Writing Without a Routine

How to build the scaffolding that keeps your work alive when schedules fall apart.

Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience with my quiet here while I was away trying to get some focused time working on my book. I hope you’ve had a wonderful summers so far; I have, though it has sped by. My retreat in Paris has me thinking today less about specific craft issues and more about what makes writing possible—about the structures in a life that allow you to produce the rough (or wonderfully hewn!) first draft from which you can shape what comes next. What is the scaffolding in your life that allows you to write, when so much in the world requires your attention? And how do you celebrate the small accomplishments, the ordinary virtues, of a work day that is far from perfect?

Many of us imagine writing as deriving either from a bolt of inspiration or a consistent application of iron discipline. I don’t know about you, but any time I hear about someone writing a book in a three-week sprint (I’m looking at you, Jack Kerouac; more recently, I believe the French writer Colombe Shneck wrote one section of Swimming in Paris in a few short weeks or months) I feel overcome. Why doesn’t that happen to me? I wonder. Why am I so slow? At the other end of the spectrum, we romanticize writers like Anthony Trollope—who wrote a set number of words a day—or Philip Roth, who was famously routine in his writing. In MFA programs, many of us teach the importance of consistency. But most of what I’ve written that matters—books, essays, poems—has emerged not from flashes of genius or perfect consistency but from uneven repetition, a kind of patient (but not punitive) accountability with myself, and the gentle pressure of rituals that are inevitably disrupted by illness, family crisis, or child-rearing—and, crucially, which help me to rebound from those interruptions.

Some of this has to do with where I focus my energy. I tend to be perfectionistic, and it’s easy for me to focus only on what is not working. As time passes, and the books get written, though, I’ve come to see that creating a life that invites your writing to return to central stage *even when your attention strays* is itself the key task. What environments allow you to keep coming back to writing even when time and energy are fractured? For you, that environment might be physical (a desk you enjoy returning to; a sunny room that feels like a retreat), social (a group that expects your pages), or temporal (an hour each morning when the house is quiet, or that you look forward to returning to after camping with your family for ten days). But it is almost always built, not found—and, crucially, part of what we have to create is a tolerance for our own lapses. We have to focus on the small happenings unfurling all the time…and make room for them.

How to get back to the desk that is always waiting? Dorka Kardos-Latif on Unsplash

This summer, for me, the usual scaffolding is under stress now that I’m back from Paris. The momentum I had got interrupted by a three‑day migraine, jet lag, and an overdue colonoscopy. (My mother died at 55 from colon cancer and I swore to her I’d be good about getting screened. You should too!) The kids are home. Camps change weekly. There are birthdays and trips to Legoland to plan. Some days I sit down to write only to realize it’s already time to pack snacks and head to the pool…

So let’s talk about concrete practices to allow for consistent overcoming of inconsistency, which I think is an often overlooked aspect of a writing life. Here are the three key elements I rely on, followed by a checklist that I find helpful, and hope you will too.