A Day in My Writing Life — The Unglamorous Truth
There’s a version of the writer’s life that gets a lot of airtime. A desk by a window. Morning light. A steaming mug. Words flowing.
That’s not my life.
Writing isn’t my full-time job. I have a career, a family, and roughly the same number of hours in a day as everyone else. So the romantic version, the one where writing is just what you do, all day, at your perfect desk doesn’t apply.
What does apply: Tuesday nights. Thursday nights. Sunday afternoons.
Those are my writing blocks. They’re not always ideal, but they are consistent. For me, consistency, is more useful than inspiration. Inspiration is unreliable. A recurring slot in the calendar is not.
Here’s how it actually works.
Before I sit down to write, I know exactly what I’m writing. I outline rigorously. Every chapter is mapped out before I start. My chapters are short by design. When I sit down on a Tuesday night, I’m not staring at a blank page wondering what happens next. I know what happens next. I wrote it down in the outline. The drafting session is more like connecting the dots than creating from scratch.
That’s a technique I borrowed from the pulp writers — the ones who produced books at a pace that would make modern authors faint. They wrote to a formula. They got the draft out. They fixed it afterwards. The goal in a drafting session is words on the page, not perfect words, but words.
Get it down. Fix it later.
Now for the unglamorous part.
Writing is only part of being a writer. The other parts, the parts nobody tells you about when you imagine yourself as an author, are the bits I find genuinely hard.
Marketing. Social media. Keywords. (Don’t even get me started on keywords.) Trying to figure out what readers want while staying true to what I want to write. Trying to compete for attention in a world where people’s phones are bottomless pits of distraction. Trying to get someone to spend £4.99 on a book when they could scroll for six hours for free. That, to me, is the hard work of being a writer.
I really struggle with the marketing side. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I find it tedious, I find it confusing, and it takes up mental energy that I’d far rather spend on creating stories. But it’s part of the job, and pretending it isn’t doesn’t help anyone — including me.
So the unglamorous truth is this: some of my “writing life” is spent writing. The rest is spent doing everything else that has to happen for anyone to read the writing.
It’s still worth it. But I’d be lying if I said it was all morning light and a full cup of coffee.