What was Ernest Hemingway’s daily routine?
There’s an enduring myth that artists have it easy, with people falsely believing that the creations simply fall into their lap because that’s what talent is—god-given and not grafted for.
It’s wrong, and a long line of greats have queued up to tell the world as much. For his argument, Ernest Hemingway presented his daily routine.
Obviously, it’s different. The process of creating art, or in Hemingway’s case, writing, has differing requirements from your typical nine-to-five office work. It requires a different mindset, as while writing needs skill, time and effort like any other job, it’s also a slippery game. When inspiration is in the mix, it comes and goes at it pleases and does not conform to office hours. The myth is that artists merely sit around and wait for it to arrive, but the greats all know that the true task is learning how to conjure and then corral it.
Hemingway had his tricks. While most workers need to finish the day with everything wrapped up, his ultimate move was to stop midway. If he got himself into a real flow with writing something, he’d cut himself off and go home, sometimes even stopping mid-sentence or mid-paragraph. That was his biggest tip for avoiding writer’s block because he knew that he’d go home stewing on what he wanted to write next and come back the next day raring to finish it off.
That basically sums the writer up—he was anti-aimlessness, knowing that feeling lost or directionless is the enemy of good and productive work, and so his daily routine did everything to prevent that.
“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,” he said, as one of the many great writers who advocated for an early alarm clock.
Nowadays, people turn this into a woozy idea that your creative brain is least clouded in the morning, and so everyone should wake and instantly write pages of their dreams. But in Hemingway’s mind, this was a practical step. Beat everyone out, write early, work hard, then clock off for fun.
Fun was an essential part. “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,” he said, sharing that tip of stopping mid-flow but then making the point that in order to write, the writer must live.
This was a necessity and one that comes up a lot in A Moveable Feast, his memoir tracking his years in Paris. His daily routine makes up the most of this book as readers follow him walking to work, doing his work, and then leaving to see friends, eat good food, have enlightening conversations with other artists or get up to some drunken mischief.
Then, the following day, he’d return, remarking on that gap, “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 the next day that is hard to get through.”
It’s remarkably simple, really. Wake early, go to work, do the work, live a life, sleep, then do it again. Shred the image in your head of the artist either lazing around or frantically creating day and night, for Hemingway was the ultimate advocate for a healthy work-life balance.
