Do you write every day?

Jeffrey's answer

Yes. Almost every day of the year, with very few exceptions. But I do have dedicated writing blocks.

I do not need an alarm. I wake naturally at 5:30 in the morning, and I am at my desk by six. That first session — two hours, every day, roughly three hundred days a year — gives me about six hundred hours when very few of my rivals are working. That is the hidden engine. I have written what I have written, in part, because I have shown up at my desk before most of the publishing world got out of bed.

After that first session, breakfast. As Somerset Maugham said, to eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day — breakfast is the one meal we do well in this country, and I treat it as the most important meal of the day.

The day continues with three further writing sessions. By the time I finish at eight in the evening, I am genuinely exhausted. My family know that I am usually silent at dinner — there is nothing left in the tank for conversation. I go straight to bed.

Then, with a good night’s sleep, the ideas percolate. I wake the next morning ready to begin again. That cycle, repeated for fifty years, is how a novel gets written.

A few practical notes

• The hidden hours rule. Two hours every morning before anyone else is working = six hundred hours a year of advantage. Your competitors are asleep. That is the time to compound.
• Wake early enough that the rest of the world is silent. 5:30 / 6am works for most adults. Phones are quiet, family is asleep, no one is asking anything of you. The protected hour is the morning hour.
• The argument for every day. The book stays in your head when you don’t have a 5-day gap to climb back in from. Compound effect across years.
• The argument against. Some writers produce thinner work when they force a daily output.
• A useful default: 5–6 days a week if you can’t do 7. One day off — Sunday or whatever — to read, walk, think.
• When to skip a day legitimately. Genuine illness. Children genuinely need you. A funeral.
• When NOT to skip. Tiredness from a normal week. Mood. ‘I don’t feel like it’.
• A daily minimum that’s small enough to never miss is more powerful than a high target you miss often. 300 words a day, every day, beats 1,500 words a day, three days a week.
• Expect to be silent at dinner. A genuine writing day leaves you depleted. Tell your family. The day after a holiday is more useful than another half-hearted day at the desk.

The seventh day: read. The novelist who reads is feeding the novelist who writes.