The Unusual Rituals of HIghly Creative People
It's become common throughout history for exceptional artists and creatives to have routines or rituals ranging from slightly odd to extreme. Ultimately, are they THAT bad if they don't harm anyone other than the artist and lead to magnificent contributions to the arts? We're discovering with some of the world's best artists in different fields what made their rituals or routines quirky and interesting.
Maya Angelou's Writing Routine: Empty Hotel Rooms
Known for wanting to keep her house pretty but feeling uninspired to write when surrounded by pretty things, the iconic writer Maya Angelou would rent hotel rooms for months at a time to have an alternative space without being locked into owning a studio.
Maya's daily routine would be to arrive at her hotel by 6:30 am to start her day, but her hotel room came with a specific set of rules:
No one was allowed entry into her hotel room.
Staff were asked to empty rubbish bins only and not touch the bedsheets because she did not sleep in the room.
The room had to be stripped of all decorations, including artwork or flowers, so she could maximise her creative writing without distraction.
Maya Angelou kept specific items in her room, including (in no particular order) a pen and pad, a deck of cards, a dictionary and thesaurus, the Bible, an ashtray, books of poetry, and a bottle of sherry with a glass.
Maya would use the books to inspire words to form in her brain, get a feel for the language, and enforce the motivation to write once she found her momentum. The deck of cards was her way of breaking the lull between writing; if she found herself struggling after long periods of writing, she would play solitaire to free up her thoughts and help get everything back on track. Her daily goal was to write 10-12 pages of work before going home and forgetting about writing, opting to instead separate her artistic life from her personal life.
Maya Angelou repeated this process daily for months on end until she had a body of work she was content with.
Gustav Mahler: Using Nature As Isolation To Enforce Creative Expression
Gustav Mahler was once known as one of the most profound voices in music, as a conductor and composer in the romantic era of the 20th century, but that's not what makes him an interesting creator. Gustav Mahler was known for building small structures, much like huts, in which he could work on composing music. These huts would be out in nature; Gustav would reside in fields or lakes that he adored so he could witness nature exist in its own way around him as he crafted work.
Gustav Mahler literally went out into the wild, built a hut disconnected from the human world, and spent his time creating in order for nature to bring out the best of his creative endeavours. When people asked Gustav what he did for work, he called himself a Holiday Composer because, in his mind, his best work was done during the summer in these creative huts. In total, Gustav built three huts to compose music, all of which were small single-room structures with a writing desk, chair, and piano. Gustav Mahler created from a space of true isolation, putting his artistic work at the forefront without distraction or concern for society.
Hunter S. Thompson's Daily Writing Routine: Embracing Chaos and Destruction
Let's be honest here: Hunter S. Thompson is an incredible visionary, a writer's writer, so to speak, well-known for his iconic daily routine. I think the best way to explain it is to show you his exact routine because it's something that feels like you've merged the plots of the two movies Blow & Trainspotting:
3:00 pm: Wake up
3:05 pm: Drink a Chivas Regal and smoke Dunhill cigarettes while reading the morning papers.
3:45 pm: Snort cocaine
3:50 pm: Drink another Chivas Regal glass with more Dunhill cigarettes.
4:05 pm: Drink a cup of coffee and smoke more Dunhill's
4:15 pm: snort more cocaine
4:16 pm: a glass of orange juice and more Dunhills
4:30 pm: snort even more cocaine
4:54 pm: Yep, you guessed it...snort more cocaine
5:05 pm: Even more cocaine. (How was his heart even beating at this point?)
5:11 pm: More coffee, more Dunhills
5:30 pm: Another glass of Chivas
5:45 pm: Go again with more cocaine…
6:00 pm: Smoke some weed, just to 'take the edge off'
7:05 pm: Hunter S. Thompson would travel to his local Woody Creek Tavern and have a Heineken, Two Margaritas, A Taco Salad with French onion rings and coleslaw, ice cream and carrot cake, a bean fritter (somehow this is the word part of his routine for me), more cigarettes and cocaine, another Heineken, and another glass of Chivas, just to get him home.
9:00 pm: More cocaine.
10:00 pm: drop acid, coz why not?
11:00 pm: Weed, coke, and Chartreuse
11:30 pm: more coke.
Midnight: It's now officially writing time, so from now until roughly 6 am, Hunter S. Thompson is mixing drugs and alcohol with cigarettes, fruit, and porn while writing.
6:00 am: Hunter is drinking champagne with fettuccine pasta in the hot tub.
8:00 am: Sleep.
I hope I don't need to explain why this routine was chaotic and destructive, but the man still wrote an incredible volume of work, so maybe it works?
