Schiller - kept rotting apples in his desk to whiff (scientifically, the smell of spiced apples has a stimulating effect)
W.H. Auden - drank colossal amounts of tea
Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and “many others” - felt they did their best work in the nude
Benjamin Franklin - wrote while soaking the the bathtub (he also brought the first tub to America in the 1780s)
D.H. Lawrence - climbed naked up mulberry trees
Alexandre Dumas - wrote his non-fiction on rose-coloured paper, fiction on blue, poetry on yellow; he would eat an apple under the Arc de Triomphe at 7am every morning
George Sand - went straight from making love in bed to her writing desk
Voltaire - used his lover’s naked back as a writing desk
Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Truman Capote - wrote lying down; Capote declared himself “a completely horizontal writer”
Edgar Allen Poe - supposedly wrote with a cat on his shoulder
Ernest Hemingway - wrote standing, not by preference but due to a back injury in a plane crash
Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll - wrote standing
Samuel Coleridge - took 2 grains of opium before writing
T.S. Eliot - preferred writing when he had a head cold
William Gass - walk around photographing for a couple of hours before writing: “the rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city, filth and decay mainly” — asked by the author “And you don’t consider this unusual?” his answer, “Not for me”
Amy Clampitt - writes sitting behind a window, in the city, on a train or by the seaside
Mary Lee Settle - straight to the typewriter out of bed, still groggy
J.M.W. Turner (landscape painter) - tied to the mast of a ship during a massive storm
from A Natural History of the Senses (1990) by Diane Ackerman
The moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to indulge whatever seemingly “crazy” whims you need to in order to feel inspired!
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