Focusing Techniques: Learn From The Pros

I just posted about this over at Critical Mass, but had to post here too, because I love this so much: In a fit of procrastination the other day, while I was supposed to be writing, I was (as usual) rearranging my bookshelves. I stumbled on Diane Ackerman's wonderful A Natural History of the Senses, and suddenly remembered that in it, Ackerman wrote about the many bizarre things writers do to get themselves writing. For those looking for focusing strategies, I thought I'd post a few highlights:

"Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. [When Ackerman told a poet friend this, he said: "If only someone had thought to shut it."] ...

"The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word ...

Amy Lowell, "enjoyed smoking cigars while writing, and in 1915 went so far as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled ... "

George Sands shared Lowell's cigar fetish, but also had another stragegy: "she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk ...

"Voltaire ... used his lover's naked back as a writing desk ...

"Both Dr. Samuel Johnson and the poet W.H. Auden drank colossal amounts of tea -- Johnson was reported to have frequently drunk twenty-five cups at one sitting. Johnson did die of a stroke, but it's not clear if this was related to his marathon tea drinking.

"Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin, and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote in the nude. D.H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees -- a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts.

"Colette used to begin her day's writing by first picking fleas from her cat ...

"Hart Crane craved boisterous parties, in the middle of which he would disappear, rush to a typewriter, put on a record of a Cuban rumba, then Ravel's Bolero, then a torch song, after which he would return, 'his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair straight up from his skull. He would be chewing a five-cent cigar which he had forgotten to light. In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript ... "Read that," he would say, "isn't that the grrreatest poem ever written!"'...

"Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every morning before working on The Charterhouse of Parma -- 'in order' he said, 'to acquire the correct tone.' "Willa Cather read the bible. ...

"Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself 'a completely horizontal writer' ... "Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were all standers ... "Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand, and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub ...

T.S. Eliot "preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam ...

"Mary Lee Settle tumbles out of bed and heads straight for her typewriter, before the dream state disappears ... [so does Adrian Nicole LeBlanc]

"Aldous Huxley 'often wrote with his nose.' In The Art of Seeing, Huxley says that 'a little nose writing will result in a perceptible temporary improvement of defective vision.'"