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Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs.
Literary Productivity, Visualized
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by Maria Popova
The early bird gets the Pulitzer sort of.
In both writing and sleeping,
Stephen King observed in his
excellent meditation on the art of
creative sleep and wakeful
dreaming, we learn to be physically
still at the same time we are
encouraging our minds to unlock
from the humdrum rational thinking
of our daytime lives.
Over the years, in my endless
fascination with daily routines, I
found myself especially intrigued by successful writers
sleep habits after all, its been argued that sleep is the
best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac and science tells us
that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain
development to our every waking moment. I found myself
wondering whether there might be a correlation between
sleep habits and literary productivity. The challenge, of
course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to
nd, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian
information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat
who make masterful visualizations of cultural
phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify and,
together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible
to visualize such a correlation.
First, I handed them my notes on writers wake-up times,
amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews,
journals, and other materials. Many came from two books
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd
Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty,
the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great
Authors by Celia Blue Johnson as well as from the Paris
Review interviews and various collections of diaries and
letters.
We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom
wake-up times were available this became the base data
set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the
literary productivity of each author.
One important caveat is that there is an enormous degree
of subjectivity in assessing a literary or any creative
career, but since all information visualization is an exercise
in subjective editorial judgment rather than a record of
Objective Truth, we settled on a set of quantiable criteria
to measure productivity: number of published works and
major awards received. Given that both the duration and
the era of an authors life aect literary output longer
lives oer more time to write, and some authors lived
before the major awards were established those
variables were also indicated for context.
Lastly, I reached out to Wendy MacNaughton illustrator
extraordinaire and very frequent collaborator and asked
her to contribute an illustrated portrait for each of the
authors.
The end result a labor of love months in the making is
this magnicent visualization of the correlation between
writers wake-up times, displayed in clock-like fashion
around each portrait, and their literary productivity,
depicted as dierent-colored auras for each of the major
awards and stack-bars for number of works published,
color-coded for genre. The writers are ordered according to
a timeline of earliest to latest wake-up times, beginning
with Balzacs insomniac 1 A.M. and ending with Bukowskis
bohemian noon.
The most important caveat of all, of course, is that there are
countless factors that shape a writers creative output, of
which sleep is only one so this isnt meant to indicate
any direction of causation, only to highlight some
interesting correlations: for instance, the fact that (with the
exception of outliers who are both highly prolic and
award-winning, such as like Bradbury and King) late risers
seem to produce more works but win fewer awards than
early birds.
The most important point, perhaps, is a meta one: A
reminder that no specic routine guarantees success, and
the only thing that matters is having a routine and the
persistence implicit to one. Showing up day in and day out,
without fail, is the surest way to achieve lasting success.
Pore over (click the image to zoom) and delight in drawing
your own conclusions or merely in taking some voyeuristic
enjoyment:
The visualization is available as a gorgeous gicle print,
with a third of the proceeds donated to literacy nonprot
Room to Read and the rest split between Accurat and
Wendy.
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