Kafka used to work at Assicurazioni Generali, an insurance company, for a year until he resigned because of the extreme and long work time schedule that required him to work from 08:00 am till 08:00 pm and even overtime. Two weeks after he tried to find another job, he landed a position at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. At this company, Kafka would work from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. He would use the rest of the day to write.

Reference: Currey, M., & Currey, M. (2013). Daily rituals: How artists work.

Kafka, F., & Bauer, F. (1973). Letters to Felice. New York: Schocken Books.

Kafka was never married but his personal life was not empty of his relationships with women. One of those most-known women was Felice Bauer. This relationship with her was, can be described as "epistolary relationship".

In the evening of August 13 1912, at one of Kafka's closest friends' apartment, Max Brod, he met Bauer for the first time. Kafka's most detailed description of his first encounter with her was written in a letter to Bauer dated from October 27th 1912. He wrote, "During the piano playing I sat diagonally behind you; you had your legs crossed and kept plucking at your coiffure which I can no longer visualize from the front; all I know is that while the piano was being played, your hair struck out a little at the sides."

They corresponded only for five years. Despite he met her only a few times, he engaged twice with her. Sadly, the marriage never took place. In 1919, Bauer married a man named Moritz Marasse.

Reference: Kafka, F., & Bauer, F. (1973). Letters to Felice. New York: Schocken Books.

Despite he had published some of the most influential novels and short stories in the 20th century, Kafka even felt a profound sense of self-doubt to his writing skill.

This letter was one of the letters that Kafka wrote to his lover, Felice Bauer, that later included in the book titled "Letters to Felice". This book was originally published in German in 1967 as "Briefe an Felice". Then the English translated version came out in 1973, acquired by Schocken Books, translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth.

Reference: Kafka, F., & Bauer, F. (1973). Letters to Felice. New York: Schocken Books.

This essay read by Martha Graham circa 1953 for NPR "This I Believe" --a program by NPR that "engaged listeners in a discussion of the core beliefs that guide their daily lives." The original recording of this essay read by Martha Graham is still available on NPR website.

Reference:NPR

When someone dances gracefully on a stage, her audience doesn't look at her efforts that she has invented into her dance. Through this essay, Graham wants to say that the path to be a great dancer is vacant from mystical element of creativity and it's about endless practices.

Pulled from his journal entry in 1971, Cheever describes his typical day:

"The hour between five and six is my best. It is dark. A few birds sing. I feel contented and loving. My discontents begin at seven, when light fills the room. I am unready for the day--unready to face it soberly, that is. Some days I would like to streak down to the pantry and pour a drink. I recite the incantations I recorded three years ago, and it was three years ago that I described the man who thought continuously of bottles. The situation is, among other things, repetitious. The hours between seven and ten, when I begin to drink, are the worst. I could take a Miltown [a tranquilizer], but I do not. . .I would like to pray, but to whom--some God of the Sunday school classroom, some provincial king whose prerogatives and rites remain unclear? I am afraid of cars, planes, boats, snakes, stray dogs, falling leaves, extension ladders, and the sound of the wind in the chimney. I sleep off my hooch after lunch and very often awake feeling content once more, and loving, although I do not work. Swimming is the apex of the day, its heart, and after this--night is falling--I am stoned but serene. So I sleep and dream until five."

Reference: Currey, M., & Currey, M. (2013). Daily rituals: How artists work.

hh

Mason Currey writes in his book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work about Cheever, 'Cheever continued to write pretty much every morning for the rest of his life--but as his career progressed, the writing sessions grew shorter and shorter, while cocktail hour began earlier and earlier. By the 1960s, Cheever's working day was usually over by 10:30 A.M., after which he would lurk about the house (the family had since moved to the suburbs), pretending to read while waiting for an opportunity to slip unnoticed into the pantry and pour himself a few "scoops" of gin' (Currey, 2014, p. 110).

Reference: Currey, M., & Currey, M. (2013). Daily rituals: How artists work.

"Louise Thompson (Patterson) had been hired by Mrs. Mason in September 1929 to be Hughes's typist" (p. 93).

