Daniel Burton's Reviews > Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

What a delightful little read. You'll find here one to two-page summaries of how some of the great artists, scientists, writers, movie makers, composers, and more worked. Each is short and sweet, perfect for a quick bit of motivation or inspiration between other tasks. It fills the place that exists between one project and another, one meeting and the next.

In fact, Daily Rituals was born out of one of those very moments. Mason Currey was under deadline
and avoiding writing an article for the publication he worked for at the time. He began to research how the great writers worked, surfing the internet to find out. Before long, he had started a blog and was writing about the work habits of the men and women he was reading about. From that blog came the book.

I read it while walking into the office from the parking garage, occasionally skipping them if the individual--an artist or writer--was one with which I was unfamiliar. The peeks into the lives of these extremely successful people was fascinating, if massively abridged. The rituals, or routines, or, maybe lack of routines, were varied as the artists (let's just call them all artists, and that includes all of them whether they were or not). Some worked mornings, some in the evening. Asimov worked all day every day; others, only for a few hours in the morning, or a few in the evening. In fact, many of them seemed to work a mere two to four hours each day. Darwin took decades to write his book, and he hated society, hiding from the world in his country home. Warhol would call his agent each morning to detail the entire previous day for a journal that was used for tax purposes. Dickens would take long walks through London to collect characters and scenes for his serialized stories.

It was a fun read and inspirational. I recommend it.