The writing routines of famous authors, from their own accounts

Most famous authors whose routines are on record wrote in the morning, for three to five hours, and stopped by early afternoon. Of the 13 below, 12 started before 11 a.m. and five were at work by 5:30. The exception, Franz Kafka, wrote late at night, after his hours at an insurance office and a long nap. Several kept a number: Anthony Trollope's 250 words every quarter of an hour, Stephen King's 2,000 words a day, Ernest Hemingway's daily count on a cardboard chart.

Every routine here comes from the writer's own words, in an autobiography, a letter or an interview, or from someone who worked beside them. That rules out a fair amount of what circulates online. The best-known of those stories are checked in a table near the end, and not all of them fail.

Thirteen routines, by start time

Why the morning wins

The table looks like an argument for early rising. Read the sources and it is mostly an argument about whose time is whose. Trollope held a full-time job at the Post Office for most of his writing life. He was at his desk at 5:30 every morning, paid an old groom £5 a year extra to wake him with coffee, and finished his literary work before he dressed for breakfast. Of the groom he wrote, "I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had."

Toni Morrison told The Paris Review she had never been able to write regularly, because she had always had a nine-to-five job. She wrote in between, on weekends and before dawn, a habit that started when her sons were small and the only free hours came before they woke, around five. Octavia Butler, in her essay "Positive Obsession," says she got up at two or three in the morning to write and then went to work in offices, factories and warehouses. Kurt Vonnegut, teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1965, described his days in a letter to his wife: up at 5:30, writing until 8, breakfast, writing until 10, then errands, a swim, and teaching in the afternoon.

Dickens, who lived on his books by then, kept the same shape anyway. Writing to his friend Cornelius Felton from Broadstairs in 1843, he described a gentleman who sits in a bay window "from nine o'clock to one" and "writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed." Then came a swim, a strong lunch, and "walking a dozen miles or so." His daughter Mamie remembered that his mornings were "invariably spent at his desk," now and then running a couple of hours into the afternoon.

Kafka is the useful exception, and his schedule shows why. In a letter to Felice Bauer in November 1912 he laid it out: the insurance office from 8 until 2 or 2:30, lunch, sleep until 7:30, exercises, a walk, dinner with his family, then writing from 10:30 or later until one, two or three in the morning. That September, his diary records, he wrote "The Judgment" in a single sitting, from ten at night to six the next morning. The lesson of the table is less "write at dawn" than "write in the hours nobody else has claimed." For most people with jobs, those hours sit at one end of the day or the other.

Quotas: words, pages or hours

The writers who set a target split into two camps. Some counted output. Trollope kept a diary for each book, divided into weeks, and entered the pages written every day. His average was about 40 pages a week, as low as 20 and as high as 112, and he fixed a page at 250 words because "a page is an ambiguous term." A short week, he wrote, "has been a blister to my eye." Hemingway kept his count on a chart made from the side of a cardboard packing case. The Paris Review lists days of 450, 575, 462, 1,250 and 512 words, the big numbers earned so he could go fishing the next day without guilt.

Twain, finishing Huckleberry Finn at his sister-in-law's farm near Elmira in the summer of 1883, told William Dean Howells he had written 4,000 words that day, often passed 3,000, and did not "fall below 2600 on any working day." When he wore out, he lay in bed for a couple of days reading and smoking, then went at it again for six or seven. Many sites quote the floor as 1,600: that is how Albert Bigelow Paine printed the letter in 1917. The manuscript, as the Mark Twain Project transcribes it, says 2,600. Stephen King, in On Writing, asks himself for ten pages a day, about 2,000 words, and wants a first draft done in about three months.

Others counted time. Henry James kept the hours between breakfast and lunch for what he called inventive work. Murakami writes for five or six hours from 4 a.m. Flannery O'Connor, who had lupus, wrote about two hours a day, "because that's all the energy I have," and let nothing interfere with them. Time quotas forgive slow days. Word quotas make progress visible. Either works if the number is one you can hit on a bad day. Here is what the word quotas add up to for a 90,000-word novel, inside the usual range for adult fiction:

The last row is the encouraging one. A single page a day is a novel a year.

