Last week, I came across a great post on Flavorwire: “Weird Writing Habits of Famous Authors.” I can’t say that I have any especially weird habits. I do prefer to write longhand before going to the keyboard. I guess that’s a little weird. [Sidenote: Did anyone else hear that they’re no longer teaching cursive writing in school? Just typing, supposedly. Sad.]
Certainly, none of my writing habits are as strange as these:
Truman Capote: Wrote lying down
“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”
John Cheever: Wrote in his undies
“To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.”
Vladmir Nabokov: Wrote only on index cards
“My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.”
Eudora Welty: Pinned pages together, so they made a “quilt”
“I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance — helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that’s when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction . . . I like pins.”
Hello! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be ok.
I’m undoubtedly enjoying your blog and look forward to new updates.
Nope, I’m not on Twitter, sorry! Maybe one day…