Reference: Hughes, L., In Rampersad, A., & In Roessel, D. E. (2015). Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.

'After submitting the manuscript of Not Without Laughter to Blanche Knopf on February 17, Hughes decided to seek a Cuban musician to collaborate with him on a new project, a 'singing play.' Godmother [Mrs. Mason] liked this plan and gave him $500 to fund his trip. Hughes traveled to Cuba abroad the Cunard ship Caronia, which arrived there on February 25. He left Cuba on March 6, after making friends among the local literati but without finding a suitable composer. Returning to his residence in Westfield, New Jersey, he did not begin writing immediately. When news of his inactivity reached her (probably through Alain Locke, who had become her well-paid, principal advisor on black American culture), Godmother became angry' (p. 92-93).

Reference: Hughes, L., In Rampersad, A., & In Roessel, D. E. (2015). Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.

"Hughes wrote Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930) with Mrs. Manson's generous financial support and intense encouragement" (p. 92).

Reference: Hughes, L., In Rampersad, A., & In Roessel, D. E. (2015). Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.

"Late May 1930 marks the beginning of the end of Hughes's relationship with Mrs. Mason. He believed that their break resulted in part from Godmother's dissatisfaction with the slowness of his writing and the fact that he was not "primitive" or "African" enough for her. As he puts it in The Big Sea, 'I was only an American Negro--who loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa--but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to be. So, in the end it all came back very near to the old impasse of white and Negro again, white and Negro--as do most relationships in America.' In this draft, Hughes alludes to their latest quarrel, which was precipitated by his decision to keep a commitment in Washington D.C, rather than stay home and write. Seeing this decision as evidence of his disloyalty and ingratitude, she reminded Hughes how much she had spent to support his writing while he had given her almost nothing in return" (p. 92).

Reference: Hughes, L., In Rampersad, A., & In Roessel, D. E. (2015). Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.

Charlotte Mason was the biggest patron in Hughes's life. For almost two years, she showered him with her unlimited money, praise, encouragement, and love. She would give him a monthly stipend, entertain him at her fancy home on Park Avenue, and even visit him at Lincoln University when he studied there.

Reference: Hughes, L., In Rampersad, A., & In Roessel, D. E. (2015). Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.

Biologically, Theo Van Gogh was Van Gogh's brother. But, spiritually, he was more than just a brother. He was his champion and his biggest patron.

Reference: Brainpickings

This is for Jo Van Gogh.

Interestingly, this asylum sparked a sense of vitality in him to paint. He painted around 142 paintings in this asylum.

Reference: Atlasobscura

"By ‘this terrible attack’ Van Gogh is probably referring to his first attack of mental illness, during which he cut off part of his left ear."

Reference:VanGoghLetters.org

"The admissions register of the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole contains the medical report sent by Dr Urpar from Arles about Van Gogh. He stated that Van Gogh suffered an attack of acute mania with generalized delirium. At that time he cut off his ear. At present his condition has greatly improved, but he nevertheless thinks it helpful to be cared for in a mental asylum. The asylum’s physician, Dr Peyron, examined Van Gogh and recorded his findings on 9 and 25 May 1889. On 9 May 1889 he wrote in the admissions register: ‘I consider that Mr Van Gogh is subject to attacks of epilepsy, separated by long intervals, and that it is advisable to place him under long-term observation in the institution."

Reference: VanGoghLetters.org

Jo Van Gogh was a wife of Theo Van Gogh.

Saint-Remy-de-Provence lies at the foot of the Alpilles, a small range of low mountains in Provence, southern France. This place is also home to the Maison de santé Saint-Paul de Mausole (an asylum) where Vincent van Gogh committed himself from 1889 to 1890.

Reference: Atlas Obscura

"By 1798, Beethoven began to experience the symptoms of deafness and by 1820, his deafness was almost total. "

Reference: NYU.edu

Prince Lichnowsky had made Beethoven a present of a set of old string instruments, enough for a string quartet; the makers were Amati and Guarneri.

Reference: Beethoven, L. ., & Hamburger, M. (1984). Beethoven, letters, journals, and conversations.

