to come out. Waiting for the edits on another. Waiting for the rejections, the partials, the fulls, the revision requests. Waiting for chance and skill to combine together into opportunity. Not even chewing my fingernails. Nope. Because this is the writer's life. Writing, sending, waiting, rejecting, rewriting, sending, waiting. With the occasional acceptance to keep things interesting. I'm walking tall. I'm a writer. You? 

Do you have the patience and the guts to send your work out, and wait for your writing to be good enough to get you the results you're hoping for? And then the ability to wait some more while those pieces fall into place? I hear Solitaire passes the time when you're tired of writing the next thing. Me? I sew, talk long walks with my husband, and pet my cats.

Catherine Schaff-Stump is a writer, teacher, researcher and novelist based in Iowa. Catherine's blog can be found at Writer Tamago and she can be followed on twitter at @cathschaffstump 

Writing habits: Stephen King

Stephen King

Stephen King was one of my favourite authors when I was younger. I recently found his book of short stories Just After Sunset  and was reminded why. 

In the introduction he describes his early career, when he was teaching English and working in an industrial laundry at nights. He was earning just enough to support his habits of buying books, beer and cigarettes (in that order).

Stephen was also writing short stories for magazines and says he wrote them fast and hard in the laundry room on his wife’s little Olivetti portable.  There was no time to think about structure or character development so he was just ‘flying by the seat of his pants’. 

The interesting thing for me was that he goes on to say how, even for him, short story writing is a ‘fragile craft’ easily forgotten if not used constantly.

Stephen King’s rigorous writing schedule

In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft  Stephen King suggests working to a rigorous writing schedule and explains that he writes ten pages a day, six days a week, even on holidays. That is about a thousand words a day – half my target but when I think about it my average output is probably less once I take into account the days when I don’t write anything. 

The importance of reading

King also stresses the importance of reading other people’s work and says ‘If you want to write, you must read a lot and write a lot.’  It may seem obvious but are you reading as much as you used to?  As well as introducing you to new styles and plot structures, regular reading helps you to develop what he calls an ‘intimacy with the process of writing’.  If you read a lot and often it will help you to understand what works - and what doesn’t.

I always thought of myself as a voracious reader and would routinely get through my limit five library books every two weeks.  I would also get through various paperbacks and of course my own collection of books, which I would re-read often.   Looking back I realised that television and my lifestyle changed all this without me realising it. 

I remembered a quote from Joanna Penn that “TV was banished from our house and since then I have written four books.”  I’m not sure I am ready for such a big step but I took the television out of the bedroom and immediately found that I am reading more again – Stephen King would definitely approve.

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

Agatha Christie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits

George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Thomas Hardy’s Writing Habits

Writing habits: Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the tiny hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, Dorset. His father was a bricklayer and it was his mother who was well educated and encouraged his interest in literature. One of my favourite novels of all time is Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which Hardy wrote when he was about the same age as I am now, so as a new novelist I am very interested in how he wrote. 

Hardy’s daily writing routine

Each morning at about nine Hardy would have a cup of tea and a breakfast of bacon with brown sugar sprinkled over it.  Then he would read The Times newspaper and go for a short walk.

At almost exactly ten in the morning he would sit at the simple desk in his study and write.  His study was at the back of the house and rarely cleaned, as he would not let his cleaner touch his papers.   He used a dipping pen with an inkwell and had on his desk a calendar that was always showing Monday 7 March – the date he met his first wife Emma, who died in 1912.

He would continue to work through the day and was quoted as saying his best work was done before he had his dinner.

Dorset writing trousers

Thomas Hardy always wore an old pair of trousers when he wrote, that eventually became so worn that he repaired them with string. In the colder weather he wore an old shawl over his shoulders.  His study had a coal fire for heating but was usually warm as it was over the kitchen - but his cottage never had gas or electricity or even a telephone to distract him.

Hardy’s notebook sketches

In the same way that artists make sketches, capturing details of light and colour for future reference, Hardy’s surviving notebooks show he recorded in great detail the things he saw around him, the sound and sensations of a thunderstorm, the colours of a Dorset sunset. 

