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How we work: Jorn Utzon, architect

Utzon, the architect responsible - with Arup - for one of the world's most recognisable buildings, was happy to draw anywhere:

Utzon rarely used a sketchbook, but would draw on anything that was available. He drew the initial plan for an art museum at Silkeborg, in Denmark, with poured salt on a restaurant table in Sydney, which he then photographed with a borrowed camera. The design was based on Buddhist caves he had visited near the Gobi Desert, but the museum was never built.

Another friend recalled Utzon using a charred stick on a pavement to sketch the cross-section of a cave-room he had seen in China, which was to form the basis for his design for a new house; sadly the sketch was washed away by a thunderstorm that same night.

From the same article:

It was thanks to the architect Eero Saarinen that Utzon, much to his surprise, won the competition to build the opera house in 1957. Saarinen appeared late, after several entries had already been assessed, to find Utzon’s scheme among those already rejected. He pulled it out and returned to the jury announcing: “Gentlemen, this is the first prize.”

See also: Calatrava, Niemeyer. More How we work.

How we work: Felipe Massa, Formula 1 driver

Perhaps, after his somewhat unlucky end to the 2007-08 season, Mass has retired his Y-fronts:

When Felipe Massa rolls out of bed on Sunday morning and starts preparing for the biggest race of his life, he will slip into the lucky white underpants which have been a constant travel companion since his first grand prix victory in Turkey in 2006. This weekend, at the Brazilian grand prix, he will need them more than ever.

"These pants have 10 victories and 14 pole positions," Massa said in Sao Paulo this week. "It's time to retire them. Who knows, if I am champion maybe I'll put them to rest."

See also: Jensen Button and Fernando Alonso. More How we work.

How we work: Philip Pullman, author

Pullman was well-known for writing in a shed, to a rigorous 3-pages-daily quota. For instance, from this 1998 interview:

I sit down to write by hand, in ballpoint, on A4 narrow lined paper, after breakfast, and work through till lunch with a break for coffee and reading mail. Then I have lunch and watch Neighbours (invaluable). In the afternoon I read or take the dog for a walk or do something physically constructive (this summer I made a clavichord with my 16-year-old son – a delightful business for all sorts of reasons). In the evening I finish the three pages which is my daily task, or if I finished them in the morning, I do whatever journalism or reviewing or lecture-planning I have in hand. I spend Sundays answering letters; it takes me all day.

The shed is part of - rather than being merely the location of - the writing ritual:

It's quite comfortable in there, but because of my superstition about not tidying it during the course of a book, it's now an abominable tip. I write by hand, using a ballpoint pen on narrow lined A4 paper (with two holes, not four). I sit at a table covered with an old kilim rug, on a vastly expensive Danish orthopaedic chair, which has made a lot of difference to my back. The table is raised on wooden blocks so it's a bit higher than normal.

I write three pages every day (one side of the paper only). That's about 1100 words. Then I stop, having made sure to write the first sentence on the next page, so I never have a blank page facing me in the morning.

That technique for avoiding the tyranny of the blank page is commonly seen in writers (I'll try dig out some examples in due course). Though elsewhere Pullman himself cites Van Gogh: "he said why should a painter be afraid of a blank canvas, a blank canvas is afraid of the painter, if you take that attitude you've beaten it already".

However, the fullest recent account of his method reveals that the writing is no longer hammered out in the shed, and the shed itself has embarked on its own creative journey:

I used to work in a shed in my garden. But it got too crowded with books and manuscripts and all kinds of bits and pieces, and I got fed up with being down at the end of the garden, especially on rainy days; and then we moved house anyway, and I had to decide whether to take the shed with us or leave it there. In the end I gave it to a friend, the illustrator Ted Dewan - on condition that when he's finished with it, he'll give it to another writer. He's replaced the windows and some of the roof, and I like the idea that it'll get passed on to lots of other writers and illustrators, and each of them will replace this bit or that bit until there isn't an atom of the original shed left.

Anyway, I now work in a big study in the house we live in, and I have room for all my books, and for several power tools as well. I have a bandsaw and a drill press and a planer and a bench grinder in here, and two guitars and an accordion, and a lot of wood that I'm going to make things out of. [...]

Given that he says "people don't always know you're making a joke" at the start of this interview, you wonder whether that last bit is a fib. He continues:

I'll get up at about half past seven and take my wife a cup of tea, and have my breakfast at the kitchen table reading the paper. I'll sit down at my desk at about half past nine and work until it's time for lunch, with a break for coffee half way through. If I'm lucky I'll have written three pages by then, and I can fool about with my power tools in the afternoon. If not, it's back to the desk until the three pages are covered.

I write with a ballpoint pen on A4 sized narrow-lined paper. The paper has got to have a grey or blue margin and two holes. I only write on one side, and when I've got to the bottom of the last page, I finish the sentence (or write one more) at the top of the next, so that the paper I look at each morning isn't blank. It's already beaten. That number of pages amounts, in my writing, to about 1100 words.

