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精美可爱的一本书，介绍了作家们写作的习惯和写作时所处的空间。大部分作家其实都蛮自律的，都有固定的写作时间和运动的习惯，让我想到了以前看过的一个有趣网站Daily Routines。书中一些让我印象深刻的点：海明威是站立办公的先驱；《查泰莱夫人的情人》竟然是劳伦斯在树下写的——情欲竟然是在大自然中被写就……

Highlights

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Isabel Allende

Allende starts every new novel on 8 January, what she calls her 'sacred day', after the letter she wrote on that day to her dying grandfather evolved into The House of the Spirits (she kept the typewriter she used to write it on her desk as a momento though she now writes with a computer).
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Charles Dickens

He also had rows of dummy bookcases with fake book spines installed at Tavistock House and Gad's Hill by his favoured bookbinder Thomas Eeles. These had mainly humorous titles - Five Minutes in China (three volumes), Cats' Lives (nine volumes) - though some were more personal ('Mag's Diversions' was an early working title for David Copperfield).

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Ernest Hemingway

He knocked off about noon when he felt 'empty' but with an idea of what would come next tomorrow when he started writing again - he said that wait until the next day's writing began was hard to get through.

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Stephen King

His routine is very regulated, sitting in the same seat and keeping his paperwork in the same place, which he says helps to concentrate his mind on the task in hand. He is very keen on the idea of writers having a definite goal for each writing session, whatever the wordcount.

As he says in his book about the art of writing: 'Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

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D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence also enjoyed writing among the trees close where he lived in the Black Forest village of Ebersteinburg, Bader Baden, Germany. 'I go off by myself into the woods and write each morning,' he wrote in a letter to the painter Jan Juta in June, 1921. 'I find a forest such a strange stimulus - the trees are like living company. They seem to give off something dynamic and secret, and anti-human - or non-human. Especially fir-trees.'

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Jack London

“Every time I sit down to write, it is with great disgust.”

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Margaret Mitchell

What was more unusual was what she did with the manuscript in her writing room. As she finished chapters, she put them in manila envelopes so that visitors to the house would not see what she was working on. Gradually these piled up in her living room, and were used to fix the sofa's wobbly leg and as pads for writing down shopping lists and telephone messages.

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"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say." Virginia Woolf

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Toby - John Steinbeck's much loved Irish Setter, who unfortunately ate half of an early draft of Of Mice and Men.