Emily Henry gets up, pours cold brew, and writes. She moves around her house every couple of hours and keeps writing. That's the routine, described in her own words in a 2021 piece for Zoella, and it's worth sitting with for a moment because of how aggressively ordinary it sounds. No 4 AM alarm, no dedicated writing cabin, no elaborate ritual. By around ten in the morning she's at her desk or on her couch, and by three in the afternoon she's done. Five hours, most days of the week, in a home office in Cincinnati, Ohio. Six novels in roughly six years, all of them bestsellers.
What makes Henry's routine worth studying has nothing to do with its surface details and everything to do with the underlying philosophy. She's built a practice around finishing things, not perfecting them. Around drafting fast and revising hard. Around writing the book she most wants to read, without waiting to know how it ends before she starts. In a genre that gets dismissed as light reading, her approach to craft is one of the most intellectually honest you'll find from any working novelist.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- No fixed alarm. She writes mornings through afternoon, typically starting around 10 AM. Earlier in her career, when she held a day job, she wrote starting at 5 AM before work and through weekends.
- Writing Location
- At home in Cincinnati, Ohio. She's described her workspace as a standing desk with a treadmill and a guest bed nearby for breaks. She moves around the house every couple of hours while continuing to work.
- Daily Output
- She doesn't talk publicly about word count targets. She writes until around 3 PM most days and measures progress by finishing drafts rather than hitting daily numbers.
- Tools
- Cold brew coffee, which she buys in bulk so she doesn't have to make decisions in the morning. She does not listen to music while writing because she finds it too distracting, though she curates playlists for each book's mood outside of writing sessions.
- Famous Ritual
- Drafting quickly and without fear. Henry has said she's "not afraid to write a terrible first draft" and that finishing a messy draft is always the first step, because it's easier to fix a book than to create one from nothing.
- Books Written This Way
- Beach Read (2020), People We Meet on Vacation (2021), Book Lovers (2022), Happy Place (2023), Funny Story (2024), Great Big Beautiful Life (2025).
The Writer Who Doesn't Outline
Most successful novelists, when asked about their process, describe some version of planning. Notecards, beat sheets, chapter-by-chapter outlines, months of preparation before a word of prose gets written. Henry does the opposite. She's said in multiple interviews that any time she's tried writing from a thorough outline, it feels like writing a book she already read, and that's not why she shows up to the page. She writes because it feels like an intense reading experience where she doesn't know what will happen next. Take that away and the whole thing deflates.
For People We Meet on Vacation, she hadn't decided which vacations her characters would take or in what order when she started drafting. She wrote both the past and present timelines more or less simultaneously, in the order they appear in the finished book. Everything about how the relationship developed between Poppy and Alex was, as she put it, essentially a surprise. The structure of the novel looks deliberate and engineered from the outside, and it is, but that engineering happened in revision, not planning.
There's a real lesson in this. Henry's anti-outline position is a theory about where story energy comes from, not a stylistic quirk or a sign of laziness. She believes that the writer's genuine curiosity about what happens next is one of the main things a reader can feel on the page. When she knows the ending before she writes the beginning, something goes slack. The sentences know the answer before the scene does. Readers are harder to fool than writers think, and they can sense when a book is going through motions it already knows by heart.
That said, Henry is clear that she's a deliberate reviser. The fast, ugly first draft is not the end point. She's described her drafts as often being "just a bunch of dialogue and tidbits of description" that need substantial rebuilding. The discovery phase and the refinement phase are kept strictly separate, and she trusts the second one to catch everything the first one missed.
Cold Brew and a Standing Desk
The physical setup of Henry's writing life is more considered than her casual descriptions suggest. She works at a standing desk with a treadmill underneath it, in a room that doubles as a guest space, and keeps a nearby bed for breaks when the standing gets old. She's described her workspace as decidedly non-photogenic, with the usual domestic disorder of someone who lives and works in the same building: dirty dishes, dust bunnies, sweatpants. The couch is also a legitimate workstation. She moves between locations throughout the day as the mood changes.
The cold brew habit is specific and worth noting. She buys it in bulk so she doesn't have to make any decisions in the morning before she's ready to make decisions. It's a small thing, but the logic behind it is exactly the logic behind every effective writing routine: remove as many friction points as possible between waking up and getting words on the page. Decision fatigue is real, and the writers who protect their mornings from small unnecessary choices are the ones who tend to produce more consistently.
The music question is where Henry surprises people. She curates playlists for each book she writes, matching songs to the emotional tone of the project and sharing them with readers. But she doesn't play those playlists while she's actually drafting. She's said she finds music too distracting, that she ends up waiting for favorite parts instead of paying attention to the sentences. The playlists are for building the world in her head before and after sessions. During the session itself, the room is quiet.
This split, the playlist as mood tool rather than background noise, is more sophisticated than it sounds. Henry is essentially doing two different kinds of creative work and keeping them from bleeding into each other. The playlist session is immersive and receptive: she soaks up the emotional register she's trying to write toward. The drafting session is active and producing: she needs her full attention on the page. Mixing them would dilute both.