Famous writers' daily routines, as they described them, have more in common than the legends suggest. Most wrote in the morning, counted what they produced, and revised hard. Toni Morrison was at work before dawn, Anthony Trollope asked himself for 250 words every quarter of an hour, and Maya Angelou might keep three pages out of nine.
EdCitation publishes this guide. Every routine, number and quotation comes from the writer's own account or the interviewer's report, read on 3 October 2026: the Paris Review's Art of Fiction interviews, Trollope's An Autobiography and an essay by Kazuo Ishiguro. The magazine's site refused our requests, so we read each interview's free opening pages in an archived copy. Four famous sayings could not be traced to the authors they are pinned to, and we say so.
EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, and we are proud of that line: the routine, the draft and every sentence stay yours. What EdCitation does is check. Mechanics QA gives a finished file the mechanical read Hemingway saved for the typescript and the proofs, and Find sources searches the published record when you want to read further.
What were famous writers' daily routines?
Most wrote in the morning for three to seven hours and kept the rest of the day for living. The table sets nine writers side by side, with the last step a student can add.
| Writer | When and where | Tools | How much | Drafting and revising | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Trollope | From 5.30 a.m., three hours, before breakfast | A watch on the desk | 250 words a quarter of an hour | Reread the previous day's pages first | Trollope (1883) |
| Ernest Hemingway | First light to about noon, standing | Pencil first, typewriter when it went well | 450 to 1,250 words on his chart | Rewrote each day up to where he had stopped | Plimpton (1958) |
| Toni Morrison | Before dawn, coffee made in the dark | Pencil, yellow legal pads | Not stated | First draft straight through, revised on a computer | Schappell and Brodsky Lacour (1993) |
| Maya Angelou | A rented hotel room, 6.30 a.m. to early afternoon | Lying across the bed | Of nine pages, two and a half or three kept | Read the morning's pages after dinner | Plimpton (1990) |
| Georges Simenon | A chapter a day, crossed off on a calendar | Not in the free pages | One chapter a day, then three days of revision | Cut every word there for effect | Collins (1955) |
| Stephen King | Every day he can | Computer, sometimes longhand | Once 2,000 words a day, later about 1,000 | Six weeks' rest, then retyped the whole draft | Rich and Lehmann-Haupt (2006) |
| Joan Didion | Nights, while working at Vogue | Pages taped in strips on the wall | Not stated | Picked a scene off the wall to rewrite it | Kuehl (1978) |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | 9 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., six days a week, for four weeks | "Free-hand" | Most of a novel in a month | Left bad sentences in and wrote on | Ishiguro (2014) |
| Vladimir Nabokov | Early morning | Filing cards | Not stated | Cards copied, expanded and rearranged into novels | Gold (1967) |
| You, at the end | Once the draft is finished | A Word document or PDF | Your brief's word limit | Formatting, leftovers, citations, numbers and language checked by Mechanics QA | EdCitation, Pro |
Morning writers: Morrison, Angelou and Faulkner
Morrison began writing before dawn out of necessity: she had small children and needed the time before they woke, "always around five in the morning" (Schappell & Brodsky Lacour, 1993). By 1983, writing Beloved, she found she was clearer-headed in the morning, and the habit became a choice. Her ritual was to make coffee while it was still dark and watch the light come. She wrote every first draft in pencil and moved to a computer only to revise.
Angelou kept a hotel room in every town she lived in, left home at six and was at work by 6.30, lying across the bed, with everything taken off the walls (Plimpton, 1990). Before starting she read the Bible aloud, for "melody". William Faulkner, asked for a formula, offered "ninety-nine percent discipline" among three ninety-nine percents, and called the morning the best time to work (Stein, 1956).
The exception: Ishiguro's four-week "Crash"
Ishiguro (2014) describes a year lost to the invitations and mail that followed a second novel. In the summer of 1987 Ishiguro and Lorna, Ishiguro's wife, planned a "Crash": four weeks of writing from 9 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., Monday to Saturday, with no mail, no telephone and no visitors. By the end most of The Remains of the Day was down, though writing it up properly took much longer.
How many words a day did famous writers write?
On the figures they gave, from a few hundred to a few thousand words on a working day. The measure differed: Trollope counted words against the clock, Simenon chapters, Angelou the pages worth keeping.
Trollope's watch and diary
Trollope (1883) was at the table at 5.30 every morning, woken with coffee by an old groom paid £5 a year extra for the duty, and worked three hours before dressing for breakfast. The first half hour went on rereading the previous day's work, "weighing with my ear" the sound of it. Then came 250 words every quarter of an hour, with the watch in view. For each book Trollope kept a diary of pages written each week: about 40 on average, as few as 20 and as many as 112, with every page counted as 250 words. That average is some 10,000 words a week.
Hemingway's chart and King's thousand
Hemingway tracked his daily output on a chart made from the side of a cardboard packing case, "so as not to kid myself", Plimpton (1958) reports; the figures ran from 450 to 1,250 words, the high days put in so that he would not feel guilty fishing the next day. King told the Paris Review that he used to write 2,000 words a day and was down to "a paltry thousand" (Rich & Lehmann-Haupt, 2006). Simenon's calendar, which his interviewer saw, gave one day to each chapter of a Maigret and three days to revising it (Collins, 1955).
