How-to manuals on writing inevitably talk about the importance of good habits: a regular schedule (morning, noon, or night), a comfortable place to work (quiet, noisy, or somewhere in between), and the discipline of knowing that writing is often hard work (a certain number of words each day, a pre- or post-writing ritual like going for a walk or napping or making a note about where to start the following day). The important thing, they say, is finding out what works best for you.
His walking impelled, through its very regularity, a shift in perspective and forward movement - down into the London streets, in composition, in life..But rarely is there a good explanation of why habits are important, or just how important they really are. For this, we can turn to the real lives of fiction writers.
Charles Dickens (The Boston Daily Advertiser, 1868).
Charles Dickens knew something about habit, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s recent biography Knowing Dickens makes clear. Dickens had a habit of walking the streets of London, ten miles—sometimes as much as fifteen and twenty miles—often at night. To walk for physical release from strenuous mental labor, to roam in search of scraps of new material or whole new fictional worlds, to calm the effects of his intense engagement with his characters, to allay the restlessness of artistic uncertainty: Dickens intimately knew another side to habit than the static repetition and unconscious compulsion that typify many of his characters. His walking impelled, through its very regularity, a shift in perspective and forward movement—down into the London streets, in composition, in life.
In his fifties, Dickens’s already fragile health began to decline, and stories of the pain in his left foot and his walking in spite of it proliferated, as Bodenheimer tells us:
… in February 1865, he reported being laid up with a “wounded foot” that he explained to friends as “a frost-bitten foot, from much walking in deep Kentish snow.” Forster got a full-blown explanation: he had perpetually wet feet in boots that swelled and shrank; he had repeatedly forced his boot onto a swollen left foot, and continued his rituals of work and walking, until he found himself lame in the snow, three miles from home. The dogs, he reported, were terrified. The pain, causing “sleepless agony,” went on for two months. Then he returned to his ten miles a day, but he could not wear shoes or boots in the evenings, and he ordered the first of several extra-large boots for his left foot. “Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an end of me” he exclaimed to Forster. (1)
On the ninth of June 1870, Dickens was dead of a stroke. In the prior weeks, his correspondents all heard how he had been “dead-lame” for three weeks: “I have been subject for a few years past to Neuralgic attack in the foot, originating in over walking in deep snow and revived by a hard winter in America… Deprivation of my usual walks is a very serious matter to me, as I cannot work unless I have my constant exercise.” (2) Bodenheimer, who focuses on the connection to Bleak House (1852) concludes, “Somewhere in Dickens’s inner world Lady Dedlock had triumphed, walking to her death through the snow.”
For Woolf, the capacity to receive violent shocks is what made her a writer; in her case, a shock was followed by a desire to explain it.Virginia Woolf also knew about habit’s potential as a matrix for creativity. In her memoir Moments of Being, Woolf writes of exceptional moments that stand out in memory and lend themselves to story-telling, moments in which something real makes itself known and life seems vivid and shocking and true. Yet these clear, discrete shocks or “moments of being” are embedded in many more “moments of non-being,” the dull cotton wool of everyday life, the unconscious parts of each day in which one “walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner.” (3)
For Woolf, the capacity to receive violent shocks is what made her a writer; in her case, a shock was followed by a desire to explain it. The shocks, however, are dependent on all the boring, forgettable things that wad our everyday lives, the dull background against which surprise, laughter, revelation—and writing—emerge.
Roger Fry, Portrait of Virginia Woolf (1917).
To put an image to this idea, here is what Woolf had to say about the importance of habits in accessing the depths of a writer’s material, in this case her earliest memories and childhood experiences:
The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason – that it destroys the fullness of life – any break – like that of house moving – causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. (4)
Surely, sometimes we have to move house, and much of daily life is anything but peaceful. But is the “present” of your writing life as smooth as it can be? Habitual enough to bare your feet and descend into the stream?
1 Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens (Ithaca: Cornell U Press, 2007), 204.
2 qtd. in Bodenheimer, 204.
3 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985), 70.
4 Woolf, 98.