How they started and stopped

The habits that travel best are not the hours but the edges of the session. Hemingway's rule, from the Paris Review interview and again in A Moveable Feast, was to stop while he still knew what happened next, so the next morning began with something to write. Trollope spent the first half hour of his three reading the previous day's work, "weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases," to catch the tone before he went on.

John Steinbeck warmed up on paper. While drafting East of Eden in 1951 he began each working day with a letter to his editor, Pascal Covici, usually on the left-hand pages of a notebook, and wrote the novel on the right. The letters came out after his death as Journal of a Novel (1969). It is the same idea as morning pages: spend the first words of the day on something that does not count.

Others worked at the far edge, in the evening. Maya Angelou reread the morning's pages after dinner and cut hard: nine pages, she told The Paris Review, might leave two and a half or three worth keeping. Joan Didion needed an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over the day's work, then began the next morning by redoing it from those notes. Near the end of a book, she said, she had to sleep in the same room as it.

Murakami put it most bluntly: he keeps the same routine every day without variation, and the repetition itself is the point, "a form of mesmerism."

Rooms, postures and tools

Jane Austen had no study. Her nephew's memoir says she wrote in the family sitting room, on small sheets of paper that could be put away or covered with blotting paper, and refused to have a creaking swing door fixed because it warned her when someone was coming. Twain had the opposite: an octagonal study on a hill above Elmira, New York, 200 yards up the slope from the house. "On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats and write in the midst of the hurricanes," he wrote in 1874.

Angelou rented a hotel room in every town she lived in, arrived by 6:30, wrote lying across the bed and never let the staff change it, since she never slept there. She brought yellow pads, a dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, a Bible and a bottle of sherry. Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of what became Fahrenheit 451 in the typing room in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, where typewriters rented for ten cents per half hour. The draft, a 25,000-word novella called The Fireman, took nine days and, by Bradbury's count, $9.80 in dimes: about 49 hours at the keys.

Posture varied more than you would expect. Hemingway wrote standing up at a chest-high reading board, starting each piece in pencil. Truman Capote called himself "a completely horizontal author" and wrote his first drafts lying down, in pencil. Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards, filling in scenes in whatever order they came until the book was done. Dickens, his daughter said, always wrote with a quill pen and blue ink and, she thought, never used a pencil.

Henry James dictated. He began in the 1890s, and from 1907 his typist was Theodora Bosanquet, who described the method in Henry James at Work. The click of the Remington spurred him on, and when it was out for repair he struggled to compose to a different machine. It all seemed, he said, "so much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing." Plays and short stories he still wrote by hand, because the labor of the pen kept them short. Anyone trying voice dictation for a first draft will recognize both halves of that.

Famous writing habits, fact-checked

Some of the best-known writing habits fall apart when you look for where they came from. Others sound invented and turn out to be on record.

Build your routine from theirs

Nothing in the table transfers whole. What does transfer is the structure: a window you can protect, a target small enough to hit on a bad day, a way into the session and a way out of it, and a record you cannot argue with. Here is how those pieces fit for a writer with a day job and a WIP, built from the habits above.

At that pace the week comes to 3,500 words, and a 90,000-word manuscript takes about 26 weeks of drafting. Run it for two weeks before you change anything. The log will tell you whether the window or the target is wrong, which is what Trollope's diary did for him.

If you draft in Strokes, a book can be a project folder with one document per chapter and the log as another document beside them. Version history saves as you go, so the morning reread can start from yesterday's version with the changes marked.

For the stalled days a routine does not fix, the guide to getting past writer's block covers what to do when the window comes and nothing does. To turn a daily target into a finish date, read how long it takes to write a novel. And for many more writers and artists at work, Mason Currey's Daily Rituals (2013) collects their routines with sources.