WRITING ROUTINE: How I Built a Writing Routine that Works For Me

My cat, Jenova, who is an essential part of my writing routine.

Finding the time and the inspiration to write is something every writer I know has struggled with at some time or another. This includes award-winning screenwriters I’ve worked with for my job as a film & tv producer, aspiring writers new to that #writinglife, and novelists with multiple books already under their hat.

If you are a writer but you can’t seem to find the time to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards, as the case my be), or if you do find the time but then nothing comes? I promise you are not alone.

When I first started writing seriously, I became borderline obsessed with the routine of fellow writers. Like many writers starting out, the only kind of writing I knew how to do was the “inspired” kind. And by that, I mean those rare but incredible moments when inspiration strikes and you simply must write! Ideas flow! Words emerge effortlessly! You are a Goddess! The Mistress of This Universe You Have Created! You are in FLOW, baby! 

Don’t you love that feeling? I know I do. 

But here’s the problem: you can’t write (let alone revise) a whole book or screenplay that way. Or at least, I couldn’t. 

As someone who was working a full-time, 50-hour a week job, these moments of pure inspiration coupled with actual time to write were too few and far between for me. I knew I needed something more consistent that also accommodated my busy work schedule.

So I googled writing advice. I asked the, “what is your process” question at every Q&A and book event I attended. I badgered every writer who had the misfortune to know me about what their routine looked like. I read blog posts and twitter threads and I tried out a lot of techniques that didn’t quite work out until eventually, I found something that did.

The first thing any experienced writer will tell you when you ask them for writing advice is that all writing advice is subjective. What works for one writer won’t necessarily work for another. Life might be easier for all us if there were one “right” way to write. But there isn’t. Everyone has to find their own way to it.  

So, with the caveat that all of this is subjective, I will share the unifying theme that emerged for me when I sifted through the piles and piles of advice out there. Perhaps you have heard it before. 

This is the advice: Butt in seat. 

At the core of this advice is the idea that you can’t wait for inspiration to strike in order to write. You have to show up for your writing the same way you show up for a job: with a bad attitude and a to-go cup of coffee clutched in your resentful, un-inspired hands. 

(Maybe some of you don’t show up for work this way. Good for you! Keep living your best life!)

Now, you might be thinking: wait! Writing isn’t a chore! Writing is my passion! It is what I love! 

Sure it is! 

But here’s the other thing about writing: Writing it terrifying. Sitting down to write isn’t just creating lovable made-up people and then imagining ways to cruelly torture them (or whatever it is you do in your writing). Sitting down to write is tantamount to sending out an embossed invitation to every bit of insecurity, every wiggle of imposter syndrome, and every inner-voice that has ever said: You aren’t good enough. It’s asking your inner demons over for a play-date and then plying them with bite-sized tea sandwiches so they never want to leave. (The tea-sandwiches are your hopes and dreams in the metaphor, obviously). 

Inner-demons are the co-worker who brings in fish for lunch. No one is asking you to like coming in to work next to fish-y office kitchen. You don’t even need to be excited about it. But you do have to show up if you want to continue paying your bills and keep your cats in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. 

And look, there are days when I show up to writing bubbling with excitement. Days when ideas are flowing and I cannot wait to get started. But there are just as many (okay, more) days when that’s not the case. And the thing I’ve come to realize is that how I show up to write has little to no bearing on how productive that writing session ends up being. 

So, the advice I kept hearing was: butt in chair. To me, that meant a regular routine. Time that I carved out of my schedule and reserved for writing. Something that seemed impossible to someone with a very busy full time job.

Here, I’d like to briefly give a shoutout to the wonderful writer and writing coach Alisa Alering who gave a wonderful workshop I attended in which she broke down the practices discussed in a book called The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel. This book is geared towards academics trying to write thesis projects around a heavy teaching load, but Alisa very cleverly adapted her talk for novelists. The core of what I took away from her workshop and what I’d like to share with you is this: When it comes to planning your writing session, the key is to set goals that are actually reasonable and achievable. I’d go so far as to advise you to underestimate and under-promise.

Sure, you could say that you want to write EVERY DAY. But then if you don’t write every day (because you aren’t a maniac?) you might feel guilty. And then, in addition to the inner-demons you are already dealing with, now your writing is ALSO tied to guilt. Same goes for word count. Aiming for a 1,000 words may feel cool to promise yourself. But what happens when you only get out 500 words? That’s actually a good amount of words! But you didn’t hit your goal, did you? That’s a bad feeling. Now you’re going into the next writing session feeling less-than. Feeling like you aren’t good enough. 

But what if instead, your goal was to write 250 words a day? And what if you wrote 500? What if you wrote 1,000? YOU KILLED IT. YOU ARE GODDESS. YOU ARE IN FLOW, BABY! What if you have a goal to write two days a week, but then on Wednesday you end up having an extra hour and you get a little something down. You wrote FOUR days this week! You went ABOVE and BEYOND. Because Goddess, etc. Right? 

You get the idea. 

Now, when I first started trying this butt in chair thing, I hadn’t yet taken Alisa’s wonderful workshop. So I made a lot of mistakes (mostly of the over-promising, under-delivering kind). 

The first hurdle I had to cross was when to write. In addition to writing, I work full-time at a busy, demanding job with long hours. So this was a real problem for me. 

But I have always been a night-owl, so the logical course of action was to simply stay up late and write at night. People write novels at night, right?

Well, I didn’t. Writing in the evenings was a massive fail for me. 

There were few reasons for this: 

• The biggest obstacle is that I was not able to protect my evenings. I work as a tv & film producer (a job that I lovingly describe as tantamount to wrangling cats) and inevitably some mini-crisis would happen during the day which would lead to a flurry of emails that extended into the evening.

