Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992.

Ten years later her second novel, The Little Friend, was published and she received the WH Smith Literary Award and was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, was published in 2013 and she won the Pulitzer Prize.

So, a 10-year gap between each novel and a 13-year gap since her last one.

“I’m a slow writer, but I write all the time,” she says.

Tartt is notoriously private, and isn’t on social media. This was following some advice from literary agent Becky Swift, Margaret Drabble’s daughter.

‘I was warned off it early on,’ she says. ‘Years ago, in India, I was the only America at a big dinner where everyone was talking about social media, which at the time was very new. A few of us (including me) had never heard of it — I was trying to understand what it was and how it worked, but Becky Swift, Margaret Drabble’s daughter, was very emphatic: “You should never get social media Donna, it’s a terrible idea for you, it’s noisy and shallow and distracting and it will sneak into your reading and writing life in a thousand horrible ways and and be a monstrous waste of your energy and time. Promise me you’ll never touch it.”

And I didn’t. It would be years before people started talking about how destructive social media was, or how insidious it would turn out to be on so many cultural, political and personal levels. So I’m hugely grateful to Becky for steering me away from it before I stumbled into it unawares - Becky died young, and I am sad I never got a chance to tell how much that conversation changed my life for the better.’

Donna Tartt’s writing routine

‘I write for three hours in the morning. If it isn’t going well, I’ll stop and do something else but if it’s going well I’ll work till I’m tired,’ she told rivistastudio.

‘With my novels I start out by hand, scratching things out and underlining things in different colors and then when my handwritten pages get too messy, often because I’ve cut the paper up with scissors to move sentences and paragraphs around, I go to the computer and type things in – printing out different colors of paper for different drafts.’

She likes to work in quiet rooms. ‘City noises don’t bother me, but I can’t stand overhearing a television. But I can really work almost anywhere. It’s hard for me to concentrate, though, unless the day ahead of me is without interruptions. So when I have errands or appointments, I’ll generally mark the whole day out, and run around from breakfast to lunch to tea to dinner and see friends all day in between whatever I have to do.’

Sometimes she listens to music when she’s writing. ‘Baroque music helps me concentrate, and sometimes too ambient music,’ she says. ‘I listened to Sibelius a lot when I was writing The Secret History – the Nordic mood suited the mood of the book.

Her favourite writers are Homer, the Greek poets and tragedians, Dante and Shakespeare. Dickens, Nabokov, Proust, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Borges, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh, Salinger, Virginia Woolf. As well as Edward St. Aubyn, Haruki Murakami, Olga Tokarczuk, Don DeLillo, W.G. Sebald, Joan Didion.

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Quotes

Next week, on Wednesday, members are invited to a writing workshop on creative writing for social media. How to market yourself, and your work, creatively. Like an artist, not a marketer. Plus, two co-writing sessions. The workshop is at 12pm.

Now’s a good time to join, as the monthly/annual membership price will be going up next week.

Want to become a member?

Yes, I'm ready to write

(You can read more about how membership works here.)

From members of The Creative Way Collective…

Care Collective by Danielle Jones

On self identity, motherhood, neurodivergence, and the arts…

I have changed my profession! (not really). I will always be an artist, owning and embodying that identity proudly. But now, I think the right descriptor for my work is activist. My artistic voice has diversified and strengthened in the last few years, especially on discovery of my neurodivergence. But, as a mother, woman, artist, and human, my primary …

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5 days ago · 4 likes · 6 comments · Danielle Jones

Belong...we are neurokin

It’s something that grows...

Dear neurokin…

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8 days ago · 4 likes · Andrea Anderson

Body Story from Tamsin Crimmens

I Thought I Was Good at Receiving. Then I Became a Mother.

For years, I thought I’d cracked it: this whole receiving thing…

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3 days ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Tamsin Crimmens

Walking the path

The crippling fear of being seen

My daughter, who is adjusting to life at a new school, asks me why people sometimes behave differently in different situations…

Read more

a month ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Nicola Chantler

Thank you for reading and supporting.

Annie x

Zadie Smith was just 21 when she wrote her debut novel, White Teeth, which went on to win several awards including Whitbread Book Awards, Guardian First Book Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

I've been to hear her speak live several times and during one of those talks she said that she finds it hard reading back through White Teeth. It makes her cringe, as there are parts she wishes she’d written differently.