How did famous writers draft and revise?
Fast and rough first, slowly and hard afterwards. Almost every writer here separates getting a draft down from making it good.
Getting the first draft down
Morrison wrote a first draft straight through when the material was urgent, though she said she did not think it a law. Ishiguro, during the Crash, wrote without caring about style or consistency, and let "awful sentences, hideous dialogue" stand so the ideas could grow. Haruki Murakami told the Paris Review he starts writing with no plan at all and waits for the story to come (Wray, 2004). Nabokov was the opposite: "My characters are galley slaves" (Gold, 1967). King sides with Murakami, quoting the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester: "The book is the boss."
At fifteen or sixteen Didion typed out Hemingway's stories "to learn how the sentences worked" (Kuehl, 1978). The first half of Run River was written at night while Didion worked at Vogue, in scenes taped into long strips and pinned to the apartment wall, each picked off and rewritten a month or two later.
Cutting, resting and the second look
Simenon's revising followed one piece of advice from Colette, who had told him his stories were "too literary". So he cut adjectives, adverbs and any sentence there only for effect, and said that was almost all of his revision (Collins, 1955). It is the instinct behind "omit needless words", whose history is in our guide to Strunk and White.
Angelou read each morning's pages after dinner, and from nine pages she might save "two and a half or three". Her editor since 1967 had questioned her semicolons for years, yet she held that a writer's own editing, before the editor sees it, matters most (Plimpton, 1990). King likes to give a finished draft at least six weeks, after which it reads almost as if someone else wrote it, and for Lisey's Story he retyped the whole book into blank documents, which he compared to swimming.
Hemingway rewrote each morning up to where he had stopped, then saw the book again when it was typed and again in proof, and was grateful for each chance (Plimpton, 1958). His thirty-nine attempts at one last page, and his habit of stopping while he still knew what came next, are in our guide to writing a short story.
How much of a Paris Review interview is in the writer's own words?
Most of it, but not all, and the difference matters when you quote one. Descriptions of desks, charts and calendars are the interviewer's: Hemingway's word chart is Plimpton's account, and only "so as not to kid myself" is Hemingway's. Simenon's chapter-a-day calendar is his interviewer's report too.
Some interviews were shaped in writing. Nabokov answered questions sent in advance, and his answers are printed as he wrote them down (Gold, 1967). Didion wrote the interview's introduction, because Linda Kuehl died soon after transcribing the tapes (Kuehl, 1978).
In the copies we read, each interview's opening pages were free and the rest asked the reader to subscribe. The interviews were also collected in books, as Writers at Work. To quote one, see our guide to citing an interview transcript.
Which famous writing quotes did writers never say?
Four of the most shared lines about writing cannot be traced to the people they are credited to. Treat each as unconfirmed for that person.
"Write drunk, edit sober"
No source in Hemingway's writing has been found. Quote Investigator's earliest close match is a character in Peter De Vries's 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben who sometimes writes drunk and revises sober, three years after Hemingway died, and it reports Hemingway denying heavy drinking while writing in a 1961 interview (Quote Investigator, 2016). Hemingway's own account puts the writing at first light.
"Sit down at a typewriter and bleed"
Writing for the Hemingway Society, Paul (2016) reports research that found no substantive evidence that Hemingway said it. The sportswriter Red Smith was quoted in 1949 saying you "open your veins, and bleed", and Paul Gallico had used much the same language in 1946.
"Kill your darlings"
The documented source is Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cambridge lecture "On Style", given on 28 January 1914, which tells writers to delete any piece of "exceptionally fine writing" before it goes to press: "Murder your darlings" (Quiller-Couch, 1917). Wickman (2013) lists Faulkner, Wilde, Eudora Welty, Chesterton, Chekhov and King among those wrongly credited.
"Easy reading is damn hard writing"
Angelou credited it to Nathaniel Hawthorne in her Paris Review interview. Quote Investigator gives no evidence that Hawthorne wrote it and provisionally credits Thomas Hood, writing in The Athenaeum on 22 April 1837 (Quote Investigator, 2014).
What can students take from how writers worked?
In our view, the borrowable part is the shape, not the hours: none of these routines was ever tested as a method, and a novelist's free morning is not a student's 9 a.m. lecture. What the research says about building writing habits is in our guide to a study routine that lasts the term. Our suggested order:
- Find your best hour. Morrison's question to her students: when are you at your best, creatively? Put the hardest writing there.
- Count something. Trollope counted pages, Hemingway words. Start from your brief's limit: Check your paper, free, reads it into a checklist, with each rule beside the sentence of the instructions it came from.
- Reread yesterday's pages first. Trollope's half hour and Hemingway's daily rewrite both start the session by reading.
- Let the first draft be rough. Ishiguro left awful sentences in so the ideas could surface.