Johann Adam Schmidt, an eye specialist and professor of medicine at Vienna University, had been treating Beethoven.

Reference: Beethoven, L. ., & Hamburger, M. (1984). Beethoven, letters, journals, and conversations.

According to the Wikipedia article that I read on this topic, though this letter was intended for his brothers, Beethoven did not send this letter to them. He kept it secretly and never showed it to anyone until it was discovered in March 1827 after his death by Anton Schindler and Stephan Von Breuning.

Reference: Wikipedia

This letter is famously called Heiligenstadt Testament. In 1802, on the advice of his personal doctor, Johann Adam Schmidt, Beethoven went to Heiligenstadt (a picturesque country village near Vienna) to rest. Through this letter that was written to his two brothers, Beethoven expressed his sadness over his hearing impairment and his ambitions to pursue his artistic destiny inspite of emotional and physical obstacles.

Reference: Beethoven, L. ., & Hamburger, M. (1984). Beethoven, letters, journals, and conversations.

This sentence and this paragraph, especially, is very heart-breaking. At this time, Beethoven was composing a large portion of his Third Symphony, Eroica. This musical composition was finished in 1804.

He lived in Heiligenstadt from April to October 1802.

From late May 1938 through winter of 1939 Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath.

He wrote this novel for about seven months. However, this novel was a final accumulation of his previous published articles and failed books on the topic of migrants' condition.

Initially, Steinbeck was commissioned by The San Francisco News to write a seven-part series of newspaper articles from October 5 to 12, 1936, titled The Harvest Gypsies. His articles were full of alarming facts about migrants’ lives (illness, incapacitation, death). A year later in late 1937, he attempted to write as he called a “rather long novel” called The Oklahomans. He did not finish the novel.

He continued to write about his vivid investigation of migrants’ lives from February to May 1938 that later became “L’Affaire Lettuceberg. After he finished the first draft of the book, which was a little over seventy thousand words, he destroyed it. He said to his main literary agent, "My father would have called it a smart-aleck book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly (…) It is sloppily written because I never cared about it. I had got smart and cocky you see (…) A book must be a life that lives all of itself and this one doesn’t do that.”

Then after everything that he'd done, he started to draft The Grapes of Wrath.

Reference: Steinbeck, J., & DeMott, R. J. (1989). Working days: The journals of the Grapes of wrath, 1938-1941. New York: Viking.

This is not the only diary entry in which he talked about facing his self-doubt. There are many more entries which exemplify his other struggles.

Habit, for Steinbeck, was an indispensable ingredient for writing, more than either willpower or inspiration. He did not wait for any inspiration to strike and managed to do the best he could despite all the distractions.

As he was tirelessly working on his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck kept a daily journal, as he said, “to map the actual working days hours” of his novel. His journal had been helpful for him to keep him grounded and remind him of his purpose to create this novel. Right before he started writing, which was usually around 11:00 am every day, he would always write in his journal about his agonizing self-doubt, fear, hopes, dreams, the progress of his craft, and his complexities as both a novelist and human being. The journal itself, though he never intended to publish and only wrote it for himself and a future use for his two sons (Thomas Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV), is in fact a work of art. It’s a glimpse at how a person was stubbornly bringing forth into the world what he believed were “truth, meaning, and beauty”.

Reference: Steinbeck, J., & DeMott, R. J. (1989). Working days: The journals of the Grapes of wrath, 1938-1941. New York: Viking.

Becker felt frustrated because she had lost the idea that once had inspired her to paint. At this time, Becker was a twenty-three years old young painter.

In 1898, when Paula was twenty-two years old, she went to Worspede to immerse herself in the artistic community of Worspede, a municipality in the district of Osterholz, in Lower Saxony, Germany, just the northeast of Bremen, her parents' hometown.

She came to Worspede with her mother, Frau Mathilde Becker, and her two sisters. They rented Paula a studio in the large farmhouse of Martin Brunjes. She stayed in this place until 1899 and in 1901, she left Worspede for Paris.