In the nearly 30 years since White Teeth was published, Zadie Smith has written a further five novels, two plays, short story collections, essays, articles. She’s won more awards, and is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University (NYU).

Here are Zadie Smith’s notes on writing and reading…

She doesn’t write every day

‘I wish I did more than anything, and I wish I had the compulsion," she said in an interview for NPR. "But in my defence, I think that novels should feel very necessary to the people who write them. I just realised quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.’

She writes slowly

‘I write very slowly and I rewrite continually, every day, over and over and over… every day, I read from the beginning up to where I’d got to and just edit it all, and then I move on. It’s incredibly laborious, and toward the end of a long novel it’s intolerable, really.’ (excerpt from Daily Routines, Women at Work by Mason Currey)

Zadie Smith is not on social media

She uses internet-blocking software while she’s writing, finding she is otherwise too easily distracted, and she doesn’t have a smart phone. “I still have a laptop, it’s not like I’m a nun,” she said. “I just don’t check my email every moment of the day in my pocket.”

On reading, while writing

From Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

‘Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again.

Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments.

Others want to hear every member of the orchestra - they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Yet you meet students who feel that reading while you write is unhealthy. Their sense is that it corrupts voice by influence and, moreover, that reading great literature creates a sense of oppression.’

Zadie Smith quotes

Annie x

Next week, members are invited to a writers’ circle on the theme of SLOWTH. Slow growth. I’ll offer prompts for mapping out a writing career that builds slowly, and sustainably, over the coming years. Less hectic, more easeful. Gradual, sturdy growth.

The circle is on Thursday at 11am. And the following week, on Wednesday, we have a writing workshop on ‘creative writing for social media’. How to market yourself, and your work, creatively. Like an artist, not a marketer. Plus, two co-writing sessions.

Want to become a member?

Obviously

(You can read more about how membership works here.)

When I think of Patti Smith, I think of her eating dry toast and drinking black coffee, in a cafe, every morning, while she writes. I must have read this somewhere. Below, there are four extracts which detail Patti Smith’s writing routine.

But first, a quote:

In 2015, Patti Smith told New Hampshire Radio the following, when asked: ‘Any habits you'd encourage young writers to take up or avoid?’:

‘I wouldn’t presume to tell anybody anything, but I think having routine is really helpful. For me, I get up early, go to a cafe, or, if I don’t have a cafe to go to, to my desk or somewhere, early in the morning... a coffee... preferably when the city is sleeping, when people are sleeping, when you seem to own the universe, and spend some time with yourself writing, and make that a habit. I try to do that every day, and I think writing, a lot of it is discipline and labor. We can be inspired at any time - in the middle of the night, we wake up at three in the morning - but there’s so much labor to be done, it’s good to develop a work ethic and a discipline.

Also, always have a notebook somewhere on ya, or some piece of paper, some scrap, some pencil stub, because something comes to you at all these inopportune times, and there’s nothing worse than thinking you have the line of your life and no pencil or a piece of paper at hand.’

In Masons Curry’s Daily Rituals: Women at Work, published in 2019, he wrote up Patti Smith’s daily routine as follows:

“I get up and if I feel out of sorts I’ll do some exercises,” the punk singer, visual artist, and poet said in 2015. “I’ll feed my cat, then I go get my coffee, take a notebook, and write for a couple of hours. Then I just roam around. I try to take long walks and things like that, but I just kill time until something good is on TV.”

Smith writes at home, usually in bed - “I have a fine desk but I prefer to work from my bed,” she has written, “as if I’m a convalescent in a Robert Louis Stevenson poem” - or else at a café near her Manhattan apartment.

As for television, she is a devoted follower of crime shows, especially the darker varieties, and she sees parallels between their moody, obsessed detectives and the writing life. “Yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives,” Smith wrote in her 2015 memoir M Train. “They spend a lifetime sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset. They entertain and sustain me.”

A year later, in 2020, Patti Smith wrote on her Substack:

‘In the corner of my room is a small suitcase, packed over a year ago, ready to tour the world. That was to be my traveling work, which never came to pass.

I am still here.