• The other problem is that usually, something would happen to annoy me during the day. Often something small. Something that didn’t really bother me all that much, but it was enough to give my inner-demons a little snack. Something I could later use as an excuse to say, “I just really don’t have the energy to write tonight.”

• And then there was the problem of my annoying friends who actually wanted to see me. I know. The gall. They would invite me to dinner. Movies. Horrible things like that. Sometimes they would have birthday parties which I was apparently expected to attend. If I didn’t like my friends so much, maybe this would be less of a problem. But I do like them, and I often ended up choosing them over wrestling with my inner demons alone all night.

So writing in the evenings was not working for me. Sometimes I’d squeeze a weekend session, but even those were few and far between because, like evenings, they proved difficult time for me to protect. 

I was kind of in despair at this point, to be honest. Maybe I didn’t really want to write bad enough? Maybe I was the problem? The inner-demons were winning. It was around this time that I picked up a book many of you may have seen referenced before: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. 

I’m going to be honest and say that I only actually made it through the first few chapters of this book, but it was life-changing nonetheless. 

In The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron advices a practice called “Morning Pages.” 

It is not hyperbole to say that adopting the practice of Morning Pages changed my life. 

Julia Cameron has recorded a very brief two-minute video explaining the practice, which I highly recommend checking out here.

But I will also explain the basics (as I understand them) below:  

• Morning pages are written by hand (pen to paper) in a notebook or on loose sheafs of paper first thing in the morning.

• Some people keep their notebook next to their bed and start them as soon as they turn off the alarm. I like to wobble to the kitchen, make coffee, and begin my pages with my first sip.

• These pages are stream of conscious. Think of it more like journaling. They will NEVER be read by others. In fact, it’s often advised that even you don’t re-read them yourself for some time (if ever).

• The goal is to write three pages long-hand (although these days, I don’t always get to three pages before I switch to working on an existing writing project).

Cats make good Morning Pages buddies—or tables, as the case may be.

I like to think of these pages as a clearing exercise. A time to skim the fat off the top of the milk. I have tried and failed to develop a traditional meditation practice in the past, but I now believe that my Morning Pages have become that meditation for me. But I don’t want to give you the impression that Morning Pages should be peaceful and serene. They often are not. Most of the time, my own pages are full of grumpy, petty complaining. For example, this is a pretty typical example of what my first page might look like:

I’m tired, and I want to go back to bed. Ugh. I hate everyone. Especially ____. Should I just go back to bed? I don’t feel like writing today. My brain feels like mush. But I’m up now so. Ugh. I’m hungry. What should I eat today? Everything is horrible and I’m sad. 

Now, you might be asking: why should I give up precious sleep in order to complain in a diary for an hour? I too had that question. Especially since, as I stated earlier, I am a night owl. Always have been. The night is my domain. The phrase “get up early” was known to strike fear in my heart. 

But I kept doing the morning pages anyway. Waking up first fifteen, then twenty, and then thirty minutes earlier so I could do them before hopping in the shower for work. I did this because I was noticing something kind of magical happening with these pages: they kept the inner-demons at bay. 

I have a theory that inner-demons like to sleep in late. And that if you wake up before them, you can get the jump on them. You can slide into your writing before they have the chance to tell you all the reasons not to. And when they do wake up, when they scream the words “you are not good enough” inside your head, the technique of Morning Pages compels you to write those words down as part of your stream of conscious. And so then you are staring at those very harsh words (“I am not good enough!”) and eventually you will get to the place where you will follow that line of thought. Maybe you will write: “Look, I know you feel that way sometimes. But look at you! You woke up at six AM today. You are working so hard and I am so, so proud of you.”

I soon became addicted to my Morning Pages. Angry tirades became (bad) poems. Meditations on past experiences and life choices became possible backstories for a character I’d never been able to understand before. Threads started to emerge. Possible character dynamics started to form. 

Soon, I was waking up forty-five minutes earlier. Then an hour earlier. Slowly pushing back my alarm clock until I got to 5:40am (never was able to get all the way to 5:30…) all so that I’d have more time with my notebook. Now, my brain craves its morning writing time.

And that is how I—a devoted night owl— became a morning writer. I don’t think I will ever call myself a “morning person,” but I have developed a healthy respect for the larks. There is a magic to waking up while the world is asleep. Unlike the evenings, it’s very rare for people to feel they have a right to your time before the sun is fully up. Even when I’m working on set for my films and we have a 7:00am call time, it’s uncommon for anyone to assume I will respond to an email or text at 5:00am. 

Morning is a time I can protect. 

I also have come to think of my morning writing sessions as a sort of teflon for the day. It enables me to approach the rest of my day with a, “do your worst” mentality.  Good days are good days and I’m grateful for them. But on the bad days, or the annoying days, my writing is still protected. I’ve already done the work that matters the most to me and there is nothing the day can throw at me that can take that away. 

When it comes to my goals for my own writing session, I measure them in time, not words. My goal is to sit my butt in my chair for two hours five days a week. This is usually from about 5:45am-8:00m, although sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less. It doesn’t matter if I spend the whole time complaining about something in my notebook or even just writing about how sorry I feel for myself. If that’s what I need that day, that’s what I need that day. I do not judge or begrudge that.  

But most days, I don’t spend the whole time complaining. Most days start off grumpy but then, after I’ve skimmed the fat off the milk, I usually ask myself on the page: “Well, Amanda, what do you want to write today? When you left off the character was doing this. And you weren’t sure why. Do you think it’s because of this reason? Or maybe it’s because of this. What if instead it was this? You know, what might work, is if instead she started off by…”

And then I’m off. In Flow. Goddess of my own made-up world. Living that writing life. 

What I describe may not work for you. But I’d love to hear from you if it does, or if you’ve found other routines that have helped you in your own writing!