Reference: Modersohn-Becker, P., Busch, G., & Reinken, L. . (1998). Paula Modersohn-Becker, the letters and journals. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press.

Wikipedia

This journal is missing the specific date, but it is compiled with other journals and letters that were written when Becker visited Paris in 1900.

Bassist once wrote, "Think of the canon of women writers: a unifying theme is many of their careers ended in suicide. I often explain to my mother my phobia that to be a writer/a woman/a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this"."

Reference: Strayed, C.,& Bassist, E. (2010). DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker. The Rumpus. Retrieved from: The Rumpus

Strayed came back to remind her that the best advice that she could give was to ask her to start to write.

Bassist once wrote, "And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked."

Reference: Strayed, C.,& Bassist, E. (2010). DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker. The Rumpus. Retrieved from: The Rumpus

Strayed was directing her attention to this sentence by Bassist about her depressive life period: "I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression"."

Reference: Strayed, C.,& Bassist, E. (2010). DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker. The Rumpus. Retrieved from: The Rumpus

She was answering Bassist's questions: "How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?

Reference: Strayed, C.,& Bassist, E. (2010). DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker. The Rumpus. Retrieved from: The Rumpus

Strayed was referring to this sentence by Bassist: "That said, I’m high-functioning—a high-functioning head-case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness".

Reference: Strayed, C.,& Bassist, E. (2010). DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker.The Rumpus. Retrieved from: The Rumpus

Strayed as Sugar loved to use affectionate terms to call people such as honey bun, darling, and sweet pea. Readers can find those words in most of the letters that she wrote.

Two years later, her first novel titled "Torch" was published.

These are some of my favorite sentences of hers. They clearly speak to the core concept of my project which is about demystifying inspiration. Strayed did not sit and wish the muse would come sprinkle her some ideas to dictate her first novel. She had to work really hard to release her first novel.

Cheryl's mother died of lung cancer when she was only forty five years old. At the time, Strayed was a senior in college. She was twenty two. Her mom died seven weeks after her diagnosis. This heart-breaking story of the death of her mom has become the major substance for her debut novel "Torch" and her best-selling memoir "Wild".

Reference: Strayed, C. (2015). The 'Painful Personal Toll Lung Cancer Has Taken on My Life'. HuffPost. Retrieved from: HuffPost

What Strayed was referring to was her debut novel titled "Torch" published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 1 2006. The story in this book comes from Strayed's personal story when she found that her mother had cancer and died weeks later. It's a story about how a family deals with death and how they move forward in life. This book later became a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest.

Reference: Leonard, M. (2006). [Review of the book Torch]. Curled Up. Retrieved from: Curled Up

Elissa Bassist sent a letter to an anonymous advice columnist from The Rumpus named Sugar (Cheryl Strayed) seeking for an advice how to be a writer. At the time, Bassist was an aspiring writer. Her short letter to Sugar exemplified her concerns over her major depressive disorder that affected her writing, the way women writers were perceived in society, and most importantly, her agonizing self-doubt to pursue writing as her destiny. In the letter, she described herself "I am a pathetic and confused young woman of twenty-six, a writer who can’t write".

Reference: Strayed, C.,& Bassist, E. (2010). DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker. Retrieved from: The Rumpus

This was one of the letters that Cheryl Strayed received and replied when she became an anonymous advice columnist named Sugar for The Rumpus, an online literary magazine. For about two years from 2010 until 2012, Sugar or Cheryl Strayed had wisely and generously answered some of the most intimate and heartbreaking letters from the readers, ranging on the topic of jealousy, the art of writing, drug addiction, infidelity, and some of the most inexplicable questions of life.

Sugar formally revealed herself as Cheryl Strayed--a writer based in Portland--at a coming out party in San-Francisco in February of 2012.

Reference: Sally Errico. (2012). Dear Sugar True Identity. Retrieved from: New Yorker

Strayed included a poem by Dickinson titled "If Your Nerve, Deny You".

Reference: Dickinson, E. If Your Nerve, Deny You. Retrieved from: Poem Hunter

This is the core substance of her letter to Bassist's letter.