Every morning for some hours, at my usual café, I sit and write. Notebook and coffee reign. Writing is what I do, and have since twelve, imagining myself Jo March. Meditations, crime novels, and poetry, hidden in stacks of notebooks, written in every stage of life. Now, in the time of the pandemic, isolated from family, friends, and fellow workers, we are reinventing our processes. Through Substack I plan to form an inter-connective body of work for a responsive community. Each week I will post my weekly ruminations, shards of poetry, music, and musings on whatever subject finds its way from thought to pen, news of the mind, pieces of this world, free to all.’

And then 11 weeks ago, on Instagram, she wrote:

‘This is
determined to work
drink coffee write
despite the horror
the tears the bullshit
and the world on fire.’

This week, I introduced a new feature of The Creative Way Collective, the writer’s membership I run on Substack: READING HOUR. Each week, on a Wednesday, at 1pm, we will read, collectively, from the comfort and quiet of our own homes.

The book I chose to read was Patti Smith’s Devotion, pictured above, which was written as part of a series called ‘Why I write’ based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures.

As well as READING HOUR, the membership offers two writing hours each week (show up on Zoom, mute yourself, write), and both a monthly writing workshop and a monthly writers’ circle with coaching prompts and conversation.

You can read more here.

Or…

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Dame Jacqueline Wilson, one of the UK’s most revered children’s book authors, was appointed an OBE for services to literacy in schools in 2002. She has won numerous awards (Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, Smarties Prize, Children’s Book of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards). In 2017, I interviewed her about mornings and her writing career for my digital platform The Early Hour (RIP). Here’s our interview…

What time are you up in the morning, and what do you do first thing? I get up around seven. I feed the cat, take the dog into the garden, make myself a cup of coffee and then go back to bed to write for an hour or so in my pyjamas.

How do you choose your outfit for the day? If I’m going to be mostly at home I’ll wear jeans and a shirt. If I’m going out to do an event or an interview I’ll probably wear posher jeans and a prettier shirt – or a dress if it’s a grand occasion. I always wear rings and bangles whatever I’m doing.

You’re rumoured to have around 15,000 books in your library … is this true? It’s possibly more than that nowadays. My entire house serves as a library. Books certainly do furnish a room – many rooms!

Do you have a favourite (adult) book? My favourite classic is probably Jane Eyre (it’s between that and Great Expectations). My favourite modern novel is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

What did you enjoy reading as a child? I loved Noel Streatfeild’s books, especially Ballet Shoes. I also liked all the girly classics like Little Women, What Katy Did and A Little Princess.

My parents wanted me to leave school at 16, as they had done. I wasn’t that keen on school anyway, so I didn’t mind too much,

How did your parents encourage you to read? I don’t think they did. They sometimes complained that I always had my head in a book. Still, they always gave me a book at Christmas, and another on our summer holidays. I borrowed most books from the library.

Did you enjoy school? Not very much! I liked English and art lessons, and there were lots of fun moments, but I lived for the holidays when I could read and draw and play imaginary games.

When did you decide you’d like to be a writer? I had my tonsils out when I was six and apparently I told the surgeon that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

When did you first feel like that dream had become your reality? When I had my first short story published when I was seventeen. It meant the whole world to me. Of course I didn’t feel like a proper writer. I’d published many novels before I actually wrote writer as my occupation in my passport.

Before writing children’s books, you wrote a few crime fiction novels. What made you switch from writing for adults to writing for children? I always wanted to write children’s books most of all. My crime novels were mostly about children and teenagers. It was wonderful when my children’s books started to be successful.

I had my first short story published when I was 17, my first novel publishes when I was 23 or so. Then I just carried on - and on and on.

What impact did having your own child have on your writing? I adore my daughter but I don’t think she’s had much impact on my writing. When she was a little girl she hated any kind of conflict in her books – and mine have their fair share! So I used to write special private stories for Emma, where happy things happened every single day!

You had multiple books published before becoming a household name as a children’s book author, what made Tracy Beaker so successful? I think it was a combination of circumstances. I think it was an original idea to have a child from a children’s home tell her story. I decided to make the text more accessible to reluctant readers, and deliberately started the book with Tracy supposedly filling in a questionnaire – as subversively as she could manage.

I included all sorts of material: letters, games, fantasies, and asked for the book to be heavily illustrated. Nick Sharratt did a wonderful job – and my new publishers then, Transworld, produced the book splendidly. And of course the highly successful television series years later introduced the book to a much wider audience.