When I've finished a story I'll type it all on to the computer, editing as I go. Then I read it all again and think it's horrible, and get very depressed. That's one of the things you have to put up with. Eventually, after a lot of fiddling, it's sort of all right, but the best I can do; and that's when I send it off to the publisher.

The shed's transformative journey recalls both Simon Starling's Turner prize-winning shed.

Also:

Pullman went to night school to learn physically how to write, how to hold a pen correctly, how to shape letters into a perfect script, how to become so expert at the technique of sending messages from the brain down the shoulder and along the arm into the fingers and on to the page, that he'd never have to give it another thought.

Related: The Economist's Intelligent Life has a great interview with Pullman, with brilliant photos by Jillian Edelstein. Roald Dahl was also well-known for writing in a shed. Ballard, who aimed for a similar thousand words daily.

More how we work.

How we work: Truman Capote, author

From The Paris Review Interviews Volume 1, which is excellent. (The Capote interview is reproduced in part at The Times.)

I have to exhaust the emotion before I feel clinical enough to analyze and project it [...] by the time I write a story I may longer have any hunger for it, but I feel I thoroughly know its flavor. [...]

Like Proust and Twain (and unlike those who stood to write - Dickens, Churchill, Woolf, Hemingway, Roth), Capote wrote in bed:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch, and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially, I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

Let’s see ... that was the second draft. Then I type a third draft on yellow paper, a very special kind of yellow paper. No, I don’t get out of bed to do this. I balance the machine on my knees. Sure, it works fine; I can manage 100 words a minute. Well, when the yellow draft is finished, I put the manuscript away for a while: a week, a month, sometimes longer. When I take it out again, I read it as coldly as possible, then read it aloud to a friend or two and decide what changes I want to make, and whether or not I want to publish it. I’ve thrown away rather a few short stories, an entire novel and half of another. But if all goes well, I type the final version on white paper, and that’s that. [...]

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it - it will haunt you till it's written. [...]

I suppose my superstitiousness could be termed a quirk. I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. Or I won’t accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate the presence of yellow roses — which is sad, because they’re my favourite flower.

I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won’t travel on a plane with two nuns. Won’t begin or end anything on a Friday. It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t. But I derive some curious comfort from obeying these primitive concepts.

See also: How we work: writing standing up, in bed, Compose Yourself, and the The Paris Review Interviews website, a treasure trove.

How we work: Steve Reich, composer

Steve Reich's (and indeed Philip Glass's) music lends itself strongly to a How we work because it has a strong performative and methodological component. But until we dig into that, read this from a 2006 profile and try imagine what music for moving bookcases he and Glass must have hummed together as they humped sideboards up staircases and carried boxes of records for music-loving householders:

In 1966 Reich moved back to New York, where he got to know Philip Glass. At one point they had a moving company together; Glass also worked as a plumber while Reich drove a cab.

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How we work: Thomas Mahon, bespoke tailor

Mr Sheppard gave his cutting shears to Mr Cameron, who later gave them to Mr Hallbery, who later gave them to Mr Mahon. The shears are a baton passed from one generation to the next, embodying the skill and history; and the inheritors were skilled enough to own and use the tool - if they hadn't been good enough no doubt they wouldn't have received the shears.

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How we work: Brian Eno, musician/artist

There are many Enovian methods to be excavated from his excellent diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices, but in the meantime, here's a snippet on focusing down on short pieces of music:

Q: How did you come to compose "The Microsoft Sound''?

A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it.''

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,'' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.''

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

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How we work: Ricky Gervais, broadcaster/entertainer

In an interview with The Onion's AV Club, Ricky Gervais reveals an avoidance of the grand strategic plan and a tight creative grip at the tactical level:

The A.V. Club: You've had a pretty varied career so far. Did you always intend not to focus on one thing?

Ricky Gervais: I didn't even intend to do what I'm doing now. I think doing something creative is the most important thing to me, and I think it's probably just good for the soul for anyone, whatever it is. You don't have to be a film director—you can do gardening or something—but I think everyone needs to create something. I've always dabbled. I've always nearly written a book, I've always tried painting, I've always tried to make something out of ideas, really. It was never a plan. I never thought, "Right. First I'll get famous, and then I'll do a book. Then I'll do a podcast." I hadn't heard of the word "podcast" a year ago. What I do next is never strategic. It's never, "If I did this, then I'll get that demographic, and then they'll like me for this, and then I can do that." I go, "I want to do this next. This is the thing that interests me most." I've got the attention span of a 5-year-old, so that's why I don't hang around doing one thing for very long. I have to be excited, I have to have an adrenaline rush about doing something, or it bores me, I feel trapped. I've never regretted saying no to anything, or finishing something. When I'm in the middle of doing something I love, I can have a better idea, and I'll go, "Oh God, I can't finish this." Maybe I've got some sort of disorder.

AVC: How do you establish that kind of creative control?

