People imagine the writing life involves a leather armchair, a glass of something amber, and sentences arriving like Amazon packages. The reality, in my sleepy corner of Surrey, leans rather more towards a man in jogging bottoms refilling the same coffee mug for the fourth time before ten and frowning at a screen.
Whenever someone discovers I write novels for a living, the follow-up question never varies: “So what do you actually do all day?” It’s a fair question. The honest answer would empty a room faster than a Gary Glitter tribute act. But since you asked, here’s the unglamorous truth, padded out with a few writers far more disciplined than I’ll ever be.
The Fantasy Version
In the fantasy, I rise with the sun, fling open the curtains to birdsong, and stride to a tidy desk where inspiration waits patiently like a loyal labrador. Ideas pour out. Lunch happens on a sun-dappled terrace. By evening I’ve produced three thousand luminous words, and the only decision left concerns which literary prize I might win.
I’ve heard this version many times. Usually from people who’ve never tried to write to a deadline.
The Actual Version
My real day starts with coffee, of which there will be a great deal. Then the emails, which range from lovely readers to a man in another country promising to fix my website’s SEO, a website he has clearly never visited. I deal with those, tell myself I’ll write afterwards, and immediately reorganise my sock drawer instead.
Eventually the guilt wins. I sit down. I open the file. I read yesterday’s words and conclude a small woodland creature must have typed them while I slept. I delete half. I rewrite. Somewhere around the eleventh attempt at a single paragraph, a sentence finally behaves, and for roughly ninety seconds I feel like a proper author.
Then the doorbell rings. It’s a parcel for a neighbour.
The myth of the daily word count
Serious writers love a daily word target, and the famous ones vary enormously. Stephen King aims for two thousand words a day, every day, in four-hour morning sessions, a discipline he sets out in his memoir On Writing. Graham Greene managed a more civilised five hundred; he counted them obsessively, marked off the hundreds in the margin, and downed tools the moment he hit his quota, sometimes stopping in the middle of a sentence. I find this deeply relatable, though I suspect for entirely different reasons.
Anthony Trollope went further still. He wrote two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour, pocket watch propped in front of him, for three hours each morning before heading off to his day job at the Post Office. The man helped bring the pillar box to Britain and still produced more novels than most of us manage to read. I feel tired just typing that. (If you’ve ever wondered how long a whole novel takes, the daily word count is where the answer quietly hides.)
Where the magic doesn’t happen
When Haruki Murakami writes a novel, he rises at four in the morning, works for five or six hours, then runs ten kilometres or swims, reads, listens to music, and goes to bed at nine. Every day, no variation, for months on end. He’s said the repetition itself becomes a form of mesmerism, a way of reaching the deeper part of the mind. I admire it enormously from a safe distance, ideally one with a lie-in.
Maya Angelou kept a hotel room purely for the purpose, rented by the month and stripped of any pictures or flowers, and wrote lying across the bed with a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry on the side table. She left home at six and worked until early afternoon. The bare room, she felt, stopped the world from creeping in. I’d last about twenty minutes before the bed won and I had a nap.
The bits no one puts in the montage
And writing the book is only half of it. Because I publish my own novels, there’s a lot of unromantic machinery: social media, this blog, accounting, answering a reader who wants to know why she can’t buy my books in an airport. There’s no montage for this part. No swelling strings as a man squints at a spreadsheet, wondering why the formatting has broken again. It’s small-business admin with a literary hat balanced unconvincingly on top.
What I’ve Actually Learned
The pattern, once you stop being dazzled by the famous names, is almost dull: turn up, do the hours, go home. None of them waited for the muse. The muse, it turns out, is a partner who never returns your calls. So you start without her, and if you’re lucky she wanders in halfway through, claims she was stuck in traffic, and takes all the credit.
My own version has no watch and no sherry, though I won’t rule the sherry out forever. It runs on coffee, a long walk when the words dry up, and the firm belief that a bad page beats a blank one. The walk does most of the heavy lifting. Half my plot problems have quietly solved themselves somewhere between the war memorial and the chip shop, with me muttering dialogue at a hedge like the local eccentric I’m slowly becoming.
So is it glamorous?
Not remotely. The terrace and the obliging labrador never showed up, and the luminous three thousand words remain firmly fictional. Instead there’s a man in his fifties in the same jogging bottoms, talking to himself, thrilled beyond reason because he found a sharper word for “walked.” But here’s the thing nobody tells you: the unglamorous version is the good version. The grind is the job. The staring at walls is the job. And every so often, in among the deleted paragraphs and the parcels for next door, something true appears on the page, and it makes the whole daft enterprise worth it.
If the daily grind of ordinary working life is your sort of thing, my novels are full of it. The ’86 Fix follows Craig Pelling, stuck managing an electrical store and a marriage he’d happily return to sender, until a school reunion and a can of Coke send him back to 1986. No Easy Deeds drops Danny Monk into the cut-throat world of a 1990 estate agency, where his new boss turns out to be the very least of his problems. And Tuned Out hands burnt-out marketing man Toby Grant a one-way ticket to 1969, to find out whether his parents’ generation really had it easier. Three ordinary blokes having a thoroughly rotten time, and not a luminous three thousand words between them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a typical writing day look like for an author?
Far quieter than the fantasy. A few hours at the desk, a great deal of coffee, a fair amount of deleting yesterday’s work, and a walk when the words dry up. Most of it is routine rather than lightning-bolt inspiration, and the afternoon often disappears into admin.
How many words do most authors write in a day?
It varies wildly. Graham Greene wrote about five hundred words a day, Stephen King aims for two thousand, and Haruki Murakami produces roughly a thousand each morning. The exact number matters less than turning up to hit it consistently.
Do professional writers write every single day?
Many do. Stephen King famously writes every day, and Murakami keeps an unvarying routine for months while drafting a novel. Others, like Greene, stuck to five days a week. Consistency tends to matter more than the precise schedule.
What time of day do most authors write?
Mornings dominate. King, Greene, Trollope, Murakami and Maya Angelou all did their main writing before lunch, when the mind is freshest and the world hasn’t started interrupting with doorbells and emails.
Is being a full-time author as glamorous as it sounds?
Honestly, no. The reality is jogging bottoms, cold coffee, talking to yourself and celebrating a single good sentence. The lack of glamour is rather the point: the grind is where the actual work happens.