He has always wanted to be a poet and his notes suggesst this influenced his observation of the world. He also wrote about particular details of his life.  For example, he wrote several pages of notes on the mail coach guard from London to Dorchester, including as much detail as he could about the man’s uniform and his life.

Working with an Editor

As he developed as a writer, Hardy would send each section of writing he completed to his editor, Leslie Stephen, for comment and review.  Stephen was the editor of the influential Victorian Cornhill literary magazine and extremely well connected in the Victorian literary world. He did however encourage Hardy to spend less time describing Dorset life and encouraged him to get to the action more quickly!

Failure and success

In 1867 Hardy’s first novel The Poor Man and the Lady, was rejected by publishers and he was so discouraged he went back to working as an architect. His first attempt at a novel was harshly described as a ‘story with no plot' so he re-wrote it as Desperate Remedies, which was in turn criticised for being all plot - a ‘series of accidents, coincidences and improbabilities’.

Desperate Remedies was published, but the publisher William Tinsley demanded Hardy pay £75 (a small fortune at the time) to be repaid out of any profits.  Hardy lost his money as his subjects were considered too controversial for Victorian sensitivities.

Tess was commissioned in 1889 by Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau who then rejected it, describing the book as 'blasphemous and obscene'. Hardy did his best to interest other publishers but was rejected by them all. 

It wasn’t until Tess of the d’Urbervilles was serialised in the Graphic illustrated magazine that he finally saw success.  Even then, the editor of the Graphic, Arthur Locker, demanded that the seduction of Tess and other scenes considered unsuitable for his readers were removed.

Lessons for new authors?

This is the briefest account of how Thomas Hardy worked but there are clear lessons that remain very true today about persevering in the face of rejection.  Time to put on my writing trousers!

Tony Riches

Other posts about the habits of famous writers:

AgathaChristie’s Writing Habits

Daphne du Maurier’s Writing Habits

Dean Koontz’s Writing Habits

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Habits
George Orwell's Writing Habits

Jane Austen's Writing Habits

John Steinbeck’s Writing Habits

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

Roald Dahl's Writing Habits

Rudyard Kipling's Writing Habits

Stephen King's Writing Habits 

Visit to Charles Kingsley’s House in Clovelly

Charles Kingsley

The Reverend Charles Kingsley was a Victorian author and friend of John Ruskin and Charles Dickens. He is best known for being one of the first prominent Victorians to publicly recognise the importance of Origin of the Species, having been sent an advance copy for review by Charles Darwin.

The Water Babies

Kingsley was a prolific poet and author but for me it was his moral tale The Water Babies that leaves a lasting memory.  It was one of the first allegorical works I read as a child, full of Victorian values (and prejudices) and profound ideas, like that no one can say that something they have never seen, such as a human soul - or a water baby – can not exist.  A founder of Christian Socialism, Kingsley used The Water Babies to successfully draw public attention to the scandal of child labour.

Arriving at Clovelly

Charles Kinsley lived in the North Devon coastal village of Clovelly, where his father was the curate. We arrived by sea, and found the tiny fourteenth century harbour was too small for our yacht so we anchored in the bay and rowed ashore, as most visitors would have done in the past. 

The main street in Clovelly is a steep cobbled path which is famous for the donkeys which haul everything up the hill on special wooden sledges.  We found Charles Kingsley’s house about half way up the hill.  As with most of the houses in Clovelly, it was very small but well preserved.

Animatronic Charles Kingsley?

Tourism has been important to Closely since Victorian times but it remains largely uncommercialised and the interpretation of Kinsgley’s house is quaintly well intended. There is a small museum, with an odd animated display of Charles Kingsley working in his study and a loud recital of his famous poem ‘The Three Fishers’ running in the background.  

Despite this it was easy to visualise Kingsley at his desk writing Westward Ho! in 1855 and sending long letters to his influential friends campaigning on behalf of the poor.

I shall leave the last word on the village to Charles Kinsgley:

"Suddenly a hot gleam of sunlight fell upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs and little scraps of garden courtyard, and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies which fluttered from the woodland down to the garden."