Cognitive psychologist, Ronald T Kellogg, wrote in The Psychology of Writing (1994), “[There is] evidence that environments, schedules, and rituals restructure the writing process and amplify performance…The room, time of day, or ritual selected for working may enable or even induce intense concentration or a favorable motivational or emotional state.”
Psychologist and philosopher William James wrote a century earlier in Habit, “The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts.” As in, you don’t have to think about it. And as any writer would likely attest, the fewer things not related to the actual writing that you have to think about, the better. The more mental space you can reserve for expending on the writing, the better.
This is the magic of a writer’s routine. They automate decisions like when and where so that they become instinctual, saving that mental energy for the work. When they find the routine that works, they never break it.
Here are the words of some of the greatest and most prolific writers on sticking to the routine:
— Stephen King has released over 60 full-length works of fiction and almost 200 short stories. He’s also created screenplays and written both comics and nonfiction:
“I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places…The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.”
— 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:
“I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. 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.”
— WH Auden, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet known for his ability to write poems in almost every verse form. He was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist:
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”
Webster Schott detailed his observations of WH Auden in a 1970 Life Magazine piece, “He looks at his wristwatch and says, ‘I’m a slave to it. I shouldn’t know what to do unless it told me.’ He checks his watch over and over again. Eating, drinking, writing, shopping, crossword puzzles, even the mailman’s arrival–all are timed to the minute and with accompanying routines.”
— Alice Munro, called the master of the short story and winner of 22 literary prizes including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013:
“I write every morning, seven days a week. I write starting about eight o’clock and finish around eleven….I am so compulsive that I have a quota of pages. I’m also compulsive now about how much I walk every day….Three miles every day, so if I know I’m going to miss a day, I have to make it up. I watched my father go through this same thing. You protect yourself by thinking if you have all these rituals and routines then nothing can get you.”
— Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the most important writers in history for masterpiece novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s long list of work also includes short stories, dramatic plays, and essays:
“I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.”
— Charles Dickens, author of 15 novels including classics like Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. He also wrote short stories, essays, articles, and novellas:
“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence.”
He eldest son recounted, “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.”
— Isaac Asimov is 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.
In his memoir, I, Asimov, reflects on his unwavering writing routine. He calls it his “candy store” schedule, born and cemented from the years working at the convenience store his father ran in New York:
“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 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.”
— C.S. Lewis wrote more than 30 books which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies: In his 1955 memoir, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis details the routine he crafted at the age of fifteen at Great Bookham:
“[I] settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind as an archetype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a “normal” day (and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the Bookham pattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one.”
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Writing isn’t easy. The life isn’t for everyone. But for those who find themselves called to it, will find that there is nothing better. There is no other life they’d rather know.
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