The saying goes that “Great minds think alike,” yet from all the lists of tips we’ve featured by different writers, that phrase seems far from the truth.
In fact, it appears from this collection of fun facts about writers compiled by Rod McClaren that great minds don’t even work alike or follow any tried and true methods for producing their masterpieces, so if you follow a different drummer, let the freak flag fly and boogie to your own beat. You might be surprised where it leads you.
Truman Capote wrote lying down, as did Marcel Proust, Mark Twain and Woody Allen.
Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Fernando Pessoa and George Sand all wrote standing up.
Roth also "walks half a mile for every page.”
Roald Dahl wrote in a shed.
Philip Pullman used to write in a shed, but eventually gave it to an illustrator friend.
Umberto Eco has a converted church as his scriptorium. One floor has a computer, one has a typewriter, one in which he writes long-hand.
