But it's where I work, it is habit and the house is, for most of the daytime hours during the week, empty and quiet. I have a small office in our basement, with the emphasis on small - most closets would be insulted to be associated with my office. It's important to note here that much of my routine revolves around the fact that I work at home. Most people, for example, would not think that a routine means working from 8:45 to 9:45, doing five minutes of yoga, making a coffee, filling the water in the bird bath, working from 10:20 to 11, playing a couple of games of online backgammon, chatting with an editor for 15 minutes, checking email, eating lunch … and then requiring a rest to recover from it all. And because the only things creative people have to offer the world (and to make a living) are what they can squeeze out of their hearts and minds, we tend to get a little obsessed with our routines - though that routine might not always look the part. The point is that routine is central to creativity. Alice Munro worked precisely from 8 to 11 every morning of every day. Stephen King does six pages a day, no more, no less. Charles Dickens' son said of his father that, "no city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he." Mark Twain used to count words. Graham Greene wrote 1,000 words a day and then stopped, whether that took him an hour or 10 hours. There are many writers who need strictly imposed self-discipline in order to create. Trust me, if I sat around waiting for my muse to arrive, I'd write a couple of paragraphs a year. Auden.Īnother myth is that creative people speak through their muses. "Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition," wrote the poet W.H. The truth, at least for me and most of the creative people I know, is that routine and orderliness and regularity are vital to the creative process. That the only way we can free up our imagination is to treat every day like a piñata we've got to bash open to see what spills out. That's something of a myth or misconception about writers and creative people namely, that we lead lives of wild unpredictability, spontaneity and unshackled imaginative flights of fancy. But when it comes to periods when I need to hunker down and put words on paper, disruption is not advisable, at least not for me. Typically, such experiences involve the research or reporting phase of a project. As someone who writes both creatively and journalistically, I often have to step out of my comfort zone, take some chances, upset patterns. Who knows?Īll I know is that I will freely admit I like my working conditions to be as routine as possible. Maybe it was when Tonya Harding announced she had a new routine for the Olympics. Perhaps it was during the 1970s when the boomers believed every single person had a unique genius to uncover and doing something routine was seen as soul-harming. Maybe it came with the advent of industrialization and the notion of the factory worker doing the exact same thing 800 times a day. Also, the little creature does something different every day-it's madness, thinks the big creature.Ĭan these two creatures learn to appreciate each other? Is the island big enough for both of them? Told with heart and humor, this is a story about being open to new ways of doing things.I'm not sure at what point in our current era the word routine took on the negative connotations now attached to it. And instead of collecting shells, he collects.well, everything else. Instead of saying hello to the fish, he swims with them. He does not like pineapples or bananas, but he does like coconuts. At first the big creature is excited to show the little creature around and explain how things are done on the island, but the small creature has his own ideas. That is, until a small boat carrying a very small creature with small teeth, small eyes, and very, very small feet arrives on the island. It is exactly the way the big creature likes it. He gets up in the morning, eats three pineapples and two bananas, collects shells, says hello to the fish, rocks, trees, and crabs of the island before he eats three more pineapples and two bananas, and finally goes to bed. Every day the creature does the exact same things in the exact same order. On the island of Habit, there lives a very big creature with big teeth, big eyes, and very big feet. A story for creatures of habit big and small who might be surprised by the joy of trying something new.
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