Build a Practice for Every Season

A writer builds a schedule in a generous year. Then a child is born, a parent falls ill, a job changes, a book sells and brings invitations, a deadline arrives, or a long low stretch sets in, and the schedule fails and takes the writer’s sense of being a writer along with it. The usual response is to blame character. More often it is probably a design flaw, a schedule that fit one set of conditions and no others, taken for the practice when it was a practice for one season.

Haruki Murakami’s well-known routine, from his 2004 interview with The Paris Review, is up at four, five or six hours of work, a run or a swim in the afternoon, bed at nine, every day without variation. He introduces it as what he does “when I’m in writing mode for a novel.” It is a mode, entered for a book, and he describes the repetition as a kind of self-mesmerism and treats it as demanding work. In the same interview, describing how he came to write, he talked about running a jazz club, making the cocktails and the sandwiches, and starting his first book at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months.

Toni Morrison told the same magazine in 1993 that she began writing before dawn out of necessity, when her children were small and needed her around five in the morning. After she left Random House she kept the early hours by choice, having found herself clearer-headed in the morning. (Practice 1 gives the other half of her account, the sustained bursts when something was urgently there.)

Define three modes before you need them. Full is the arrangement under which you do your deepest generative work, and for many writers it may be rare; some Works need an immersion that no Reduced mode supplies, and a book may need a season of Full to exist at all. Reduced is what remains possible when Full is not, a smaller unit in a smaller space, twenty minutes at lunch or a single scene card, chosen because it moves the Work by an amount you can see. Maintenance is the smallest act that keeps the Work present in your mind without asking anything more of your life, such as rereading the last page or leaving a note about where you would pick up. In some seasons maintenance is nothing at all, and nothing here promises that something can always be done. A Work can wait, provided it is safe, findable, and left where you will know how to resume.

Money decides many seasons. The Authors Guild’s 2023 survey of 5,699 published authors in the United States, a voluntary survey and not a random sample, reported for 2022 a median book income of $2,000 among all respondents, about a third of whom considered themselves full-time authors, and $10,000 among the full-time authors. Median income from all author-related work was $5,000 and $20,000. Those figures say nothing certain about any one writer, they will change, and the current ones for your market are worth looking up. They do support a plain planning rule. A practice that depends on writing paying for itself is fragile, and a writer who also holds other work is in the ordinary case and has failed at nothing.

Success, with its requests on your time and a new audience arriving before the next book is ready, is a change in conditions like any other. Decide in advance what stays protected.

Practice. Write the three modes on one page, each with an amount of time, a place, a minimum output, and the circumstances that move you into it. Then run one week deliberately in Reduced mode and record what you did. Look at what survived, and at what you had assumed was necessary and was not.