Six Writers on Getting Words on the Page

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

Jonathan Lethem
If anyone really visualizes my routine—do they do that? I don’t do this, not really. But if they did, I suspect the surprise would be how little I’m glued to my chair. The process is typically one of brief outbursts of writing in the course of long spells of reading, cooking, housecleaning, playing computer chess, watching Mets games, and so forth. Then again, sometimes time inverts like a sock, and I discover that it was light out and now it is dark, and seven innings of the Mets game have gone by without my registering what happened, because I was writing. Or there’s nothing to eat because I didn’t cook, or the laundry rotted in the washer for three days. I don’t call this multi-tasking, by the way. I don’t believe multi-tasking exists. I’m just dodgy and unsystematic, and I’ve stopped worrying about how this would appear to others, or to myself.

Ann Patchett
I got the treadmill desk for my fiftieth birthday (I’m fifty-nine now). I wanted one because Susan Orlean had one. Susan Orlean is always ten years ahead of the curve and I strive to emulate her. In the past I had used the treadmill to answer emails or return phone calls but I never used it to write fiction.

Starting a novel is always the worst part for me and for whatever reason I decided to give the treadmill a try. It did wonders for my concentration. I felt like I was stepping into the novel every day, and when I finished work I stepped out of it. I think that walking occupies the restless part of my brain.

Curtis Sittenfeld
I sometimes procrastinate by glancing at the website of People magazine. While writing Romantic Comedy, which takes place at a late night comedy sketch show and features more than one celebrity couple, I sincerely would wonder when I looked at People.com, But wait … am I procrastinating or am I doing research? (I found articles about celebs who post cryptic quotations on their social media before a breakup especially useful.)

Akwaeke Emezi
I don’t outline! Often I don’t actually know what my characters are going to do until I write them. I do have a general idea of the overall plot, but sometimes the characters hijack it.

Qian Julie Wang
I wrote Beautiful Country on my iPhone during my subway commute to and from my law firm job—so it was both the first and last part of my workday. I think those were the only conditions under which I could have possibly written my first book. There was neither financial nor psychological pressure for me to finish the book, so it silenced the self-conscious and critical voices out just enough for me to get the words onto the page. The subway was also a regular feature of my daily life in both childhood and adulthood, so the setting allowed me to find an intimate and vulnerable connection to my childhood self.

Now that I no longer commute, my favorite place to write (and read) is still the subway. But because it is no longer such a fixed part of my day, I try to get at that raw, intimate, and uncritical place as much as I can—and that is often during the first hours when I wake up and the last hours before I go to bed. It’s akin to writing at the beginning and end of my workday, because I am targeting the time when my critical and overpowering voice is too tired to speak up, thereby creating space for my creative and authentic voice.

Jean Hanff Korelitz
That I don’t have one. As Anna Quindlen pointed out recently in her book Write For Your Life, the only part of a writing routine that matters is the part where the words get onto the page. I concur. I have written under the covers, in coffee shops, on trains, in front of the TV (which was on)… pretty much everywhere and anywhere. It’s nice to have a favorite candle or a playlist… I suppose… but so long as the words get onto the page, that’s just window-dressing.