Alice Munro built a Nobel-winning body of work on an unglamorous schedule. She wrote in the mornings, seven days a week, and treated her page quota like a debt she had to repay. The habit held for decades.
The Morning Routine
Munro described her working day plainly. She got up, had some coffee, and started writing, keeping the serious work to the early hours. In her 1994 Paris Review interview she put the window at roughly eight to eleven, seven days a week, and said she filled the rest of the day with other things unless a final draft pulled her back to the desk.
I write every morning, seven days a week. I write starting about eight o'clock and finish up around eleven.
Alice Munro, The Paris Review, 1994
The Quota She Owed Herself
The discipline came from a quota. Munro set herself a number of pages and called herself compulsive about hitting it. Miss a day and the pages carried over, to be made up later. She kept the same rule for exercise, walking three miles a day and making up any day she expected to skip.
She was candid that the writing itself came slowly. She filled notebooks with rough, clumsy drafting just to get something down, then hauled herself back whenever she wandered onto the wrong track. The routine wasn't there to make writing easy. It was there to make sure it happened.
For the wider picture, see the full Alice Munro writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Protect the morning. Munro spent her freshest hours on the hardest work and let the day's errands wait.
- Set a quota you can carry. A page count you can make up beats a mood you have to wait for.
- Write seven days a week. The daily return kept each story warm and moving.
- Pair it with a walk. Munro walked three miles daily and made up any day she expected to miss.