famous writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity_ visualized

Upload: yengmgtr

Post on 03-Jun-2018

217 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

  • 8/12/2019 Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity_ Visualized

    1/6

    brainpickings.org

    Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs.Literary Productivity, Visualized

    Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and

    offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.

    by Maria PopovaThe 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 endlessfascination 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 aphrodisiacand science tells us

    that it impacts everything from our moodsto our brain

    developmentto 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

    find, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian

    information designer Giorgia Lupiand her team at Accurat

    who make masterful visualizationsof cultural

    phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify and,together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible

  • 8/12/2019 Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity_ Visualized

    2/6

    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 Workby Mason Currey and Odd

    Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty,

    the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great

    Authorsby Celia Blue Johnson as well as from the Paris

    Reviewinterviewsand various collections of diariesand

    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 degreeof 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 quantifiable criteria

    to measure productivity: number of published works and

    major awards received. Given that both the duration and

    the era of an authors life affect literary output longer

    lives offer more time to write, and some authors lived

    before the major awards were established those

    variables were also indicated for context.

  • 8/12/2019 Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity_ Visualized

    3/6

    Lastly, I reached out to Wendy MacNaughton illustrator

    extraordinaireand 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 magnificent visualizationof the correlation between

    writers wake-up times, displayed in clock-like fashion

    around each portrait, and their literary productivity,

    depicted as different-colored auras for each of the majorawards 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 prolific and

    award-winning, such as like Bradbury and King) late risersseem to produce more works but win fewer awards than

  • 8/12/2019 Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity_ Visualized

    4/6

    early birds.

    The most important point, perhaps, is a meta one: A

    reminder that no specific routine guarantees success, and

    the only thing that matters is havinga routine and thepersistence 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:

  • 8/12/2019 Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity_ Visualized

    5/6

  • 8/12/2019 Famous Writers Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity_ Visualized

    6/6