- Rest it, then cut. King waits six weeks; a student can wait two days. Cut what is there for effect, as Simenon did.
- Give the file a last mechanical read. Run it through Mechanics QA for formatting, leftover comments, citations, numbers and spelling slips.
- Check the references. Paste the list into Verify references, free.
How does EdCitation help once the draft is written?
In our view, EdCitation's Mechanics QA is the best tool for the last, mechanical read of a student paper, because it reads the file itself by rule and leaves every sentence to you. Hemingway was grateful for the typed copy and the proofs as further chances to correct; Mechanics QA is that chance for a Word document or PDF.
What Mechanics QA checks
Mechanics QA checks formatting against the APA 7 student paper: font, size, spacing, margins, title page, headings and the reference list. It finds comments, tracked changes, placeholders and template text left in the file. It matches each citation to the reference list and looks each reference up in the publisher's record. It flags figures that do not add up or disagree between sections, and the slips a spell-checker lets through. Each finding is marked where it sits in your paper, names the rule it broke and gives the fix, and no model reads your paper. Like every EdCitation tool, it writes nothing: the cutting stays yours, as Simenon's did. Mechanics QA is part of Pro at $8 a month ($72 a year), and a free account can run three checks a month (pricing).
Find sources, Cite a source and Verify references
On 3 October 2026 we searched Find sources, free, for "Paris Review interviews writers at work". It returned 58,884 results, the first "Writers at work : the Paris review interviews", 1958, credited to Malcolm Cowley, venue "Viking Press eBooks". Open each record before you cite it: two of the next were one-page journal items of 1989 and 1993 with the book's title, listing George Plimpton as a co-author. Cite a source builds a reference in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver, and Verify references marks each entry verified, "check this" or not found, never showing one it could not check as not found.
Quick questions
What time did famous writers start work?
Most started early. Trollope sat down at 5.30 a.m., Morrison wrote before dawn, Hemingway began at first light and Angelou was at her hotel room by 6.30.
Did Hemingway say "write drunk, edit sober"?
No source shows that he did. Quote Investigator's earliest match is a character in Peter De Vries's 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben, published after Hemingway's death.
Who said "kill your darlings"?
Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a Cambridge lecture of 28 January 1914, printed in On the Art of Writing. His words were "Murder your darlings".
Are the Paris Review interviews free to read?
In part. In the copies we read, each interview's opening pages were free on the magazine's site and the rest was for subscribers.
Can EdCitation check my draft for me?
EdCitation's Mechanics QA, in Pro, checks formatting, what was left in the file, citations, numbers and the slips a spell-checker lets through. EdCitation never writes or rewrites a sentence of your work.
References
- Collins, C. (1955). Georges Simenon, the art of fiction no. 9. The Paris Review, (9). https://web.archive.org/web/20231208154519/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5020/the-art-of-fiction-no-9-georges-simenon
- Gold, H. (1967). Vladimir Nabokov, the art of fiction no. 40. The Paris Review, (41). https://web.archive.org/web/20231230064300/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov
- Ishiguro, K. (2014, December 6). Kazuo Ishiguro: How I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the-day-guardian-book-club
- Kuehl, L. (1978). Joan Didion, the art of fiction no. 71. The Paris Review, (74). https://web.archive.org/web/20240103122756/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion
- Paul, S. (2016, May 27). Quotation controversy: Writing and bleeding. The Hemingway Society. https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/quotation-controversy-writing-and-bleeding
- Plimpton, G. (1958). Ernest Hemingway, the art of fiction no. 21. The Paris Review, (18). https://web.archive.org/web/20231209184231/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway
- Plimpton, G. (1990). Maya Angelou, the art of fiction no. 119. The Paris Review, (116). https://web.archive.org/web/20231215220406/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2279/the-art-of-fiction-no-119-maya-angelou
- Quiller-Couch, A. (1917). On the art of writing: Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914. Cambridge University Press. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17470
- Quote Investigator. (2014, November 5). Easy reading is hard writing. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/05/hard-writing/
- Quote Investigator. (2016, September 21). Write drunk, revise sober. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/21/write-drunk/
- Rich, N., & Lehmann-Haupt, C. (2006). Stephen King, the art of fiction no. 189. The Paris Review, (178). https://web.archive.org/web/20240103122802/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5653/the-art-of-fiction-no-189-stephen-king
- Schappell, E., & Brodsky Lacour, C. (1993). Toni Morrison, the art of fiction no. 134. The Paris Review, (128). https://web.archive.org/web/20240103131948/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-morrison
- Stein, J. (1956). William Faulkner, the art of fiction no. 12. The Paris Review, (12). https://web.archive.org/web/20240124035640/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner
- Trollope, A. (1883). An autobiography. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5978
- Wickman, F. (2013, October 18). Who really said you should "kill your darlings"? Slate. https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/kill-your-darlings-writing-advice-what-writer-really-said-to-murder-your-babies.html
- Wray, J. (2004). Haruki Murakami, the art of fiction no. 182. The Paris Review, (170). https://web.archive.org/web/20221220023648/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fiction-no-182-haruki-murakami