Today is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby.

I always think of Hunter S. Thompson who once typed out the entire novel. As Johnny Depp tells it, “He’d look at each page Fitzger­ald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he want­ed to know what it felt like to write a mas­ter­piece.”

I don’t think copying the finished words recreates the masterpiece itself - but it does channel… something. If you can’t create… then just start copying for a while, and your own ideas will begin to take over.

He also did this with Hemingway. Which reminds me of this tidbit by Robert Caro (The Power Broker celebrated it’s 50th anniversary in 2024)

One of Caro’s well-known habits is to record how many words he has written each day. In the “Turn Every Page” exhibition, you can see a marked-up calendar from the period when he was working on The Power Broker. Here is how the first half of April 1971 went: 1,200; 1,400; 200; 0; 1,000; 1,800; 0 (sick); 1,200; 0 (lazy); 1,000; 0; 1,000; 400 (lazy); 200 (lazy); 1,400.

Researching Caro’s earliest journalism, I stumble upon a suggestive concordance. On July 3, 1961, the day after Ernest Hemingway’s death, Caro wrote a powerful eulogy in Newsday that included the following sentence: “At the end of each morning, he would carefully chalk the number of words written that day on a blackboard he kept for that purpose.”

Sometimes, I want to see a complete family tree of each artist…and their habits and inspirations mapped out.