New Yorker

Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Routine Hemingway was an early riser throughout his adult life, typically rising around 5:30-6:00 every morning. Even after a night of drinking, he’d be up and at it. His son Gregory remembers, “My father would always look great, as if he’d slept a baby’s sleep in a soundproof room with his eyes covered by black patches.” Hemingway found his early mornings to be important. Explaining, in a 1958 interview: “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until that next day that is hard to get through.” He would write standing up, writing his first drafts in pencil, before switching to the typewriter. He’d chart his daily word count to keep himself accountable. Once the creative juices ran dry, he’d switch to writing and answering letters. Giving him a reprieve from, as he put it, “the responsibility of awful writing.”