By Marcus Coates, @homeinriyadh, 4th March 2021
Dan Gold - Unsplash: 'Choose whatever way floats your boat'
Blog No. 14
Writers Habits
You’ve probably been encouraged over the years to do this sitting; however, a surprising number do it vertically, and quite a few do it horizontally, as well: I’m talking about the act of writing, of course!
The Vertical Preference
According to the literary magazine, The Paris Review, “A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemmingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the skin of a lesser Kudu – the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.”
That’s right, the man who gave us such classics as The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, Men Without Women, and a Moveable Feast, wrote them all standing.
And he wasn’t alone in this habit. Besides being the UK Prime Minister between 1940 - 1945 (during the Second World War) and again from 1951 – 1955, Winston Churchill also found time to write 43 books – and he wrote standing. And Churchill didn’t just dash off his novels; after all, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.
Hemingway and Churchill were prodigious heavyweights of the literary world, and both stood whilst writing. Yet, they were not literary oddities in this habit.
In his article ‘17 Authors Who Write While Standing,’ Jared A Brock lists (along with Hemingway and Churchill) the following upright wordsmiths: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Saul Bellow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Soren Kirkegaard, Vladimir Nabakov, Lewis Caroll, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Thomas Wolfe, August Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, John Henry Newman, and even cartoonist Stan Lee. They all did it standing.
Such a list of eminent writers adds real weight and a literal element to the phrase ‘Thinking on your feet’.
And if reading such a long list of upright writers makes you feel exhausted enough to want to lay down – well, you’d be in good company – as many writers preferred the horizontal to the vertical position.
The Horizontal Preference
Edith Wharton, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920), preferred to write in bed; she believed it freed her from the rigid expectations of polite New York society concerning how women should socially present themselves in the early 1900s.
Truman Capote was another advocate of the school of horizontal writing. In an interview in The Paris Review, Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffanys (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966) stated:
“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.”
And would you be surprised to hear that William Wordsworth, Marcel Proust and James Joyce (during his later years) also loved to do it horizontally?
Last Words
So, next time someone tells you that the best way to write is to put your bum down in the chair and get on with it - say NO! - today I’m either writing standing up or laying down. By resisting the conservative option of sitting; you might surprise yourself and create a Nobel or Pulitzer prize-winning masterpiece.
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