If you find yourself in the same position that I was in at the beginning of the semester, wanting to write but being unsure how to develop a routine that will allow you to write consistently, I strongly encourage you to embark upon a similar experiment. Below are the routines of each of the authors that I selected. Each of these authors have written at least one novel that has largely impacted me and inspired me to become a writer myself. Therefore, feel free to substitute any of these authors for ones that have directly impacted you if the ones I've chosen are unfamiliar to you. (Or, read these authors' work and decide for yourself if you'd like to try their routines! I strongly recommend each one.)
Lily King
"I write the first draft of my novels in pencil in spiral notebooks exactly as I used to write those first short stories. I start at what I think is the beginning of the book and move mostly chronologically through to the end. Occasionally there is a back story, or a side story, but mostly I move forward through the notebooks. I section off the last 20 pages of each one for notes, for ideas I have for future chapters or for chapters I’ve already written. These ideas can be general ('Everything needs to feel relentlessly claustrophobic in this house”) or specific (“Have him give her his dead brother’s glasses”). They can be whole scenes, lines of dialogue, a fragment of detail. When the notes start to accumulate and confuse me, I make a timeline by drawing a line across the top of a page and little vertical notches along it and I make a list of all the things I think will happen, little and big moments I am trying to get to.
At the back of my notebooks I keep a log, a punch clock of sorts. When the writing day is done, I write the date and how much I’ve written. A good day for me is 3-5 notebook pages, but there are days, many, many days when I don’t write that much. Some days I write one page, or a half page, or one line. I do not force myself to stay in the chair until I’ve written a certain amount. I cannot do that. I know there are writers who force themselves to stay in the chair until they’ve written a certain number of words each day, but those writers, I am certain, don’t have children who need to be picked up at school. I try not to beat myself up about the days of few words. A lot of work is being done that is not writing, a lot of thinking, note-taking, and listening. Because the imagination is always working, churning up something. It’s the writer’s job to listen carefully."
E.B. White
"I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me.
In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."
Kate Elizabeth Russell
"Definitely coffee shops and libraries. I write best when I get out of the house, especially if I'm struggling. I find getting out of the house, and being in a coffee shop especially, I feel more compelled to work or obligated to work if I'm in a coffee shop because I feel like people can see my computer screen, not that anyone's looking at me. I just feel like if I'm messing around on social media, people will see, whereas it gives me more accountability, I guess, and also liking the background noise. Also, once I was really, really deep in the writing process, I would just set up on the couch and write all night. That was the best. That was the best feeling, the feeling of not wanting to sleep because the writing was going so well. I really miss that. I can't wait to get back to that point when I'm writing again. Anyway, coffee shops are always my go-to place. And there's food and drink there."
John Steinbeck
"Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material."
"Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised..."
"In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration."
Carmen Maria Machado
"I always write with coffee or seltzer water on hand. I like to be dressed—that is, not in my pajamas. And I need my desk to be relatively neat and clean, or I need to be in a relatively neat and clean room. (In other words, if there’s paper or clothes or dirty dishes everywhere, I can’t focus.) And sometimes I need to switch locations, get out of my element—head to a coffee shop or my office or a residency or even, say, a hotel. There’s something about being in a controlled environment with specific aesthetic stimuli around you that can really jumpstart some magic."
"I write for myself. I try not to think too hard about my audience—I think that’s a recipe for stopping a project in its tracks. It’s very easy to get shut down by perceived expectations. Plus, how do I know who’s going to respond to my writing? This isn’t to say that I don’t love my readers. When people respond to my work, it’s exciting and amazing and humbling. But that’s not why I do it. It’s just a bonus.
To turn it around a bit: The writers whose work I love weren’t writing for me in particular. They might be delighted by my readership, or puzzled or indifferent or enraged. All of those things are okay. Because once they put their work into the world, it became, in its own little way, mine. And that’s incredible, right? That we can be touched, moved, excited, provoked by a text whose author is removed from us in every way, even by time, language, or death. So you can’t get hung up too much on audience. There’s simply no way to catalogue or write for the sheer width and breadth of your potential readership. You have to just write."
Alice Walker
"If I’m patient, and if I don’t try to force it—and I don’t. I have no interest in forcing anything. In fact, if it doesn’t want to come, fine, I will do something else, and it can go somewhere else. So it’s very easy, actually, to wait in an attitude of patience and acceptance and trust that this is something that clearly has come to me to be expressed, and if it has gotten this far, probably it will want to come up with the form.
It’s amazing that it never seems like work. It’s hard work and then, in a way, when I look back I can’t even remember how it was done."
"This has changed a bit, but for, I would say, three decades, I wrote every morning, or I made the space. Because part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and the time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea. If you are expecting someone to come to tea but you’re not going to be there, they may not come, and if I were them, I wouldn’t come. So, it’s about receptivity and being home when your guest is expected, or even when you hope that they will come."
"I wrote for such a long time in longhand that I harmed one of my fingers. It’s fine now, but I realized that it was time to move to a different way, and now I like writing on the computer. But for a long time I really did feel that thing that writers always say, that when you write in longhand, it’s as if the blood from your heart is coming into what you’re writing, right down your arm."
Jean Kyoung Frazier
"This is why, in some ways, I feel like I’m not meant to be a full-time writer—I just like doing a lot of things, being busy, not just writing. I was writing the book when I was working a full-time job—a couple jobs, actually. I would have to get up at 5 a.m. to work on it. I would sit in this fold-out camping chair I had, and I would tinker. I honestly don’t really remember too much of it other than getting up every morning and really trying, if not to write, then to at least look at it and think about it. I always think that’s important—opening the Word document every day and living in it for a little bit."
Taylor Jenkins Reid
"When I’m working on my books, I’m very regimented. I start with my idea, and I know how the story begins and the story ends, but what’s in the middle I don’t know. So for my first drafts, which can take anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks, I write a certain amount of words per day and that’s what I have to get done. So if that takes me four hours and I happen to have a few hours free in the afternoon, then good for me. I’ll try to catch up on books that I’m blurbing or something like that. But, most of the time, it takes me a full day. Every single day I’m waking up and I don’t know what’s happening in the story, and I’m sitting down and I’m figuring it out, Monday through Friday, 8 to 6."
Now that you've read about the routines you'll be trying out over the next 8 weeks, you can begin writing! I created this template to track my data. I wrote 4 times a week, then marked down how many words I wrote, how much time I spent writing, and how I felt about my writing on a scale of 1 to 5. In the final week, you will use your own routine, which you'll develop after trying out a diverse range of them through the experiment. Go with your gut and stick to what has been working for you!