Alexis Hall's Writing Routine

A Day Job as Creative Freedom

Hall has been open about the fact that he's kept a day job for most of his writing career, and he frames that as an advantage rather than a limitation. "I have a dayjob and a life to live," he's said, and the financial stability that comes with it means he doesn't have to write toward whatever's trending in order to survive. He can write the book he actually wants to write, including books that don't fit neatly into a single marketing category, because the mortgage doesn't depend on any one of them landing.

That's a different relationship to output than most professional novelists describe. Full-time writers often talk about protecting writing time because it's the only income stream they have. Hall's version of protection runs the other direction: the day job protects the writing from having to be commercial in every instance. It's part of why his catalogue ranges as widely as it does, from Regency romance to contemporary rom-com to a trans heroine reclaiming a title in a country house, without any single lane defining him.

He's also been candid that this arrangement isn't free. Managing a day job, a writing career, and, in his words, "a life to live" means time is the actual constraint, not motivation or ideas. Hall has pointed to time management as the real limiting factor on how much he writes, more than any question of craft or inspiration.

Five Hundred Words, Come Hell or High Water

For a stretch of his career, Hall held to a specific daily discipline: a minimum of 500 words, every day, no exceptions. "I used to have a policy of writing at least five hundred words a day come hell or high water," he's said, describing it as a habit that worked well for him while he kept it up. He's also been honest that he fell out of the habit during a period when writing felt overwhelming, and that he's tried to rebuild it since, because he could feel the difference in his output when the daily minimum lapsed.

Five hundred words is a small target on purpose. It's low enough to hit on a bad day, after a full shift at a day job, with whatever energy is left over. That's the actual design principle behind it: a target so modest that skipping it takes a real decision rather than just a tired evening. Hall's underlying belief, stated directly in interviews, is that writing has to be something you choose to do on purpose. "It's quite important to see writing as a thing you choose to do," he's said, "rather than as some kind of spirit of inspiration that comes upon you."

"Deep down, writing is a data entry job, and the process is that you sit at a desk, and you do it."

Drafting Before the Outline Exists

Hall rejects the usual plotter-versus-pantser split as a false choice. "It's a spectrum like most things," he's said, and his own process bears that out in an unusual order. He's described getting an idea, sitting down, and writing several thousand words before he has any formal outline at all. Only after that initial burst does he go back and build a structure to organize what's already there. "I'll get an idea, then I'll sit down and bash out the first X thousand words," he's explained, "and then after that I'll realise that it would be a good idea to have an outline and I'll go back and write one."

He's called the broader shape of this method "concurrent-yet-iterative," a loop between concept and character that keeps revising both at once rather than locking either down early. Structure, in his account, stays genuinely malleable right up until copyediting starts. Even so, he holds to one fixed rule inside all that flexibility: he always writes a book from start to finish, in order, and admits he finds it hard to imagine working any other way, even though he knows other writers draft out of sequence successfully.

What ties this together is Hall's resistance to treating any part of the process as sacred. The outline works as a tool he reaches for once he already has enough material to need organizing, not a blueprint drawn up before the building starts. That's a meaningfully different relationship to planning than writers who can't begin without one, and it means his early drafts function less like architecture and more like excavation: write first, then figure out what you were building.

Refusing to Mystify the Job

Ask Hall to describe his writing process in detail and he tends to push back on the premise of the question itself. "I wouldn't. Sorry, that's a glib answer," he's said, "but one of the things I believe very strongly is that writing shouldn't be mystified." He's argued that it doesn't require special people, special places, or special tools, and that framing it as something rarefied discourages people from simply attempting it. "Deep down, writing is a data entry job, and the process is that you sit at a desk, and you do it," he's put it, adding that it "doesn't have to be a desk."

That stance carries real weight coming from someone this productive. It would be easy for a writer releasing four books in a single year to lean into mystique, to suggest some rare discipline or gift explains the pace. Hall does the opposite. He identifies the hardest parts of the job as unglamorous mechanics, like remembering a character was given a dog in chapter three and hasn't fed it since chapter six, or getting someone to walk from a door to a window without the sentence going flat. Craft, in his telling, lives in those unglamorous details, not in any special condition a writer has to secure before starting.

Sources

Hall's 2016 interview with Ellie Reads All the Books is the primary source for his statements on his former 500-words-a-day habit and his view of writing as a deliberate choice. His interview with Geeks OUT, conducted around the release of Confounding Oaths, is the source for his "data entry job" framing and his view on demystifying the craft. His Author Spotlight interview with Romantically Inclined Reviews covers his stance on writing software and his commitment to drafting start to finish. His interview with The Gloss Book Club and his conversation with InBetweenDrafts cover his "concurrent-yet-iterative" planning process and his account of writing thousands of words before building an outline. Biographical details, including his bibliography and awards, are drawn from his Wikipedia entry and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. See also: Alexis Hall on Wikipedia.

What You Can Steal

Hall's routine works precisely because it refuses to be special. Here's what actually transfers:

Set a target small enough to survive a bad day. Five hundred words is modest by design. A minimum you can actually hit builds more books than an ambitious target you abandon by Thursday.
Let your day job fund your creative freedom. Financial stability from outside your writing means you don't have to chase every trend. Hall's range exists because no single book has to pay the bills.
Write first, organize second. You don't need a finished outline to start. Several thousand words of discovery can tell you more about the real shape of a book than an outline written from nothing.
Distrust anything that promises the process should feel special. Hall's plainest belief is that writing requires sitting down and doing it, nothing more specific than that.
Treat writing as a choice, not a visitation. Waiting for inspiration is optional. Choosing to write today isn't dependent on whether it shows up.

The Routine at a Glance