Six Writers on the Most Surprising Parts of Their Writing Routines

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

Shelby Van Pelt
I listen to music while I write. I find it hard to focus while in total silence. And my old-school wired earbuds, plugged into my laptop, function as a tether of sorts, keeping me in my chair instead of off refilling my coffee or succumbing to distractions.

Qian Julie Wang
The act of writing itself takes the least amount of time for me. For Beautiful Country, I spent three years (and one might say, most of my life) thinking about the book, researching through my diary and retracing my steps, and processing how I wanted to write it. But actually writing it took me just shy of three months. The long initial marination stage is awful and terrifying, because it looks and feels exactly like procrastination. I spent a lot of that time freaking out about how I’m never going to get around to actually writing it.

But whether for a book or a short piece, that stage has been necessary to getting me to the second, cathartic phase of spilling the words onto the page. I wouldn’t call that part necessarily enjoyable, but seeing the words and pages flow by brings a sense of calm that the rumination stage does not.

The stage I most love, by far, is editing. That is when I can be both critical lawyer and creative author. I’m not a writer who is married to everything she puts down on the page: I delete and demolish with zeal. Active editing gives me confidence as a writer because it reminds me that the first draft can be however rough it needs to be, as I can always sand it down. That can be dangerous too, of course, because my first impulse after writing anything is to delete it entirely. I need to let a draft sit for awhile before I look at it — otherwise, my first book would have gone straight to trash.

Tracy K. Smith
Meditation has become a part of my writing process. And when I am meditating, I am giving thanks and also very much asking for guidance, for input, for the ability to hear and feel the presence of ancestors and my own higher self. I’ll sit and close my eyes and get into the rhythm of unhurried breathing. I’ll watch the swirling image patterns behind my closed eyes, and accept as purposeful the feelings and ideas that often emerge from this process. Writing can be so lonely. The whims and needs of ego can be so destabilizing. Listening out beyond my own known self gives me the feeling that I am porous, and that I can think in dialogue with another larger intelligence.

Tracy Chevalier
People always seem surprised that I write by hand. These days most write directly onto the computer. For something like this questionnaire that’s fine. But for me, there is something about the brain-hand connection that helps me formulate the words.

Typing words onto a screen also feels more like “work” — like filling out a form. Novels are not forms. Also, I type fast and write slowly; my writing hand seems to be more in sync with the time that a sentence forms in my mind.

I do use a computer, of course. At the end of the day I type in what I’ve written by hand. Editing is much easier on a computer. Having said that, once I’ve got a draft I print it out and edit it on paper. It’s probably no surprise that I also don’t read ebooks very often; I much prefer the tactile experience of a physical book.

Jonathan Lethem
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.

Jean Hanff Korelitz
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.