Writing naked: uncovering the truth of creativity?
Many singers maintain that creativity is best expressed in the buff. Maybe writers should take a fig leaf out of their book
Undressed for success? Ernest Hemingway bare-chested in his Cuban farmhouse. Photograph: CPL/Popperfoto
Now that Naomi Wolf has given us "the truth about the vagina" in a revelatory volume hilariously reviewed by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and Zoë Heller in the New York Review of Books,
perhaps it's time to move beyond the narrow canyons of orgasm and
address the desirable physical state for creativity in its widest sense.
Here, in the world of books – an awkward, secret society, sometimes lacking physical confidence – we might consider taking inspiration from Lady Gaga who has, apparently, recorded her latest album stark naked. Nor is she the first, by the way. Olivia Newton-John, Robbie Williams, Ian Gillan (Deep Purple) and the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies have all performed in the nude, some of them regularly.
Authors generally get no more daring than bedclothes. Writers who have at one time or another worked in bed include Winston Churchill, Walter Scott and (suffering from TB) George Orwell.
In our own time, both AN Wilson and the biographer Michael Holroyd have advertised their preference for writing in bed, and I'm sure there are many others I haven't thought of. For the record, this blog is being written in bed, with books and cuttings scattered in front of me across the duvet.
Writing rituals, like all fetishes associated with creativity, are intrinsically interesting. Jonathan Franzen attracted a lot of attention when he described writing The Corrections in a state of primitive solitude. According to Time magazine, "Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop … Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the internet, he not only removed the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port."
Then there are other considerations such day versus night, drunk versus sober, or champagne (Harold Pinter) versus benzedrine (Graham Greene) versus coffee (virtually everyone). Some writers are larks; others are owls. Mario Vargas Llosa has an elaborate psychological theory for choosing first light as the best time to write.
Günter Grass, Churchill (again) and Philip Roth have all written standing up, something I've never tried. I read somewhere that Ford Madox Ford dictated his masterpiece The Good Soldier to his mistress while pacing up and down the offices of his magazine, the English Review. Henry James and Barbara Cartland – that unlikely duo – used stenographers for all their late works.
Other writers have attached great importance to the significance of manuscript. William Golding used to say that he could feel a creative current surging down his writing arm. Ted Hughes once told me that he firmly believed the pen-holding hand is able to access otherwise inaccessible, and inspirational, parts of the cerebral cortex.
But no one, so far as I know, has ever described writing in the nude. Perhaps you can help?
Here, in the world of books – an awkward, secret society, sometimes lacking physical confidence – we might consider taking inspiration from Lady Gaga who has, apparently, recorded her latest album stark naked. Nor is she the first, by the way. Olivia Newton-John, Robbie Williams, Ian Gillan (Deep Purple) and the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies have all performed in the nude, some of them regularly.
Authors generally get no more daring than bedclothes. Writers who have at one time or another worked in bed include Winston Churchill, Walter Scott and (suffering from TB) George Orwell.
In our own time, both AN Wilson and the biographer Michael Holroyd have advertised their preference for writing in bed, and I'm sure there are many others I haven't thought of. For the record, this blog is being written in bed, with books and cuttings scattered in front of me across the duvet.
Writing rituals, like all fetishes associated with creativity, are intrinsically interesting. Jonathan Franzen attracted a lot of attention when he described writing The Corrections in a state of primitive solitude. According to Time magazine, "Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop … Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the internet, he not only removed the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port."
Then there are other considerations such day versus night, drunk versus sober, or champagne (Harold Pinter) versus benzedrine (Graham Greene) versus coffee (virtually everyone). Some writers are larks; others are owls. Mario Vargas Llosa has an elaborate psychological theory for choosing first light as the best time to write.
Günter Grass, Churchill (again) and Philip Roth have all written standing up, something I've never tried. I read somewhere that Ford Madox Ford dictated his masterpiece The Good Soldier to his mistress while pacing up and down the offices of his magazine, the English Review. Henry James and Barbara Cartland – that unlikely duo – used stenographers for all their late works.
Other writers have attached great importance to the significance of manuscript. William Golding used to say that he could feel a creative current surging down his writing arm. Ted Hughes once told me that he firmly believed the pen-holding hand is able to access otherwise inaccessible, and inspirational, parts of the cerebral cortex.
But no one, so far as I know, has ever described writing in the nude. Perhaps you can help?
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