Flannery O'Connor's Framework

Lupus confined O'Connor to her mother's farm in Georgia for the last thirteen years of her life, and she called her routine a condition of survival. She was at prayers by six with a thermos of coffee, then drove into Milledgeville for daily Mass, and wrote from nine to noon, three hours before the illness tired her, at a desk turned to face a blank wall so nothing could distract her. Afternoons were rest, long letters to friends and admirers, visitors on the porch and her flock of forty-odd peafowl and other birds. She painted as well. Evenings she read, and she was in bed early. This is the shortest creative block in the set, three hours, and it produced two novels and thirty-two stories. The framework keeps it exactly: a nine-hour night, an hour of quiet at six, two hours of church, the three hours of work, and a long afternoon and evening for everything gentler. If energy is the limit, this is the day that respects it.