The Bizarre Rituals Of Famous Writers

ALL THAT JAZZ

Many writers claim to feel a special connection with or inspiration from pieces of music, but postmodern author Haruki Murakami has taken his musical muse to a grand extreme, spending as much as ten hours a day listening to classic American jazz.

Murakami claims an almost synaesthetic link with music, writing that "My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker's repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald's elegantly flowing prose."

Indeed, Murakami's elegant but surreal works can often be as divisive or inaccessible to readers as that one friend of yours who keeps insisting that you really need to listen to this Django Reinhardt album, maaan, although it's likely that your friend has not won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY AND THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY

Many writers, alienated from or actively shunned by society, took solace in the companionship of animals, which is something many of us can relate to. After all, haven't we all found ourselves raising over a hundred peacocks on our family farm much the same way as Flannery O'Connor did?

Pioneering poet Sylvia Plath (who didn't even like other poets, let alone normal people) was introduced to the hobby of bee-keeping by her then-husband Ted Hughes and was said to have continued keeping bees even after separating from the philandering schmuck.

Plath later said that bee-keeping and other non-literary skills fascinated her as a sort of "mastery of the practical." Although, certain alarmist information sources have gone so far as to suggest that she was intending to develop her poetry-based control over her swarms of deadly bees to the point where no government or literary journal on Earth could hope to stop her megalomaniacal ambitions.

BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL/NOSE

Playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is well-known for his intense, dramatic dialogue from films and series like "A Few Good Men" and "The West Wing." His secret? The stage-trained dramaturge often leaps up from the keyboard to physically act out key lines and confrontations.

Given how passionate (if you like Sorkin) or overwrought (if you don't) that his characters speeches and performances tend to be, it's not actually that surprising that at one point Aaron actually head-butted a mirror while working on a script for his latest HBO series "The Newsroom," sheepishly admitting to reporters at an Emmy reception, "I wish I could say I was in a bar fight, but I broke my nose writing."

It's a good thing he didn't write the script for "Taxi Driver," otherwise he might have ended up shooting himself. (Also, it probably wouldn't have been as good.)

DRESSED FOR SUCCESS: THE WRITING WARDROBE

Many significant things have been written in pajamas, underwear, or similar skivvies. Celebrated short-story author John Cheever began his writing career owning only one decent suit, which he removed and cleaned every evening before settling down to his typewriter clad only in boxers. After his stories began to attract attention, praise, and cash, he found he couldn't shake the undies-only habit.

While a number of advice sites for beginning writers recommend dressing professionally as a way of treating the creative process as a career rather than a hobby, it seems most notable authors prefer comfort at all costs, such as Pulitzer-winning novelist Jane Smiley, who tends to work in a simple bathrobe.

Apparently there aren't many writers who go the full monty (being naked isn't that much fun when you're sitting in a leather chair for hours at a time) but one notable exception was Les Miserables creator and infamous procrastinator Victor Hugo.

Faced with an encroaching deadline, Hugo ordered his valet to remove all clothing from his house while he slept. Trapped nude in his home, the great playwright and author had no alternative but to write.

THE ZOMBIE CAPTAIN OF CHARING CROSS

Was T.S. Eliot one of the twentieth century's most important and influential poets? Yes, without a doubt, and as certainly as something as vague as that can be certain. Was T.S. Eliot also a little bit crazy? Yes, without a doubt, and as certainly as something as vague as that can be certain.

Genius expatriate Thomas Stearns Eliot found himself in Oxford in 1914 torn between his desire to pursue poetry as a profession and his horror of what he regarded as the endless tedium of campus life. His introduction to the vivacious, flamboyant, and sexy Vivienne Haigh-Wood resulted in a whirlwind courtship and marriage.

Over the next eight years, an already bad relationship became steadily worse as Viv's physical and mental health steadily declined. Yet during the same period, Eliot composed his masterpiece The Waste Land, a work that many scholars believe would not have been possible without the influence (both positive and negative) of his never-ending train wreck of a wife.

While it's easy to see references to Viv in The Waste Land (and a few believe that she may have even helped write certain segments) it's also worth noting that the year after the publication, Eliot was renting a separate apartment in Charing Cross, demanding that all visitors refer to him as "the Captain," and wearing lipstick and corpse-green facepaint at all times. That's the kind of poet you read about in new-wave magazines!

TOO DRITE TO WRUNK: SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Many writers are inclined to treat drug or alcohol addiction as a necessary tool of the trade, and given the number of famed authors known to be smashed out of their heads when they wrote some of their best works, it's hard to say there isn't at least a seed of truth to this idea.

One of Charles Bukowski's points of advice from his poem "how to be a good writer" was "just drink more beer/more and more beer."

Hunter S. Thompson allegedly began his day at 3PM with a Chivas Regal and four lines of coke, while Ernest Hemingway drank rum in such quantities that he may never have technically been sober.

On the other hand, consider that Hemingway and Thompson both committed suicide-HST killing himself largely because the excesses of his youth now left him in almost constant pain-and while Bukowski somehow survived his lifestyle until 1994, his cult outsider status merited him a cameo appearance in 1977's science-fiction spectacular "Supervan," where he briefly appears as a troll-like judge of a wet t-shirt contest at a swinging seventies "van-in." It's a fate which is at least as awful as killing yourself but exponentially more embarrassing.

JOSEF XXX: KAFKA'S PORNO STASH

Back when Franz Kafka was just a Prague-born Yiddish-German-speaking Austro-Hungarian-Jewish-bourgeois chronicler of the fundamental absurdity of modern society, people were generally okay with his various eccentricities.

He was an undeniably brilliant writer that people of all ethnicities could find common cause with. Perhaps that's why James Hawes' 2008 "Excavating Kafka" (which for the first time exposed Franz' predilection for hardcore pornography) caused such a literary ruckus, particularly among Central European scholars who insisted that the author's subscriptions to a number of risqué magazines represented only his commitment to transgressive and uncensored art.

There's something to be said in favor of that argument, but on the other hand, few of Hawes' critics like to talk about how much freaky bestiality porn Kafka kept in his archives.

"MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW"

That was how Lady Caroline Lamb famously referred to Romantic (in every sense of the word) poet Lord George Gordon Byron. And a full two hundred years later, it remains one of the most accurate and succinct descriptions of the original Byronic hero.

Mad? Historians speculate that he was one of the first high-profile sufferers of bipolar disorder. Bad? Byron was popularly suspected of banging everything that moved and some things that didn't, including wives of friends, husbands of friends, and (according to rumor) his own half-sister, eventually abandoning the British Isles for sexier climes. Dangerous to know? Well, while Lady Lamb probably meant the dangers posed to the reputation of anybody who associated with such a scandal-plagued figure.

Byron famously kept a bear while studying at Oxford, and after understandably dismayed school officials insisted that students were not allowed to keep tame animals, he told them not to worry since the bear was wild. With such an eye for loopholes it's a wonder he didn't minor in law.