You attempted all the tried and true tricks
to removing writer’s block, but did you soak your feet in ice water? Did you soundproof your walls and ceiling
with cork? Hemingway is rumored to have
written The Old Man and The Sea while
standing up at his typewriter! Here are some truly bizarre writing block
tips according to an article at MentalFloss.com:
1. Voltaire skipped lunch. Instead of a
mid-day meal, the French titan sustained himself with chocolate and up to 40 cups of coffee per day.
2. The dark, gruesome work of Edgar
Allan Poe was written under the supervision of a cat. The tabby Catterina sat
on the writer's lap or perched on his
shoulder.
3. Sir Walter Scott preferred to write
in motion, often while riding his horse.
4. Word counts work for some writers.
Anthony Trollope set a goal of 250 words
every 15 minutes.
5. Victor Hugo went on self-imposed
house arrest to finish The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He even locked away all his clothes, so he
wouldn't be tempted to get dressed and go out. But Hugo wasn't naked—he wore the same gray writing shawl for
months.
6. Like many of us, Charles Dickens
sometimes worked while traveling. But he couldn't do it without his five bronze animal statues, paper
knife, green vase, desk calendar, blue ink, and quills. Good thing he didn't
have to work at a coffee shop!
7. Dickens also insisted on writing in
a specific blue ink. He wasn't
attached to the color — it just dried faster, so he didn't have to waste time
blotting.
8. Lewis Carroll literally wrote purple prose. He penned his manuscripts in the same
violet ink required for grading his math students at Christ Church College in
Oxford. This way, he could easily switch between tasks.
9. The three musketeers on Alexandre
Dumas's desk were piles of color-coded
paper: pink for articles, blue for fiction, and yellow for poetry. [Okay,
this one isn’t too bizarre – actually a quite reasonable idea!]
10. When Herman Melville needed a break to revitalize his creative juices, he worked the fields of his 160-acre farm.
11. John Milton spent the last 20
years of his life blind, but not being able to see didn’t slow him down. He'd
start writing poetry in his head around 5 a.m., and an aide would arrive at 7
a.m. to take dictation. Milton called
the process "getting milked."
12. With his publisher’s deadline
for The Gambler looming, Fyodor Dostoyevsky hired a stenographer named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina in 1866. The
two finished the novella within a month and married a year later. Dostoyevsky
dictated his work to her for the rest of his life.
13. Proust turned his bedroom
workspace into a cocoon, covering his
windows with shutters and dark curtains and lining the walls and ceiling with
soundproofing cork. Blotting out the sun and the noise was a necessity
since he slept all day and wrote all night.
14. Nothing stimulated poet and
playwright Friedrich Schiller's creatives juices like the smell of rotting apples. He kept a drawer full of them in his desk.
That wasn’t his only writing quirk—Schiller also enjoyed soaking his feet in ice water to stay alert.
15. Scottish biographer James Boswell was a tremendous writer, but he wasn’t
great at waking up in the morning. To solve this problem, he designed a bed that would physically lift
him up and set him on the floor. He never got around to building it, so
servants ended up doing the heavy lifting for him.
Source: http://mentalfloss.com/article/55572/15-productivity-secrets-very-prolific-writers
Do you have
any bizarre writing tips to share? I’d
love to hear from you.
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