Artists in Action

As part of his slow buildup to writing, Franz Kafka devoted 10 minutes to the "Müller technique"—a series of swings, stretches, and body-weight exercises that he performed naked at the window; he did an additional 10 minutes after he had finished writing. P. G. Wodehouse employed a similar regimen, performing a series of 12 callisthenic exercises every morning after waking.

Igor Stravinsky also did exercise right after he woke up. And if he felt blocked while composing later, he might execute a brief head stand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.”

Taking breaks: So many of the habits in this series—exercising, smoking, napping, walking, caffeinating, masturbating—are really just excuses to take a break. That’s OK! Breaks are good. No one can work nonstop—and if you can, you probably shouldn’t. A lot of artists have noted that it’s during breaks that the “real” work happens and new ideas or insights spring to mind.

The composer Steve Reich relies on this method. “If I can get in a couple hours of work, then I just have to have a cup of tea or I have to run an errand to get a little bit of a break,” he told me. “And then I come back. But those can be very fruitful pauses, especially if there’s a little problem that comes up. The best thing to do is to just leave it and put your mind somewhere else, and not always but often the solution to that problem will bubble up spontaneously.”

When Hemingway got bogged down in his fiction writing, he would take breaks to answer letters. Charles Darwin took time off in the morning to review the day’s mail and to listen to his wife read aloud from whatever novel they were working their way through. L. Frank Baum alternated between writing and gardening, puttering about in his flower beds while he tried to work out ideas for his books. “My characters just won’t do what I want them to,” he would explain.

Of course, there is a fine line between taking a much-needed break and procrastinating—but as we’ve seen, procrastinating can have its benefits, too. If you’re truly obsessed with a problem in your work, some part of your brain will be gnawing away at it all the time. In some sense, then, artists are always working, even when they’re not.

Mason Currey is the author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.