It’s About Time!

The perfect writing routine! Every writer dreams of it, and every writer knows, deep down, that there is no such thing. There are simply too many variables at play—ambition, temperament, material circumstances—to reach a one-size-fits-all solution. But! Could one identify the building blocks of the perfect routine, to be applied to individual writing practices on an ad hoc basis? Here is an attempt, with copious supporting examples.

Rule No. 1: Schedule discrete focus blocks

Writers with day jobs may fantasize about having long expanses of unstructured creative time, but let’s be honest: there is no greater drag upon a writing practice than having the full day available for it, which practically guarantees a long, flabby drift rather than a focused effort.

In a practice that is all about increments of labor, the first step is to define your daily dose.

How long should these focus blocks be? That depends on your individual creative metabolism and how much time you have available, but a good general rule is three hours. That’s what the ultra-productive British novelist Anthony Trollope advised, and it’s hard to argue with his conclusion: “All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

Of course, some writers have found longer sprints productive—but plenty have gotten by on shorter bursts, too. The late novelist Martin Amis said, “I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.” Graham Greene was once asked if he was “a nine-to-five man.” “No,” Greene replied. “Good heavens, I would say I was a nine-till-a-quarter-past-ten man.” Gertrude Stein was never able to write for much more than half an hour a day—but, she said, “if you write a half-hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.”

Rule No. 2: Create rituals of transition

OK, you’ve got your block of writing time figured out—but can you really just sit down and start writing? Obviously, no. Countless writers have found, consciously or unconsciously, that they need to create a transition from the world of dog walking, bill paying, and family relating to the world of the imagination. This transition can be as simple as making a cup of coffee or as elaborate as changing into a specific writing wardrobe. “I can never work in anything but old clothes, although these must always be very neat,” The Well of Loneliness author Radclyffe Hall once told a reporter. “I usually work in an old tweed skirt and my velvet smoking jacket, a man’s smoking jacket by choice because of the loose and comfortable sleeves.” The real point is not comfort, however—it’s marking the transition to a different state of mind, one where this obscurely demanding work is possible.

The simplest transition is a change of location—the trip to the office being a time-honored example. Even if one doesn’t have a commute, the dynamic can be simulated. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has described a period of his life when he had to write in student housing that he shared with his wife and how this upset him—he needed his workspace to be separated from the domestic sphere. His solution: “In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I’d leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.”

Rule No. 3: Choose your stimulant

Let us now praise caffeine, an enduring engine of literary creation through the ages. Coffee is the classic choice. According to a 1946 newspaper profile, the playwright Lillian Hellman drank 20 cups a day—and the French novelist Balzac supposedly downed as many as 50 to fuel his epic writing binges (please note: these were small cups) and said, “Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”

If that seems excessive—yes. Luckily, anything that can be done to excess can be done in moderation, too, and your average writer maintains a much more sensible intake of a cup or two (or three or four) each day. Tea works just as well. Tolstoy was a tea lover, as was Samuel Johnson, who drank it, observed a friend, “very plentifully.”

Of course, there are more powerful stimulants than caffeine, and they have their own literary pedigree: Legend has it, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in an amphetamine-fueled three-week session of “kick writing,” and a whole swath of early-20th-century writers relied on the same class of stimulants, including the poet W.H. Auden, who took a dose of Benzedrine each morning the way many people take a daily multivitamin, and Ayn Rand, who turned to amphetamines to finish The Fountainhead. Rand had spent years planning and composing the first third of that novel; with the help of Benzedrine, she was able to write a chapter a week—but her continued reliance on the drug led, predictably, to a host of bad effects, including mood swings, irritability, and paranoia.

Rule No. 4: Take the all-important walk

Counterintuitively, this may be the most crucial component of a successful writing practice, even though it appears to have nothing to do with writing. If you look closely at the daily routines of successful writers throughout history, you will almost certainly find a walk built in somewhere—or a jog, a swim, a bike ride, or another bout of solo physical exercise. These activities are not just breaks from the relentlessly sedentary act of writing; they create the conditions for ideas to flourish and multiply seemingly of their own accord. We’ve all had this experience: brain-dead at our desk but bursting with ideas on a dog walk or a stroll to the post office. Charles Dickens, who took a vigorous three-hour walk every afternoon, described the activity as “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” Virginia Woolf said of her rambles in the country, “I like to have space to spread my mind out in.” The filmmaker and writer Miranda July has talked about finding the right amount of pressure to apply to her brain on her walks. “It’s not too much,” she said. “You know, you kind of want to trick yourself that you’re just enjoying being outside and maybe plant the seed of, like, ‘How does this character do this?’ And then let it go.” But the savvy writer also carries a notebook or voice recorder on these jaunts, to ensure that any fresh insights haven’t drifted away by walk’s end.

Rule No. 5: Engage with the world of ideas

We writers can be so fixated on getting our own writing done that we sometimes forget how much the output depends on the input. This is not an optional component of a writing practice—any successful writing day must include some measure of engagement with the world of art and ideas. Ideally, it would be part of one’s daily routine. The poet Wallace Stevens, for instance, read for two hours every morning, before commuting to his job as an insurance executive. (He composed his poems on his walks to work, jotting down verse on the scraps of paper he carried in his pocket.)

Reading is great, but so is going to a museum, watching a film, or having a conversation with a friend, provided it’s the kind of friend you can have deep conversations with. (Empty socializing is to be avoided at all costs.) Many writers have found listening to music particularly indispensable, like the novelist William Styron, who said, “I often have to play music for an hour in order to feel exalted enough to face the act of composing.”

Rule No. 6: Get weird

OK, you don’t have to be weird to be a writer, but—it helps? Or, rather, writing seems to bring out the inherent weirdness in its practitioners, and there’s no use stifling it. Instead, you might try indulging it as part of your routine. The examples are legion: The 18th-century German philosopher and playwright Friedrich Schiller kept a drawerful of rotting apples in his workroom; he needed the decaying smell, he said, in order to feel the urge to write. Truman Capote was “a completely horizontal author,” he said—“I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.” Joan Didion took this idea a step further. When she was nearing the end of a book, she needed to sleep in the same room with it. “That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things,” Didion said in 1977. “Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.”

Rule No. 7: Repeat, repeat, repeat

Repetition is not so much an additional component to the ideal writing routine as it is a way to activate one’s overall routine: by repeating it to the extent that it becomes a habit, at which point something magical happens. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has spoken eloquently about this, saying that when he’s writing, he keeps to the same routine “every day without variation,” and adding that “the repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

Woolf celebrated the same dynamic in a 1931 speech. She said that “a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible” and argued that the way to achieve this was to arrange one’s life so that it proceeded “with the utmost quiet and regularity…so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.” Auden had similar advice for the writer: “Decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” (Passion, in Auden’s case, being a synonym for distraction.)

This is the central paradox of the writing routine: that only by embracing regularity and predictability can one unleash the full powers of the imagination and come upon unexpected insights. The trick is a kind of flexible rigidity—to embrace the power of habit without getting overly fussy or fanatical about it. Writing is a creative act that relies on a mix of intellect and instinct; crafting one’s writing routine should be no different.•