RG: I just demand it. I just simply wouldn't do anything that I wasn't terribly in charge of. I don't let anything go. I worry about the font on the back of the DVD, and I'll do this as long as that continues. Even if it does continue, I could still get bored with that, but I certainly wouldn't compromise anything. I think we got away with it initially [on The Office] because we were low-risk.

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How we work: Warren Ellis, comic writer

Michael Avon Oeming's interview with Warren Ellis is good on Ellis's methods and aims with comics. Excerpts:

M: I think too many comic writers never really think about the craft, they just keep writing and stumble their way out of crappiness – if ever at all. I found a little bit of studying the craft took me a long way, and I still dissect it as much as possible. What was the first "rule” or guideline you learned about writing?

W: Hm. You have to remember that a lot of us Brits learned to write comics from a single example: one page of JUDGE DREDD script reprinted in a 2000AD annual around 1980. Me and Garth Ennis still laugh about it. And we both still write scripts in something approaching that form. Around '88, someone told me the Stan Lee rule – 28(ish) words per panel. An average panel on an average page can't usefully hold more than 28 words of dialogue and/or caption. I do that by eye, now – if a single balloon or caption runs into a third line on the script page, it's starting to run too long.

I'm still learning, all the time. The thing I tell people is that you don't learn how to write comics by reading comics. You learn how to write by reading books. You learn how to write comics by *dissecting* comics. You need to cut into the page and discover exactly what tools the creators employed to attain an effect. [...]

M: I like to build my scripts from the ground up. Do you do anything like this, or do you find you can just jump right into it at this point?

W: I'm the most arse-backwards writer in the business. I've been known to start with a scene somewhere in the middle with no characters or setting and build in both directions. I usually start with a bunch of random notes, connect them up and go from there. Technically, I'm one-draft, but I edit as I go. It goes down as dialogue and brief directions, raw, and I take another pass at everything when I go back and format it into script. Most often, I go into something already knowing the themes – it begins with something I want to talk about, and everything follows from that. I tend to feel character arcs are part and parcel of the writing process – it's not a separate step; it's just something that happens if your story's working. Or, sometimes, not – I don't consider "the growth/change of a character" crucial to a good story. Sherlock Holmes maybe had two elements of character development in his entire career.

M: Do you keep the artist in mind when writing, if at all?

W: Constantly. I'm living with the script for a week. The artist is living with it for a month. It needs to be tailored to them, and it needs to show them off at their absolute best. I'll read tons of their work beforehand, look for what they do well, look for the things they haven't gotten to do and the unrealised potential therein, and go into it trying to make them look as good as possible.

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How we work: Grant Morrison, comic writer

Grant Morrison on his lengthy plan-then-distill method of writing Seven Soldiers and other comics:

I plan my stories very, very carefully, years ahead of completion but I l do like to let chaos and dirt into the proceedings, scuzz it up a little, forget the original intent, let new characters rise up and take over, cut stuff out, put new stuff in, add some NOISE. I've always preferred the Buzzcocks to Pink Floyd, if you know what I mean. I've spent 28 years in the comics business perfecting my 'sound' and it's been immensely successful for me but I don't really see it as two halves of anything and I'm not much of a one for duality so it's a more, dare I say it, holistic process as I see it.

All my work starts as sketches in the notepad - I have to have pages of visuals and designs or I can't get started. I then write a 'demo' of the first issue to music, in a fairly improvised 'Beat' way, just to get the tone, direction and energy down. This sometimes spills into a rough draft of the second and third and even fourth issues as well. The bulk of the original concept work usually gets done in a white heat over a few days - or weeks in the case of Seven Soldiers.

Then I fill up pads with notes and drawings. Seven Soldiers consumed several notebooks - I have the entire history of the Sheeda worked out, and the exact timing and days of the week on which the story happens. I know the entire geography of the fictional DC Universe New York. I know how every series could be developed into a long-running franchise and so on.

I work out most of the details to the very end then go to work in earnest - fleshing out the stories and drawing the connections between books takes as long as the comic takes to be published usually. I edit constantly; even at the very last moment before the book goes to print, I'm tweaking dialogue. I often write two or three complete drafts of an issue then throw them away [...] It can be an exhausting process but fortunately I work fast and reworking it in this laborious way means I get the material I like best on the page). Usually, the first drafts tend to come in around 40 pages which I then meticulously mix and re-mix until only the 'beat' is left and I have 22 pages of complete story. Every character requires a different storytelling style or rhythm - the Superman stuff I do is very tight and formal and magisterial, Batman is loose, pulpy and fast, WildCATS is remixed 90s New Rave and so on.

Once I get started on actual issues, I always find that the story and characters themselves take over and I generally wind up exploring completely different directions that often lead to a more organic ending. It's important for me to surrender completely to whatever the story and the characters want to do. I want to be surprised by my stories, to feel that I'm discovering them in a participatory way, rather than just 'making it up'. I like it when the stories and characters start to push ME around.

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