Her favourite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible. Her position, she noted, would be almost foetal and, indeed, her intention was to create, she said, 'a womb of her own.'
Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. 2003 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004) p. 123.
My brother insists that no-one addresses him first thing in the morning, for fear of destroying his carefully-fostered aesthetic dream-state.
I don't go quite that far, but I do find that a lot of undisciplined playing around on the computer is required before I can really get down to doing anything. It's very important not to identify it as "work," I find.
What about the rest of you?
NB: This is in response to an interesting post of Martin Edmond's at Luca Antara.
This is what you do:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people: (soon ...)
