When the New York Tribune ran its 1984 profile on Neil Diamond, the headline surprised readers not for its praise but for its phrasing: “An Old-School Artistic Laborer.” It was a description drawn from a series of quiet observations made during several mornings in his New York workspace, where the reporter witnessed a routine that seemed pulled from another century. Each day began the same way: three unbroken hours of handwriting — no instruments, no studio equipment, no assistants hovering nearby. Just paper, ink, and silence.
The dossier revealed that Diamond’s mornings started before the rest of the household stirred. He brewed his own coffee, set it beside a stack of blank legal pads, and sat at a heavy wooden desk scarred with the pressure marks of years’ worth of drafts. The reporter noted that he never opened with melody; he opened with language. Lines, fragments, word clusters, half-thoughts written with the speed of someone trying to keep up with himself. His handwriting wasn’t elegant — the profile described it as “determined, slightly slanted, almost impatient.” But the physical act mattered. He believed ideas behaved differently when written by hand, that a pencil on paper forced honesty in a way machines never could.
The most striking detail was his discipline. Once he sat down, he did not rise. No phone calls, no conversations, no breaks. A small clock sat on the edge of the desk, but he rarely looked at it. Time was measured not in minutes but in pages — the slow, steady accumulation of inked thoughts. Some days he filled entire pads; other days he produced barely half a page. Yet he held the three-hour window sacred. The reporter described it as “a worker’s ritual — closer to a craftsman than a star.”
Part of the profile focused on the rhythm of those sessions. Diamond frequently wrote long passages of emotional narrative, not intending them as lyrics but as exercises to loosen whatever tension blocked the day’s ideas. He wrote scenes from memory, invented characters, drafted letters he never sent. The Tribune’s writer compared it to a runner stretching — not the performance itself, but preparation for it. Only after the writing session ended did he move to his instruments, using the raw emotional residue from the morning to guide melodic decisions.
One anecdote in the dossier captured the essence of the routine. At one point during the interview days, a deliveryman rang the doorbell. The household dog barked, footsteps echoed in the hallway, and still Diamond did not raise his head. “When he is in that room, the world happens elsewhere,” the reporter wrote. “He works as though work is the only certainty he has.”
The profile also explored why he clung to this analog process in an era when digital tools were spreading rapidly. Diamond told the reporter that handwriting made his thoughts “visible in their flaws,” something he considered essential. The crossed-out lines, margin notes, and arrows weaving between paragraphs formed a map of instinct and revision that he trusted more than tape or screen. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was method.
By the end of the 1984 feature, the Tribune made its case: the term “old-school artistic laborer” wasn’t a stylistic flourish. It was a literal observation of a man who treated creativity the way some people treat craftsmanship — something earned daily through repetition, discipline, and a refusal to let the ease of modern tools soften the rigor of the work.
And in those three handwritten hours every morning, the profile found its thesis: Diamond didn’t wait for inspiration. He built a place for it to land.