William Styron's Framework

Styron tacked Flaubert's maxim about being regular and orderly in life to the door frame of his workroom in the Connecticut farmhouse, and then kept an unconventional routine for thirty years. He slept until noon, read and thought in bed for another hour or so, and had lunch with his wife Rose around 1:30. Errands, the mail, music and daydreaming eased him toward work until four, when he went up to the workroom for four hours and perfected each paragraph until two or three hundred words were done. Cocktails and dinner with family and friends came at eight or nine, and he stayed up until two or three in the morning drinking, reading, smoking and listening to music, while Rose guarded the door and ran the household. As a week it is a nine-hour night that starts at three, a four-hour creative block that starts at four, and seven hours of evening. The late-shifted day at its purest, and it depended on someone else keeping the rest of life running.