I used to write everything by hand in lovely Italian notebooks. I loved working like that.

Your children’s books include difficult themes like adoption and divorce – what made you focus on these issues? These are the sort of topics that have always interested me. I used to wonder as a child why my books always seemed so bland and concentrated on happy-go-lucky middle class children – though of course I didn’t use those sorts of terms.

Where, when and how do you write? I used to write everything by hand in lovely Italian notebooks. I loved working like that, but of course it slowed up the whole novel writing process, because then I had to type everything out laboriously. So now I work straight on to a computer. I write the first draft of my novels for an hour or two every single day. I spend much longer when it comes to rewriting. And irritatingly, I find I write much much greater word counts each day doing work-related emails.

Is it true that you took an English A Level aged 40, and achieved an A grade? If so, what made you decide to take this exam? Yes, it’s true. My parents wanted me to leave school at 16, as they had done. I wasn’t that keen on school anyway, so didn’t mind too much. I had no idea that you could study A levels at college! I always regretted my lack of education, especially when I helped my ex-husband take a part-time degree in Law, while my daughter was studying for her O-levels.

I thought I’d like to take just one A level to keep my own end up, so I went once a week to study at the local technical college. I loved the whole experience and read the set books and related material many times. I felt ludicrously nervous taking the exams which surprised me, because I was so used to writing. For a minute or so I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Then I began – and raced through all the papers. I would have been mortified if I hadn’t got an A. I can’t resist adding that there were no A stars then, so it was the top grade. Pathetic, I know – but it meant so much to me.

For many years I’d get the English syllabus from the local university and daydream about doing a degree there, but I knew I couldn’t combine it with my writing. At that time I was writing at least 10,000 words a week of magazine stories as well as a couple of books a year, simply to help pay the bills. It’s a little ironic that now I have five Honorary Doctorates – the easy way to achieve academic success!

When starting out as a writer, where did you go for inspiration? I didn’t really go anywhere. I’d read a Teach Yourself to Write book in my early teens and knew how to submit my work. I had my first short story published when I was 17, my first novel published when I was 23 or so. Then I just carried on – and on and on.

Where do you look for inspiration now? I don’t look for it. I just hope it suddenly creeps up on me!

Are you a writer, looking for support, mentoring and community? If so, you might like to join The Creative Way Collective. You can read all about it here.

Annie x

I thought that this week, we could look at the writing routine of someone who has children and has written about the impact of motherhood on her writing.

Anne Tyler, who is now 84, is a Pulitzer-winning American novelist, short story writer and literary critic. She has published 25 novels, including my all-time favourite ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.’

Tyler is a firm believer in the power of routine. And yet for many years, as the primary carer to her children, it wasn’t always possible to keep to one.

So, before I share the writing routine she adopted once her children had grown up, I will share an excerpt from Tyler’s essay ‘Still just writing’.

It’s published alongside essays by other writers in a brilliant collection called ‘The writer on her work’, edited by Janet Sternburg.

Still just writing

by Anne Tyler (an excerpt)

‘While I was painting the downstairs hall I thought of a novel to write. Really I just thought of a character; he more or less wandered into my mind, wearing a beard and a broad-brimmed leather hat. I figured that if I sat down and organised this character on paper, a novel would grow up around him. But it was March and the children’s spring vacation began the next day, so I waited.

After spring vacation the children went back to school, but the dog got worms. It was a little complicated at the vet’s and I lost a day. By then it was Thursday; Friday is the only day I can buy groceries, pick up new cedar chips for the gerbil, scrub the bathrooms. I waited till Monday. Still, that left me four good weeks in April to block out the novel.

By May I was ready to start actually writing, but I had to do it in patches. There was the follow-up treatment at the vet, and then a half-day spent trailing the dog with a specimen tin so that lab could be sure the treatment had really worked. There were visits from the washing machine repair man and the Davey tree man, not to mention briefer interruptions by the meter reader, five Jehovah’s Witnesses, and two Mormons.’

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The essay goes on in this stead and ends with notes on Tyler’s dislike of public appearances, and wanting her private life to remain private.

Partly, it was because she didn’t want to leave the house to attend events but there was another reason, too. She wrote:

‘I feel I am only holding myself together by being extremely firm and decisive about what I will do and what I will not to. I will write my books and raise the children. Anything else just fritters me away.’

