But like many other great artists, Dickens did not stumble into his fame and success by accident. It was the result of conscious effort, discipline, and a well-balanced daily routine—combined, of course, with once-in-a-generation genius and native talent. The results were awe-inspiring and continue to captivate readers in all the 150 languages into which his work has been translated.

Dickens treated his creative work like any other job: He was punctual and kept set hours. He didn’t wait for the muse to shower him with inspiration or for the right mood to strike him like lightning from the sky before taking up his pen. Such a romantic view of the creative process would likely have hindered his work.

Dickens knew that, often, inspiration comes after knuckling down to work, not before. It joins the writer as a traveling companion only after he has begun the journey of the day’s writing quota.

In the words of Dickens’s eldest son, quoted in Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” “No city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business-like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.”