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Sometimes I am asked about this, and my answer is 'put on some sweatpants, pour a cup of coffee, and begin.'
Maybe I should step up my game. In today's Wall Street Journal, eleven authors shared their daily writing habits.
Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.
He wrote his first novel, "The Mezzanine," by dictating to a voice recorder during his commute to work. For his recent novel "The Anthologist," a first-person narrative by a frustrated poet who's struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology, he grew out a beard to resemble his character, put on a floppy brown hat, set up a video camera on a tripod and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures. He transcribed about 40 hours worth of tape, and ended up with some 1,000 pages of notes and transcription. Creating the voice of a rambling professor "was something I had to work on a lot in order to get the feeling of being sloppy," said Mr. Baker.
Meanwhile, Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times. Hilary Mantel, whose excellent "Wolf Hall" I am reading right now, puts notes on a seven-foot-tall bulletin board she keeps in her kitchen.
I can relate most to the talented Kate Christensen:
Ms. Christensen, who works out of her home in Tribeca, says a lot of her writing time is spent "not writing." Most mornings, she does housework, writes emails and talks on the phone to avoid facing her work.
