One important caveat is that there is an enormous degree of subjectivity in assessing a literary - or any creative - career, but since all information visualization is an exercise in subjective editorial judgment rather than a record of Objective Truth, we settled on a set of quantifiable criteria to measure “productivity”: number of published works and major awards received. We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available - this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author. Many came from two books - Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson - as well as from the Paris Review interviews and various collections of diaries and letters. So I turned to Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat - who make masterful visualizations of cultural phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify - and, together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible to visualize such a correlation.įirst, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. The challenge, of course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to find, hard to quantify, or both. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits - after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. “In both writing and sleeping,” Stephen King observed in his excellent meditation on the art of “creative sleep” and wakeful dreaming, “we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.”
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