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How we work: Philip Roth, author

Phillip Roth stands while he's working, and "walks half a mile for every page". Like others, Roth has a strict regime:

He works standing up, paces around while he's thinking and has said he walks half a mile for every page he writes. [...]

He has always believed in the separation of life and art. He keeps his private life strictly to himself and prefers not to work where he lives. In Connecticut, his studio is back in the trees away from the house; 30 years ago, when he was spending half the year in London, he lived in Fulham and worked in a little flat in Kensington; in New York, there were two apartments on the Upper West Side, one for living in and a studio for work; when he moved more or less full-time to Connecticut, he kept the New York studio and that is where we met to talk. [...] The lectern at which Roth works is at right angles to the view, presumably to avoid distraction.

The core challenge in writing is how to render life into art:

"I have to have something to do that engages me totally," he says. "Without that, life is hell for me. I can't be idle and I don't know what to do other than write. [...] I don't really have other interests. My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That's what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing.

(thanks See Tshiung Han)

Apparently Virginia Woolf did too. See also: Walter Murch.

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How we work: Scott McNealy, entrepreneur

In 1997, McNealy banned the use of Powerpoint at Sun because it clogged disks, bandwidth and brains:

We had 12.9 gigabytes of Powerpoint slides in storage on our disk drives. Ha ha ha. It freaks me out just to think about. Do you how many person centuries that is? Of clip-art manipulations? I banned Powerpoint from our company - I just edicted it. [...] if I just gave everybody overheads, you know, blank Mila overheads with all the free pens they wanted - I could drive productivity through the roof, as opposed to having - I mean you've all seen these overheads that have 14 pieces of clipart, 13 fonts, right hand justified, spell-check, 13 colours and you know your employee is exhausted by the time it finally comes off the printer. And do they communicate anything? No.

McNealy hand-draws his overhead projections (source: somewhere in Infodesign Cafe's archives perhaps).

See also: Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, Ian Parker's Absolute Powerpoint (for The New Yorker, 2001), and Powerpoint bad/good.

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How we work: Haruki Murakami, author

Murakami's commute from Oiso into Tokyo to write from a city-central apartment is part of a rigourous personal regime:

At 53, Murakami is dauntingly prolific and almost aggressively healthy. He swims and runs daily, and has run marathons in New York, Boston and Sapporo. He is in bed by 9 p.m. and up at 4. "You need power to be a good writer"

On the Tokyo metro sarin attack changing his writing:

The shock I felt when I interviewed the victims of the sarin attack for "Underground" [nonfiction; 2000] changed my life, my entire point of view, and even my style of writing. I didn't imagine that such a thing could happen. I was doing those interviews for a full year, and I interviewed about 60 people. [...] That's what I think about when I write fiction these days: more details and simpler words. In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories. I think "Underground" was the turning point in my writing.

And takes the time to answer reader email (in prefence to reading professional critics):

I answer my readers' e-mails, you know. I read about 100 per day, and I write 10 to 20 replies. I think it's necessary for me. [...]  Sometimes they actually help me to think about the books I've written.

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How we work: Autechre, musicians

Sound on Sound's interview has a lot of detail on Autechre's philosophy, studio techniques, etc. Which could probably be fairly reasonably described as an immersive bricolage.

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How we work: Howard Hodgkin, artist

Hodgkin paints fairly reclusively, on several paintings in parallel, most of which take years to complete. He works in an all-white studio without windows or a live model, and with few preparatory drafts:

Hodgkin admits to only being able to manage a large picture space in the past ten years or so, 'You have to keep the picture surface alive "all over", in a way that you don't with smaller paintings. You can't pretend the picture surface isn't there on a large scale'.

