My really sexy, very sophisticated, highly secret writing routine

A peek behind the curtain...

What’s your writing routine? It’s my most dreaded interview question.

The interviewer waits for my answer. She wants a good answer, possibly a quirky answer. Above all, she wants a meaningful one. Something nobody would have guessed. THAT ONE WEIRD TRICK that will help you, yes you, find the time to write. The simple hack that authors don’t want you to know! 

My answer should be that I rise early or go to bed late. Whichever is more romantic. That I drink my coffee black and my whiskey neat and listen to old records and smoke a slim lady cigarette while banging out poems on a typewriter in lacy red underwear. I should say that I read Bukowski. I meditate. And then I write 14 pages non-stop.

But I don’t do any of that. 

The truth is—I lie in bed and write first thing in the morning. I wake up at 6:30am, not because I’m disciplined or morally superior, but because there are pigeons outside my window and my cat is trying to hurl himself through the screen and launch like a huge pigeon-seeking missile onto the roof. 

But that’s how my best writing comes. That’s the secret. The pigeons. The yowling cat. The feeling that if I don’t write in this precise instant—while the world is still young and urgent—I won’t write at all. That’s the best trick I’ve got, I guess. You have to love your life enough to write it down.

You have to write at inopportune times, in sometimes unsexy, unstructured ways. You have to stop waiting and instead, write desperately—like your life depends on it. Like you’ve been shot through the heart and you're running through the woods. And soon it won’t matter if what you write is always great or even good. It just matters that it’s yours.

Go write something today. Tag me if you share online. I wanna read it.

XO,
Joy

P.S. 

My book Instructions for Traveling West is now available for preorders. Presales are about the nicest thing you could do for a writer you want to support through the perilous and often impossible world of publishing. If you can, preorder below and help this writer keep writing.