Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Steadily

Photo: Jill Krementz “John Updike filled his 50 years of writing with probably seven or eight normal writing careers. He did so by fusing two artistic virtues that rarely meet in the same person: a frisky, easy, improvisational energy and a rigorous, workaday discipline. He was both the ant and the grasshopper, accountant and poet, Trollope and Rimbaud. His solution to the daily crisis of inspiration was simply not to have it: He wrote steadily, with very little angst, three pages a day, five days a week.”

From “Three Pages a Day,” by Sam Anderson, New York Magazine (Feb. 1, 2009)