A classic writing routine

I’m on my second monster biography of Charles Dickens, after just completing Michael Slater’s recently published Charles Dickens (720 pages). This time I’m reading Peter Ackroyd’s 1,200-page Dickens, a 1991 release that I found used—but in like-new condition—for about $15. I admit, after several hundred pages I’m beginning to jump around the text a bit, but Ackroyd’s narrative is thorough and engaging.

I read the following except last night, and was taken by how similar Dickens’ writing routine is to that of other, more recent writers described in the pages of The Writer and elsewhere: 

“He used a goose-quill pen with blue (or occasionally black) ink. He wrote in blue-grey slips of paper, eight and three quarter inches by seven and one quarter inches. On an ordinary day he would complete approximately two thousand words (some two to two and a half ‘slips’) but when he was writing in a furious vein he might cover four ‘slips’ and complete almost four thousand words. Sometime, of course, nothing came at all; and yet he stayed in his study, keeping to his hours. On these occasions he might draw figures or dots, or doodle. Or he would simply stare out of the window. ‘But I always sit here,’ he said, ‘for that certain time.’ His son [the eldest, Charles Dickens Jr.] adds, ‘Whether he could get on satisfactorily with the work in hand mattered nothing. He had no faith in the waiting-for-inspiration theory ... It was just his business to sit at his desk during just those particular hours in the day, my father used to say, and, whether the day turned out well or ill, there he sat accordingly. He would occasionally come into lunch and complain of having a ‘bad morning’--‘but I have know from the expressive working of his face and from a certain intent look that I learnt to know well, that he had been, almost unconsciously, diligently thinking all round his subject. ...’ So the novelist sat at his desk, from nine until two, and, when the time came for his three-hour walk, ‘I go at once, hardly waiting to complete a sentence.’ ” 

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