Anne Tyler’s writing routine, now

Tyler starts every day with a morning walk. She might set out thinking about whatever chores she needs to complete but further into the walk, her characters drop in and start a dialogue with her.

She then works from around 8am until 3.30pm (still mirroring the school hours), writing her drafts in longhand, using a Pilot P-500 black gel pen on unlined paper. She types up sections, edits by hand and types them up again.

At the very end of the novel-writing process, often after dozens of drafts, she speaks the novel aloud and records it. This helps her to check on dialogue that isn’t working, repetition and character behaviours that don’t seem in-keeping.

Tyler had a metal recipe box full of observations she’d scribbled down over the years. Sometimes, just one word that would then be used decades later, in a novel. When that box became too full, she created the Blue Box, an index-card file, where she also stores notes about dialogue and character ideas. She flicks through when looking for inspiration.

Tyler continues to work a Monday-Thursday week and keep Fridays free for errands.

Quotes

“I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple.” - Anne Tyler

“If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.” - Anne Tyler

“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have” - Anne Tyler

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On another note…

Substack and non-fiction book deals

Next week, I’m running a workshop on Substack and non-fiction book deals; why publishers are keen to commission books from Substack writers.

Normally, these one-hour workshops cost £30 but I’m now including them as part of The Creative Way Collective (for paid subscribers).

So, you pay £30 a month and get the monthly writing workshops (including access to past workshops) but also:

• Co-writing sessions twice a week (show up, on Zoom, get your head down and write in silence but in the ‘presence’ of others - great for marking out specific time for your writing and feeling there’s some accountability).

• A monthly writers’ circle with coaching prompts to get you thinking about your writing practice, followed by time for conversation with other writers.

All writing levels welcome. Unsubscribe easily, any time.

Any questions? Email me: annie@annieridout.com.

Annie x

American author and poet Maya Angelou moved to New York in her 30s to start taking her writing career more seriously. Prior to that, she’d worked as an actress, dancer, teacher, editor, civil rights activist and a streetcar conductor.

Rather than carving out a space in her home to write, she would rent a hotel room for a few months at a time and head there early in the morning, around 6am. She’d then lie across the bed and write on a yellow legal pad turned sideways.

She wouldn’t let the staff change the sheets, as she wasn’t actually sleeping there, and she needed to make sure she wasn’t disturbed during her writing sessions. Every few weeks, she’d let them in to change the waste-paper basket.

Angelou took a bottle of sherry with her for an 11am tipple though, she’d sometimes have one at 6.15am before she started writing. She’d then keep going until around midday, returning home for lunch and to do a food shop.

She liked entertaining and so afternoons would be spend preparing the evening meal. “I’m a serious cook,” she said. To set the atmosphere, she’d lay the table, light candles and select music before her guests arrived.

Angelou wrote two autobiography/cookbooks: Hallelujah! The Welcome Table and Great Food, All Day Long.

After dinner, she might re-read the pages she’d written that morning - averaging 10-12 pages a day - and ‘save’ two and a half or three of those pages. She’d then read aloud to her husband, to “hear the language” and the rhythm of the words.

Maya Angelou quotes

"Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it." - Maya Angelou

"You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them." - Maya Angelou

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." - Maya Angelou

"You alone are enough, you have nothing to prove to anybody." - Maya Angelou

“If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.” - Maya Angelou

‘I know why the caged bird sings’ is Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography describing her early years in the American south of the 1930s. A tale of poverty, violence and discrimination, with hope and light woven through.

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If you’re a writer, or would like to write more, you might be interested in joining The Creative Way Collective as a member. It’s all online.

• Monthly writing workshops (covering Substack, non-fiction book writing, publishing, journalism, poetry and more)

• A writers’ circle, to discuss our practice (coaching prompts and conversation)

• Co-writing sessions twice a week (writing alongside other writers, online, in silence - great for accountability and showing up for your own practice)

Read more here.

Join The Collective

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.” ― Virginia Woolf

What do we make of that?

Virginia Woolf’s writing routine

Virginia Woolf had periods of what she describes as ‘madness’ and during these bouts, she couldn’t write.

When in better mental health, she’d have breakfast with her husband, Leonard Woolf, take a bath and then spend from 9.30am until 12pm writing. Working on novels, or reviews, sitting in a low armchair with a wooden board on her lap.

