3 - Routine
There are many different kinds of plans one might adopt to serve their pursuit of writing. I use a strict, week-daily routine, which I'll describe now.
On weekdays, I try to get up at 5 am. I dress in work jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, or shorts and a tank in the warm months, and make coffee. Right now I'm trying no breakfast for a while, but when I do eat breakfast it's the same thing every morning and it's something pre-prepared I can eat as quickly as possible, like half a bagel and a banana. I usually have a podcast or a YouTube video on while I'm doing stuff around the house, but in the morning when I'm preparing to write I only listen to music, and it's usually the same rotation of songs depending on the time of year. I'm writing this in autumn so it's a lot of Nick Drake and Fleet Foxes. Before I start writing, I listen to one or two songs from my dedicated book playlists, which I select specifically because they sound like they're from the world of the story. I have a standing desk and as I start writing I set an interval timer that beeps every 40 minutes, which is a signal to switch from sitting to standing or vice-versa. Setting the timer is always the last thing I do before I start writing. I usually start by reading what I wrote the previous day, or just enough of the current scene to "get back into it." If I want to make small changes to this existing material, I let myself do it, even though this time is for drafting, not editing. On a good day I'll start writing at 6 or 6:30 and stop at 9 so that I can make myself presentable and get to work by 10. When I stop, I draw myself a "gold star" in yellow sharpie on my calendar. I then use ctrl+shift+C to see the total word count of my document and write that on my calendar, then subtract the previous day's total to find the number of words I wrote that day (minus any words I deleted while changing things), and write that on the calendar as well. I try to write at least 1,000 words for my main project every weekday. On Saturday mornings, my plan is to work on this blog or short fiction for this website. On Sundays I don't write.
To some, I imagine this routine might seem excessive, either in terms of waking up at 5 am every day or in terms of the plurality of very specific things that constitute my routine—eating the same breakfast, wearing the same kinds of clothes, listening to the same music, and hitting the same timer every day. For many, this might be undesirable as a lifestyle choice. For others it might be infeasible. I'm aware that I owe my ability to keep this routine to a great deal of privilege and luck, being in a stable life situation with very few obligations beyond work and, to boot, a later start time for work than most in my field and an extremely short commute. Others may be wired in such a way that a strict, near-daily routine like mine would result in creative burnout and a decline in writing quality.
So, to say a little bit about other kinds of plans one might adopt, I'll turn to some sources I often think about when I think about writing routines. First, to Brandon Sanderson's first 2020 BYU creative writing lecture which, in his infinite generosity, he posted in its entirety to YouTube, along with all the subsequent lectures. The part of this video I'm now citing starts at about 25:00, but this whole lecture series is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn about the craft of writing, especially science fiction or fantasy.
In this section about the importance of writing consistently, Brandon talks about his own daily routine, which looks suspiciously like mine except full-time, and then goes over a number of less intensive or frequent writing routines that other obligations might necessitate, such as writing during a lunch break, or for an hour a night, or for a few hours each weekend. He extolls the virtues of such plans on the basis that they get stories written in a reasonable and predictable amount of time!
But one could travel even further along the spectrum from my chosen practice, as Hank Green details in an old video starting at about 00:50.
Catching glimpses of Hank's life through his videos and podcasts, it's always seemed like a very chaotic and unpredictable existence, so it makes sense that he couldn't have the kind of "consistent" writing routine that Brandon prescribes. But still, he has a plan: write, some how some way, 1,000 words every week. What a brilliant rule to hold oneself to when a "consistent" routine isn't possible!