Hodgkin's working methods are not typical. The painting Lovers (finished in 1992) took eight years to complete. He works out many aspects of a large painting in his mind - there are few preliminary works, few props or aide-memoire.  He carries with him an extensive knowledge of other artists' work. He believes that the media-dominated culture in which we live is prompting a return to the lasting values of painting. (from Calvocoressi in Howard Hodgkin, Large Paintings, 2002, 10)

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How we work: Pablo Casals, cellist

Began each day by playing several preludes and fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on the piano. And of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites he'd say:

All I could do was stare at the pages and caress them. ... I hurried home, clutching the suites as if they were the crown jewels. ... I read and reread them. I was thirteen at the time, but for the following eighty years the wonder of my discovery has continued to grow on me. Those suites opened up a whole new world. I began playing them with indescribable excitement. They became my most cherished music. I studied and worked at them every day for the next twelve years.

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How we work: Jackson Pollock, artist

Knocked a wall down in his studio in order to fit in the canvas that would become Mural (1943), for Peggy Guggenheim's apartment. But he didn't commence work on it until 15 hours before it was due to be delivered - "it was a stampede", he would later report.

When it was delivered, Guggenheim found that it was eight inches too long to fit into the space. On Marcel Duchamp's advise it was chopped down to fit.

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How we work: Umberto Eco, academic/author

From The Name of the Rose, 1:

"I completed a translation, using some of those large notebooks from the Papeterie Joseph Gibert in which it is so pleasant to write if you use a felt-tip pen."

Eco has a converted church as his scriptorium. One floor has a computer, one has a typewriter, one in which he writes long-hand (so he write with whichever tool feels best today). - The source for this is currently mispaced. But the excellent 'A Conversation on Information' interview with Patrick Coppock from 1995 has a lot on computers, notebooks, and so on:

"As a writer I have discovered there are certain kinds of things for which I still need the pen, there are certain things for which I need the computer, certain things for which I need a felt-tipped pen. And the kind of instrument I am using is influencing my writing enormously."

Q: "The material substance that you operate with".

Yes, when I come to think about it, this kind of action... [Eco picks up his notepad and scribbles on it] ...is very important. And this is so new that people have not really understood those differences. I don't know [...]

Eco's critics on the tool, the hand and authenticity (viz Heidegger and Walter Benjamin):

So, there was a Metropolitan legend that said that my novels have been written at the computer, and they don't consider that The Name of the Rose was published in 1980, and that the first really good word-processors started to come in 1982-83. So it could not have been computer-written. [...]

Type-written or hand-written. But for the Pendulum, since the Pendulum speaks about the computer, the silly journalists argue that, well, "Your book was concocted by the computer." And they still believe that you put some words there, and zzzaapp: the machine gives you the book. One of them said: "Well, it is clear that this is computer-written, except one chapter. That one where the boy plays the trumpet in the cemetery (the final chapter). It's clear that that one is hand-written." It was the only chapter of my book that I wrote immediately, and without correction at the computer! All the others were hand-written! [...]

Put together in multiple ways. Why? Because I had in mind this final chapter right from the beginning. And I thought about it for eight years so intensely that when I arrived at this point - I remember very well, it was in my apartment in Bologna at 6 o'clock - it was like playing the piano, like a jazz-musician: I put it all down very easily with the computer, following my mind and only making the corrections underway. It was totally written at the computer...it was just because there was more inspiration, so to speak.

See also The World According to Eco ("Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco expounds upon the Net, writing, The Osteria, libraries, the continental divide, Marshall Mcluhan,and, well, God").

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How we work: Lucian Freud, artist

This article by the Telegraph's art critic Martin Gayford is interesting on the experience of sitting for Lucian Freud:

Freud's method is to leave areas of untouched surface visible until very late on. This is, as he characteristically put it, "because it makes it more difficult, which helps me". "Many painters," he explained further, "may like to feel that they are working on a picture that is already there. But I like to feel that every aspect of it is provisional, changeable, removable." Consequently, my portrait grew outwards from a single point - "organically" as Freud puts it.

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How we work: Pierre Omidyar, entrepreneur

From a keynote speech at Tufts University:

So people often say to me - "when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day." Well... nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn't my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining... because I had a real job to go to every morning.

I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.

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