Honoré de Balzac's Daily Routine

Honoré de Balzac packed some 90 novels, stories and essays on French life into La Comédie humaine and helped found literary realism. His writing routine, which Mason Currey calls the most extreme in Daily Rituals, turned the day inside out. He wrote through the night and went to bed before the sun went down.

He ate a light dinner, slept from 6:00 PM and rose at 1:00 AM to write for 7 hours in a monkish white robe. A 90-minute nap split the day, and he wrote again until mid-afternoon on cup after cup of black coffee, as many as 50 a day by one estimate. Then he walked, bathed and received visitors. He told a friend in 1830 that the days melted in his hands like ice in the sun.

It suits anyone who can only find silence while everyone else sleeps, or who is up against a deadline and can clear the calendar for a few weeks. It also suits people who write best in long, unbroken stretches.

You get 13 hours of writing before dinner and a free late afternoon for people. To try a gentler version today, go to bed at 8:00 PM, write in the early hours and leave out the 50 coffees. The afternoon finish, where Currey puts it a little later, and the same cycle every day are our simplifications.