I was only vaguely aware of Isabelle Allende — I knew she was a Spanish-speaking magical realist — when I came across David Epstein’s explanation (in Inside the Box) of her way of working — starting with a bit of backstory:
In 1970, Salvador Allende, the first cousin of Isabel’s father, was elected president of Chile. Three years later, he died during a military coup, and Augusto Pinochet began his long reign. After the coup, Allende’s grandfather warned her to keep a low profile, but she defied his instructions. She kept writing satirical columns for a feminist magazine and hosting a humorous television program until she was fired from everything as independent media withered. After that, she sheltered political fugitives in her house and helped them over the walls of foreign embassies.
In 1974, she began to realize how much danger she was in. Men in a black car stopped her two kids as they walked to school and told them, in vulgar terms, to let their mother know that she had better leave the country. Allende fled to Venezuela.
[…]
Six years later, Allende was still in Venezuela. She was thirty-nine and working a job she hated as a school administrator when she got a phone call informing her that her grandfather was dying. He was the anchor in the country of her childhood. Without him, her exile would feel complete. She could not return to visit, but she wanted him to know that the family stories he had imparted, many of them tinged with magic, would live on with her. He hated the telephone, so she decided to draft a letter. She took out an old Underwood typewriter, sat alone at the kitchen table at night, and began to write. That was January 8, 1981.
I didn’t realize the “Venezuelan” writer was Chilean and closely related to that Allende. The first mention of Salvador Allende on this blog naturally references A. Stafford Beer’s Cybersyn system. Jared Diamond noted, “The coup was welcomed with relief and broad support from centrist and rightist Chileans, much of the middle class, and of course the oligarchs.”
Back to her writing methodology:
What began as a letter to her grandfather turned into a ritual. Every January 8, she would clear her calendar and start a new book, assuming she had finished the previous one. The result would be a new book about every eighteen months for the next forty-three years.
[…]
Allende’s January 8 ritual is a form of what social scientists call a “commitment device”: a self-imposed restriction of freedom in service of a larger goal. There is no obvious reason that she couldn’t start on some other day of the year, but the ritual itself has become a promise that brings her predictably back to her most productive space (and keeps others out of it).
Commitment devices have been shown to help people save more money (when they open accounts with limited withdrawal windows) and exercise more (using voluntary contracts in which participants have to pay if they skip too many days). Behavioral scientist Katy Milkman would classify Allende’s January routine as a “soft” commitment device, because the immediate penalty for failure is psychological, not financial, but those often work too.
Allende’s reward for her rigid ritual is unadulterated focus. As computer scientist and author Cal Newport has noted, writers were, in a sense, the original remote workers, and anyone who studies the great ones will notice that they tend to go out of their way to designate specific space and time for their work. Maya Angelou famously rented hotel rooms and stripped even the bland artwork from the walls so as not to be engaged by anything extraneous. Victor Hugo locked away his own clothes so he wouldn’t be tempted to change and go outside while writing. Marcel Proust lined the bedroom where he worked with cork to dampen outside sound.
Those are extreme examples, but the reason such practices are important is that the kind of sustained focus Allende employs hour after hour, and year after year, is highly unnatural. Our brains evolved to be extremely distractible, to attend to any novel sights and sounds in our vicinity. Unsurprisingly, research has found that people instantly become more creative when distractions are removed. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul, in her book The Extended Mind, explains: “It was only when we found ourselves compelled to concentrate in a sustained way on abstract concepts that we needed to sequester ourselves in order to think. To attend for hours at a time to words, numbers, and other symbolic content is a tall order for our brains.” And we have been struggling.