Blake Butler—

Cool piece on writing processes of a range of writers, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Richard Powers, Margaret Atwood, at Wall Street Journal [via Rozalia Jovanovic]

Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.