The Strange Writing Habits of Famous Authors (Or: Why Your Writing Routine Is Probably Normal)
There’s a comforting myth about writers. They wake early. They brew coffee. They sit at a tidy desk overlooking some picturesque landscape and calmly produce brilliant sentences until noon. It’s a lovely image. It’s also almost entirely untrue.
Literary history is filled with writers who worked lying down, standing up, in hotel rooms, in bathtubs, or beside drawers filled with rotting fruit. Some wrote naked to avoid distraction. Others surrounded themselves with lucky objects. One poet even climbed into a coffin before writing.
If you’ve ever worried that your own writing habits are strange—scribbling in short bursts, pacing the room, jotting notes in unusual places—you’re actually in excellent company. Great writers, it turns out, are often gloriously peculiar.
The Horizontal Author - Truman Capote
Truman Capote insisted he could not think properly while sitting upright. “I am a completely horizontal author,” he once said. Capote wrote lying on a couch or bed, usually with a notebook balanced on his knees. His mornings began with coffee, which later gave way to tea and—by afternoon—often sherry or martinis. Desks, he believed, made writing feel like clerical work. Comfort, not posture, was the gateway to imagination.
The Bathtub Detective - Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie didn’t rely on a grand study or a carefully designed writing studio. Instead, she often plotted her mysteries in the bathtub. Christie would soak in warm water while eating apples and untangling complicated murder plots in her mind. Many of the twists in her Hercule Poirot novels reportedly took shape there. Considering she wrote more than sixty detective novels, the bathtub may be one of the most productive brainstorming spaces in literary history.
The Naked Deadline - Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo had a procrastination problem while writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. His solution was dramatic. He ordered a servant to hide all of his clothes. With nothing appropriate to wear, Hugo could not leave the house. Wrapped in a blanket, he stayed indoors and wrote until the manuscript was finished. Extreme? Certainly. Effective? Absolutely.
The Hotel Room Monastery - Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou created almost monastic conditions for writing. Each morning she rented a small hotel room near her home and removed nearly everything from it. The room typically contained only a bed, a small table, a Bible, a dictionary, a deck of cars, and a bottle of sherry. Angelou would arrive early and write until early afternoon. The bare room eliminated distractions.
The silence gave her imagination space to speak.
Writing Standing Up - Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway believed writing should involve physical energy. He often worked standing at a tall desk, sometimes using a bookshelf as his writing surface. His typewriter sat at eye level while he composed his famously spare sentences. Hemingway also tracked his daily word counts carefully and frequently stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. That way, he said, he would know exactly where to begin the next day.
Walking the Novel - Charles Dickens
For Charles Dickens, writing began far from the desk. Dickens routinely walked ten to twenty miles a day through London. During these long rambles he observed people, listened to conversations, and absorbed the rhythms of city life. Many of the unforgettable characters in his novels—from street urchins to pompous bureaucrats—were born during these wandering excursions. For Dickens, storytelling began on the streets.
The Cat on His Shoulder -Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe looked exactly like the kind of writer who would produce tales of ravens, beating hearts, and haunted houses. Friends often described him writing late at night, pacing, muttering lines aloud, and revising obsessively until the rhythm felt perfect. But Poe also had a softer companion during these long writing sessions—his beloved cat, Catterina, who was known to perch comfortably on his shoulder while he worked.
The Closed Door Rule - Stephen King
Stephen King approaches writing with a different kind of ritual: relentless consistency. King writes every single day, including holidays, with a goal of about 2,000 words. He works in the same place and often drafts while listening to music. But his most famous advice to writers is simple: Write with the door closed. Rewrite with the door open. The first draft, King believes, should be private and fearless. Only later should the outside world enter.
Creativity in a Coffin - Edith Sitwell
Perhaps the most theatrical ritual belongs to poet Edith Sitwell. As a young writer, she reportedly spent time lying inside an open coffin before beginning her work. Sitwell believed the experience helped her enter a deeper imaginative state. Whether psychological exercise or artistic flair, it certainly ensured that her writing day began memorably.
The Beautiful Weirdness of Writing
So if your writing life looks a little strange—scribbling ideas on receipts, writing in ten-minute bursts before the day begins, or staying up late chasing one stubborn sentence while sipping cold coffee from yesterday’s mug—you’re not doing it wrong. You’re participating in a long, eccentric literary tradition. Great writing doesn’t come from perfect routines. It comes from the wonderfully weird ones that work. So find your ritual. Be weird. Go write.