(Please don't try this at home)
Haruki Murakami's Mental and Physical Strengthening Via Vigorous Routine
Haruki Murakami is a world-famous novelist who has been writing for over forty years. While we've heard about the no-distractions technique of Maya Angelou and the unhinged chaos of Hunter S. Thompson, Murakami's daily routine to enable maximum creativity feels a little more…normal by comparison, but it goes deeper. Murakami once spoke of his daily routine to an interviewer named John Ray, where he said,
"When I'm in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometres or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerise myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."
Creating an unbreakable daily routine involving both creative expression through writing and brutal physical exercise, Murakami found his way to peak creatively, day in and day out. But there's a deeper reason at play. In the 1980s, Murakami closed down the jazz bar he owned and started writing as a career. He spoke to the New Yorker in 2008 about those early days, stating, "Once I was sitting at a desk writing all day, I started putting on the pounds. I was also smoking too much—sixty cigarettes a day. My fingers were yellow, and my body reeked of smoke. I decided to start running every day because I wanted to see what would happen. I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything. And in the end, I think it was good for me because I became tough."
Murakami will likely inspire you if you find joy in routine and physical exertion.
Salvador Dali + a Key = Sleep…?
Known as the king of the micro-nap to some, Salvador Dali created an interesting way to get the minimal amount of time in for a micro-nap without the risk of oversleeping, and it's known as the 'slumber with a key' technique. Dali's technique consisted of taking a nap and sitting upright in an armchair while holding a key between your fingers inside your hand. The key (no pun intended) here is that you'll eventually relax enough to pass out, but when you do, you'll drop the key and wake yourself up, returning to reality to continue your day.
Dali's thought process behind his 'slumber with a key' technique was that short naps are needed for your 'physical and psychic being to be revivified by just the necessary amount of response.' Or, in other words, finding the fastest way to the quickest nap humanly possible.
Friedrich Schiller and His Rotten Apples
Born Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, this German philosopher and poet was known for his epic work in the second half of the 1700s but would later go on to be known for some odd: Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples and other decaying fruits in the drawer of his desk, believing the scent would stimulate creativity.
Many theories have delved into the psychological aspect of 'why' someone would use the scent of rotten fruits to conjure up creative force, but they generally get relegated back to the idea that smells can be stimuli that remind us of emotions and other memories of the past, stimulating our capabilities of creative expression. Whatever Mr. von Schiller's reasoning was, it clearly worked for him with the impressive body of work he crafted in his life before passing away in the early 1800s.
Igor Stravinsky's Headstand Antics
Stravinsky has been widely considered one of the 20th century's most important composers, with an impressive catalogue of work. In his book, 'Daily Rituals,' writer Mason Currey wrote about the unusual ways Stravinsky remained creative and composed daily. Stravinsky's creative-block-breaking routine included two main facets:
When creating, Igor Stravinsky required all windows to be closed and covered up so that he could compose in silence, away from the prying eyes of the general public.
Stravinsky would perform a headstand any time he felt creatively blocked up. The thought process behind this headstand idea was that it provided him with a sense of rest and clarity.
Randomly breaking out into a headstand to clear creative blocks may sound a little odd, but not so much when you've just read about rotting apples and key-dropping naps. Still, Stravinsky's headstands are an unusual way you could try to force new strands of creativity out any time you're stuck for ideas.
Hilma af Klint Would Call Out To The Spirits
This Swedish artist (and mystic) is one of the early adopters of abstract art in Western history, but Hilma af Klint has a deeper story behind her abstract work, including an unusual ritualistic approach to creation. After her sister passed away in 1880, Hilma started to delve deeper into an obsession with her spirituality, which inspired her abstract artwork. A self-described medium, Hilma would conduct seances to communicate directly with spirits, claiming she received messages on how to create her iconic bodies of work.
Yayoi Kasuma’s Commitment to Being Committed
Known as one of Andy Warhol's most influential inspirations, Yayoi Kasuma is widely known as one of Japan's greatest artists EVER, a title that is no easy feat to attain. Ever since 1977, Yayoi has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital because she finds the structured living environment helps manage her mental health and channel her creative vision to be the best artist she can possibly be. As a neurodivergent artist, living in psychiatric care allows her to cope better while she continues to showcase and create at a level appropriate for one of the world's best-living artists with unmatched longevity.
As we evolve as artists, we'll find ourselves picking up rituals and acts to help boost our creativity along the way. Have you discovered yours? How does it help boost your creative expression or affect your output? I hope you’ve found this blog useful, and derived some understanding into your own creative genius.