But why should one have a plan at all? I'll certainly never knock the practice of writing whenever one can, or when inspiration strikes, or when one is in the mood, inconsistently as those times may come. But I would argue that this practice would make one's writing a hobby rather than a pursuit. As previously established, those who pursue something do so to have it, not only to enjoy the process, and all those who pursue anything are aware of their limited time on this earth to get it. Writing takes time. Writing well takes practice, which takes more time. If one wishes to master the skill of writing and find success before the grave takes them, writing when the mood is right won't cut it. A consistent routine also has the advantage of keeping one in practice, or keeping the story "in one's brain," as Hank puts it. Much in the same way writing too often might cause creative burnout, writing too infrequently might cause creative atrophy.
Yet another YouTube video was hugely important in motivating me to adopt a consistent writing routine. This time the whole video is germane.
Craig admits that his thesis here is obvious but points out a lot of not-so-obvious things, such as how easy it is to confuse a goal for a plan and how plans can be simple and even arbitrary while still being effective. I also find his personal story very inspiring. He made a plan, he moved heaven and earth to keep it, and he found success. When I first watched this video, I was at a point in my life when I didn't have a consistent writing routine; I just wrote whenever I was able, which at that point meant whenever I had several hours of random free time, absolutely nothing else I could be crossing off my to-do list, and I was in the right mood. I thought to myself: if I'm serious about this, I should be willing and ready to make time for it—to move heaven and earth to make it happen.
I also love Craig's point about stealing other people's plans. I stole the idea of a daily writing routine and a word count goal from Sanderson. I stole the idea of writing in the mornings from the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos during a guest lecture at the University of Iowa. The mornings, she said, are good for creativity because they're a time before the distracting, disorienting everyday "crap" of modern life has a chance to get at you. I also stole the idea of working in the early morning from Craig himself when he talks about getting up ridiculously early to make YouTube videos before going to work, and when, and in another video, he challenges himself to get up at 5 am and discovers the pleasant solitude and quiet of waking up before everyone else. Before I had a writing routine, spending any of my waking day on writing felt like taking time away from other obligations that were more important, or at least promised more immediate returns. By waking up at 5 am, I "create" time that, for all intents and purposes, didn't previously exist, and so spare myself the shame of "stealing" time from my non-writing life. That shame is its own issue and it's far from healthy. And the solution is ultimately nothing more than a case of irrational mental gymnastics. But it works for me. I wake up at 5 am specifically to write, and there's nothing else it would remotely make sense to do with that time, so there's no excuse not to write. I also stole from Hank: though his writing practice couldn't be further from my own, the idea of keeping the story in one's head was instructive for me. I write every day because I'm able to and because it goes faster that way, but also because I experience creative momentum from frequent writing, rather than creative burnout. When I write every day, I become more immersed in the story, which results in both my daily word count and the quality of my writing increasing over the course of the week and the month.
Finally, why all the other little parts of my routine? Why the same clothes, the same coffee and breakfast, the same music, the same timer? Why all the ritual? It might not surprise you to learn that this, I also stole from a YouTube video: one of my favorites from the defunct but never forgotten Idea Channel with Mike Rugnetta. This one's even more important to me. I now own a Chemex and use it to make coffee every morning exclusively because Mike uses one in this very video. Once again, I refer to the whole video this time, except for the comment response section that begins at about 6:40.
Once again, this video inspires an aspirational drive in me. It's no coincidence a video that made such an impression on my teenage, wannabe-writer self uses as all its examples the morning routines of great writers. Like Toni Morrison, I practice a morning routine as a way of becoming a "conduit" for creativity—to "mesmerize" myself, as Haruki Murakami puts it, into a creatively productive state of mind. Perhaps even more specific to my own thinking about this, it's a way of consistently attaining that once fickle, elusive "mood," the scarcity of which used to limit my writing productivity so much. By writing in the morning and dodging the crap of the day, and by performing the same routine every morning, I invoke the mood within myself, and by successfully attaining the mood over and over again, the routine gains more and more power to invoke the mood, forming a self-reinforcing cycle. By giving myself agency over the conditions that get me into the mood, I control when it comes instead of needing to wait for it. And where before weeks or months passed with no writing getting done, now the writing gets done.