Woolf wrote in The Writing Lodge (pictured above) for a while, but Leonard used the loft above the shed, or nearby, to store and sort apples from the garden, and she found this noise too distracting. Eventually, another lodge was built for her.

After lunch, Woolf would revise, edit and retype her morning work before going for a walk. Walking gave her space and time away from her desk, to think through her work. Following afternoon tea, she’d write in her diary, or write letters.

Evenings were for reading or socialising, as Woolf found it impossible to write at night. ‘How great writers write at night, I don’t know, it’s an age since I tried, & I find my head full of pillow stuffing,’ she wrote in her diary in March 1923.

Woolf spent 30 years reviewing books for the Times, receiving a book on Friday, reading it by Sunday and writing a 1500-word review by Wednesday.

And she and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, through which they published all of Virginia’s most famous novels (including Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own) as well as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other notable works.

Woolf famously wrote:

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

That, she had.

If you’re a writer, or would like to write more, you might be interested in joining The Creative Way Collective as a member. It’s all online.

• Monthly writing workshops (covering Substack, non-fiction book writing, publishing, journalism, poetry and more)

• A writers’ circle, to discuss our practice (the next one is on Thursday, 11am, the theme: what I’d do, if I wasn’t afraid - coaching prompts and conversation).

• Co-writing sessions twice a week (writing alongside other writers, online)

Read more here.

Join The Collective

Annie x

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir’s writing routine

From The Marginalian

“I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five o’clock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, I’ll read the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most often it’s a pleasure to work.

[…]

If the work is going well, I spend a quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day before, and I make a few corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the thread I have to read what I’ve done.”

A feminist classic. You can buy a copy here.

If you’re a writer, or would like to write more, you might be interested in joining The Creative Way Collective as a member. It’s all online.

• Monthly writing workshops (covering Substack, non-fiction book writing, publishing, journalism, poetry and more)

• A writers’ circle (to discuss our practice)

• Co-writing sessions twice a week (no talking, just writing)

Read more here.

Join The Collective

For members, we have our first writers’ circle next Thursday at 11am, UK-time. We’ll meet, online, to discuss our practice honestly and openly, after some coaching prompts from me about your writing goals. The following week, we’ll have our first live online workshop: The art of the personal essay (on Substack). Become a member for access to all this, plus two co-writing sessions a week and all the workshops in the archive. (You can unsubscribe quickly and easily at any time.)

Become a member

Writers, writing

“I’m gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me” - Toni Morrison

Joyce Carol Oates

at her desk

Joan Didion on her writing routine

From The Paris Review

“I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.

I spend most of the day working on a piece not actually putting anything on paper, just sitting there, trying to form a coherent idea and then maybe something will come to me about five in the afternoon and then I’ll work for a couple of hours and get three or four sentences, maybe a paragraph.”

Morning Song

By Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

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• Monthly writing workshops (covering Substack, non-fiction book writing, publishing, journalism, poetry and more)

• A writers’ circle (to discuss our practice)

• Co-writing sessions twice a week (no talking, just writing)

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Daphne du Maurier

at her desk

Haruki Murakami, on his writing routine

From The Paris Review

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.

“I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

“But to hold to such repetition for so long – six months to a year – requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”

After the Lunch by Wendy Cope

On Waterloo Bridge, where we said our goodbyes,

The weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.

I wipe them away with a black woolly glove

And try not to notice I’ve fallen in love.



On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:

This is nothing. you’re high on the charm and the drink.

But the juke-box inside me is playing a song

That says something different. And when was it wrong?



On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair

I am tempted to skip. You’re a fool. I don’t care.

The head does its best but the heart is the boss-

I admit it before I am halfway across.

Tell us:

• What have you read lately, that you’ve loved?

• What have you written lately, that you’ve loved? (Feel free to add a link so that we can read it too.)

• Whose words are you finding inspiring?

If you’re a writer, or would like to write more, you might be interested in joining The Creative Way Collective as a member. It’s all online.

• Monthly writing workshops (covering Substack, non-fiction book writing, publishing, journalism, poetry and more)

• A writers’ circle (to discuss our practice)

• Co-writing sessions twice a week (no talking, just writing)

Read more here.

Join The Collective