Thursday, March 26, 2015





Three authors who wrote standing ~

"If I sit down, I write a long opinion and don't come to the point as quickly as I could.  If I stand up I write as long as my knees hold out.  When they don't, I know it's time to stop." ~ Oliver Wendell Homes, "the Great Dissenter," while serving on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Virginia Woolf had "a desk standing about three feet six inches high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand to do her work.  Her 'principal motive' was that her older sister Vanessa, a professional painter whom she both adored and saw as a rival, stood before an easel as she worked.  Virginia feared her writing would appear less worthy than Vanessa's painting 'unless she set matters on a footing of equality,' and that was why 'for many years she stood at this strange desk, and, in a quite unnecessary way, tired herself."  ~ Quentin Bell, a nephew of VW.

"Winston Churchill composed his prose while standing and walking.  'He wrote forty-two books, five thousand speeches and articles -- in all roughly thirty-million words,' said Richard M. Langworth, founder of the Churchill Centre in Washington, DC.  'When he went to work, usually late at night, he shut himself up and arranged his papers at a stand-up desk.  And there, padding up and down in his slippers, he reeled off prose in the small hours.... 'Nearly 3,000 words in the last two days!'  he told his wife in 1928. 'I do not conceal from you that it is a task.  But it is not more than I can do."

Harry Bruce, FOIBLES and FETISHES of FAMOUS WRITERS / Page Fright.  McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 2009.