In our interview with Daniel Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, he explained, “One of the most important insights from the science of timing is that our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of the day. They change — in predictable and sometimes extreme ways. That’s why it’s important to do the right work at the right time. Most of us have a period of the day when we’re highest in vigilance, in our ability to focus deeply and bat away distractions.”
Of course, writers use all sorts of different methods to bat away distractions—listening to the same song on repeat, building a cabin in the middle of nowhere, blocking access to WiFi or turning off devices altogether. Another method, shared by many of the greats, is waking up extremely early or staying up extremely late to do their work when the rest of the world is still or already in bed.
Here are 20 writers on when they do their best work:
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“I remember Salman Rushdie telling me how he gives it the first energy of the day. As soon as he gets up, he goes to his office and starts writing. He’s still in his pajamas. He believes there is a “little package of creative energy that was nourished by sleep,” and he doesn’t want to waste it. He works for an hour or two and then goes to brush his teeth. I have a very similar approach. Only I brush my teeth before I start. I guess that’s my pre-writing ritual.”
— Cal Fussman, best known for the “What I’ve Learned” Esquire column and a master interviewer who has talked to the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Ali, John Wooden, Richard Branson
“A good writing day starts at 4 AM. By 11 AM the rest of the world is fully awake and so the day goes downhill from there.”
— Daniel Gilbert, Harvard Psychology professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness, a New York Times bestseller, selling over a million copies worldwide, and was awarded the Royal Society’s General Book Prize for best science book of the year.
“I write in my study at my house in Belgravia in London, starting very early in the morning, usually around 4.30am, dressed in my pajamas, dressing-gown and slippers. That way no-one interrupts you for five hours, in which time you can get a huge amount of work done. (I averaged 5,500 words a day for 100 days straight writing Churchill: Walking with Destiny).”
— Andrew Roberts, award-winning historian and multiple time bestselling author of books like Napoleon: A Life—winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and a finalist for the Plutarch Award—and his latest, Churchill: Walking With Destiny
“I generally start writing sometime between 5:30am and 6am. I have found that I am most productive if I start early. Doing this allows me to stay consistent—even if I have a 9AM meeting or a class to teach later in the day, I always manage to get some writing done. And I know it’s time to stop when I start thinking about everything else but the piece I am working on. For the most part, I am able to maintain this routine. If I don’t write early in the morning, I feel unsettled throughout the day, so I try not to veer off schedule even when I don’t feel like writing.”
— Keisha N. Blain, award-winning historian and author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom—one of Smithsonian Magazine’s best history books of 2018
“I get up at 4:00 AM and write from 4:00 to 8:00 AM every morning…I’ve been doing for over 20 years. There are a whole bunch of reasons. I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn everything off at the end of the day including unplugging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morning there’s nobody jumping into my inbox or assaulting me emotionally with something, you know what I mean? So I really protect that early morning time.”
— Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and one of the world’s leading experts on ultimate human performance.
“I’m at the gym at 5:30 every morning but it takes me till around 11:30 to actually sit down and start work…From the moment I open my eyes, I’m preparing myself to work, to confront my own Resistance and to overcome it. My friend Randy has a concept, “Little Successes.” He tries to start his day with a series of successes, so that when he sits down to the blank page, he’s got momentum. The gym is that for me. It’s physical but it’s mental too. It’s a ritual, as Twyla Tharp says in The Creative Habit. I never want to get out of bed. I HATE the idea of getting up and going to work out. But I do it to do something I don’t want to do. And of course it feels great when it’s over. I feel virtuous. It’s a Little Success.”
— Steven Pressfield, The bestselling author of, among others, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and The War of Art
“I write in the morning, before I turn on my phone or my computer. This last part being particularly important. I’ve found that writing first thing helps even me out and allows me to feel like I’ve accomplished something before I allow the world to invade my thoughts. This, though, wasn’t always the case; it’s only been in the past five years that I’ve come to understand the importance of ordering one’s day by importance. Or maybe it’s that the internet has gotten more terrible and now it’s easier to stay away.”
— Paul Shirley, professional basketball turned writer, with work appearing in places such as Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and Playboy. He’s the author of two humor memoirs, including Stories I Tell on Dates
“I’m a night owl through and through, and the wee hours are when I’m at my best. I need to be alone to write fiction, for I am a fragile flower — and the more utterly alone I am, the better. In the middle of the night, there are no distractions. I can get myself to a place where I feel like I’m the only person in the world who’s currently conscious, and that frees me up to be a little more vulnerable and experimental.”
