{"id":440,"date":"2017-10-24T17:47:34","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T16:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writingroutines.com\/?p=440"},"modified":"2017-10-24T17:47:34","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T16:47:34","slug":"famous-writers-standing-desks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writingroutines.com\/famous-writers-standing-desks\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Famous Writers Who Stood Up To Write"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Lamott\u2014the author of, among other books, <\/span>Bird by Bird<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u2014once tweeted about the writing process: \u201cHow to write: Butt in chair. Start each day anywhere. Let yourself do it badly. Just take one passage at a time. Get butt back in chair.\u201d Lamott is one of our favorites around here; few authors have captured better the feelings and thoughts of a writer as they\u2019re going about their craft. And her quip about putting your butt in the chair has an important antecedent: It was the legendary poet and wit Dorothy Parker who said, \u201cWriting is the art of applying the ass to the seat.\u201d (Parker was also famous for the line: \u201cI can\u2019t write five words but that I change seven.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

But what about those of us who get our best thoughts standing up, not sitting down? Well there\u2019s important models for us too, writers who chose to do their writing while on their feet. Here are five writers who took their butts out of their chairs to get their work done:<\/span><\/p>\n

1) <\/span>Ernest Hemingway<\/b><\/h3>\n

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That\u2019s right: the Papa himself wrote standing up. By some accounts, he borrowed this from his editor, the legendary Maxwell Perkins. <\/span>A Movable Feast<\/span><\/i><\/a> was written at a stand-up desk in his home in Havana. As<\/span> one account<\/span><\/a> has it: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn Ernest\u2019s room there was a large desk covered with stacks of letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings, a small sack of carnivores\u2019 teeth, two unwound clocks, shoehorns, an unfilled pen in an onyx holder, a wood carved zebra, warthog, rhino and lion in single file, and a wide-assortment of souvenirs, mementos and good luck charms. He never worked at the desk. Instead, he used a stand up work place he had fashioned out of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Paris Review<\/a> also reported: \u201cA working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu \u2014 the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

2) Winston Churchill<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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It would have been enough for Churchill to have a full life in politics\u2014but he was also the winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.\u201d Many of those descriptions were written while upright. This wasn\u2019t a side pursuit for Churchill either: over the course of a full and varied career, he also found the time to write 43 books in addition to hundreds of speeches. As he once said about writing, “It was great fun writing a book. One lived with it. It became a companion.”<\/span><\/p>\n

3) Virginia Woolf<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u201cA must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,\u201d came from Woolf\u2019s essay \u201cA Room of One\u2019s Own.\u201d She might have added: money, a room\u2026and a standing desk. For a significant part of her life, Woolf wrote her novels while at \u201ca desk standing about three feet six inches high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand to her work.\u201d Her sister painted standing up, and \u201cThis led Virginia to feel that her own pursuit might appear less arduous than that of her sister unless she set matters on a footing of equality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

4) Lewis Carroll<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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The author of <\/span>Alice in Wonderland<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Through the Looking Glass<\/span><\/i><\/a> wrote standing up with purple pens (as Maria Popova notes at <\/span>Brain Pickings<\/span><\/a>, \u201cDuring his years teaching mathematics at Oxford, teachers were expected to use purple ink to correct students\u2019 work \u2014 a habit that carried over to Carroll\u2019s fiction.\u201d). As Carroll\u2019s biographer observer, “Standing at the upright desk he always used while writing, <\/span>he managed to breathe life and laughter<\/b> onto the dry leaves.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

5) Charles Dickens<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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This was the view of Charles Dickens\u2019 study according to one visitor: \u201cbooks all round, up to the ceiling and down to the ground; a standing desk at which he writes; and all manner of comfortable easy chairs.\u201d Yep, the author of so many classics\u2014including <\/span>A Tale of Two Cities<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>Great Expectations<\/span><\/i><\/a>, and <\/span>David Copperfield<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u2014opted to be upright rather than sit for his writing. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Lamott\u2014the author of, among other books, Bird by Bird\u2014once tweeted about the writing process: \u201cHow to write: Butt in chair. Start each day anywhere. Let yourself do it badly. Just take one passage at a time. Get butt back in chair.\u201d Lamott is one of our favorites around here; few authors have captured better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFive Famous Writers Who Stood Up To Write - Writing Routines<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.writingroutines.com\/famous-writers-standing-desks\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Five Famous Writers Who Stood Up To Write - Writing Routines\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anne Lamott\u2014the author of, among other books, Bird by Bird\u2014once tweeted about the writing process: \u201cHow to write: Butt in chair. 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