Dear reader,
Victor Hugo wrote naked.
According to Hugo’s wife and biographer, Adèle Foucher, the author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables would lock “his formal clothes away so that he would not be tempted to go out”, and then he would enter his novel “as if it were a prison”.
Hugo was not alone. Throughout history, from ancient Greece to modern times, many writers and historical figures have used quirky, absurd, eccentric, and downright funny methods in their act of creative writing—an act often seen as a painfully solitary endeavour.
The Greek philosopher Socrates famously eschewed the written word itself, preferring to engage in dialogues with his disciples. His student, Plato then transcribed these conversations into written works, such as The Republic, preserving Socrates’ teachings for posterity.
In the Renaissance era, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci was known for writing in mirror script, a form of handwriting that reversed the order of letters, making it difficult for others to read his notes. Some speculate he did this to protect his ideas from prying eyes, while others believe it was simply a quirk of his genius mind.
Fast forward to the 19th century and the renowned German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idiosyncrasies. Suffering from various ailments throughout his life, Nietzsche often wrote while lying in bed or reclining on a sofa, using a small wooden writing board propped against his chest. It was this unconventional pose that produced groundbreaking philosophical works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.
A particularly peculiar writing ritual comes from the American novelist Truman Capote, a favourite of this newsletter writer. Capote famously claimed he could only write while lying down, in bed or on a couch, with a glass of sherry in one hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips. “I am a completely horizontal author,” Capote told the Paris Review in 1957. Neither sherry nor cigarette seemed to hinder his creativity, going by just one of his masterpieces, In Cold Blood, a pioneering work in true crime literature.
The list does not end there. There’s Agatha Christie, who used to finetune her plots in the bathtub. And Mark Twain who stood at a tall desk and towered over his work, claiming that standing improved his blood flow and creativity.
Then there is Jack Kerouac, voice of the Beat Generation and author of On the Road, who once embarked on a writing spree fuelled entirely by coffee and Benzedrine. He is said to have typed On the Road on a single continuous scroll of paper, completing the 120-foot-long manuscript in just three weeks. On the other hand, German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller found inspiration in, hold your breath, the stench of rotting apples! He kept a stash in his desk drawer, believing the foul odour would jolt his creativity. One can only hope his editor had a strong stomach.
At the other end of the quirky-writing spectrum are some mediaeval monks who would copy religious texts while suspended in mid-air by ropes, believing it brought them closer to God.
Clearly, writers will go to any length to get it “write”. So we asked novelist and commentator Aakar Patel to talk about what floats his manuscripts. And he sportingly wrote this engaging little essay for our White Space pages, where we publish freewheeling creative non-fiction.
How do YOU write? What makes the ink flow in your pen and the ideas in your head?
Write in and tell us.
Wishing you a productive week ahead,
For Team Frontline,
Jinoy Jose P.
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