— Liana Maeby, novelist and author of South on Highland, which actor/writer BJ Novak called it “the kind of book kids will steal from each other.”
“The earlier the better. Nobody is up. I’m creative. I don’t have the worries of the day infecting my thoughts and I am calm. I think some people write better at night but I always sort of think the whole point of “night” is that people are tired (the brain and body become tired) and that’s why we sleep. To rejuvenate. So when I am fully rejuvenated, I write.”
— James Altucher, blogger and author of Choose Yourself—listed as one of USA Today’s “Best Business Books of All Time”— and Reinvent Yourself was #1 book overall on Amazon.com.
“I definitely believe in writing rhythms. Especially in New York City, I write best in the early morning or late night and I find the energy is too distracting to write during the daytime unless there is major breaking news on deadline. But when the city is asleep, you can focus for sustained periods of time. Otherwise, the adrenaline of New York is just too intense.”
— John Avlon, former Editor-in-Chief and Managing Director of The Daily Beast and author of, most recently, Washington’s Farewell
“When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize winner and novelist, known for classics like A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea
“I tend to wake up very early. Too early. Four o’clock is standard. My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head. So getting to my desk every day feels like a long emergency. It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest for works like The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior
“It took me a long time to accept 1-5am as my best hours, which was the only timing that provided consistent progress. I also distinguish between idea generation and idea “creation” (combination into a meaningful whole). 1-3pm was spent brainstorming fragmented concepts and anecdotes, as well as interviewing and note taking. I would circle the best ideas and then put them in order at 1am for an attempt at synthesis. I don’t believe that it is possible to do more than 4 hours of good creative work per waking cycle. This can be extended only slightly by caffeine power naps (down a cup of espresso and then take a 20-minute nap) or “ultra-naps” that are multiples of the 90-minute ultradian cycle (I prefer 90 minutes or 3 hours)…I also put a TV on in the background and mute it, but that’s more a social coping mechanism, since most people sleep from 1-5am.”
— Tim Ferriss, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of several books, including The 4-Hour Workweek.
“Eventually I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down…I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come…And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular…Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”
— Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, best known for The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved
“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
— Haruki Murakami, called one of the world’s greatest living novelists by The Guardian for works like Kafka On The Shore, Norwegian Wood, and 1Q84
“In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, novelist and essayist, who penned the classics Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions
“I usually get up fairly early, I got up at 4:30 this morning, but I usually get up between 6 and 6:30. I always have a pad on my bedside, in case I want to write straight away. I also have a habit at night of leaving a sentence unfinished, so I can pick up on it the next morning. I’m also a bit afraid of going to sleep. If writing is flowing, I’m afraid it might disappear. I’m also slightly afraid of mealtimes. If the mood is upon me, I tend to write nonstop. But I’m not very systematic…I get up, a pad by my bedside. I have my usual breakfast of oatmeal, again with a pad in the kitchen, because you never know what’s going to go through your mind when you’re eating your oatmeal. I then usually go for a walk. I like to walk before 7, when there are not too many people around, and there’s something about exercise that gets my mind going.”
— Oliver Sacks, renowned neurologist, physician, and bestselling author of Musicophilia, Awakenings, and On The Move.
“The overriding factor in my life between the ages of six and twenty-two was my father’s candy store…I was pressed into labor…What was really remarkable about the candy store was the long hours. My father opened the store at 6 A.M., rain, shine, or blizzard. He closed it at 1 A.M…I must have liked the long hours…I have kept the candy-store hours all my life. I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.)
In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store. Of course, I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do—but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.”
— Isaac Asimov, credited with writing over 500 published works, most notably the Foundation and Robot series’. There are also estimates that Asimov wrote more than 90,000 letters and postcards.
“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
— H.P. Lovecraft, horror fiction author of short stories, novels, and novellas, including The Call of Cthulhu and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
“I go to bed at six or seven in the evening, like the chickens; I’m waked at one o’clock in the morning, and I work until eight; at eight I sleep again for an hour and a half; then I take a little something, a cup of black coffee, and go back into my harness until four. I receive guests, I take a bath, and I go out, and after dinner I go to bed. I’ll have to lead this life for some months, not to let myself be snowed under by my debts.”
— Honoré de Balzac, author of eighty-five novels over twenty years, including his most famous La Comedie Humaine (“The Human Comedy”).
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