Look up Emily Henry's writing routine and you'll mostly find fans recreating an aesthetic, all lattes and tidy desks. Her own version is plainer than those videos suggest. She writes most days, drafts fast and rough, and saves the real work for revision.
Her Routine Is Just Doing It
If you go hunting for Emily Henry's process online, you'll mostly find people recreating a mood: the breakfast, the latte, the clean desk. Henry's own description is a lot less cinematic. Asked about her routine, she said she wishes she'd found some magic combination where lighting a candle and drinking the right drink summoned inspiration, but for her it really comes down to sitting down most days and making herself write, even when she doesn't feel like it or thinks it's going badly (Today, 2024). She drafts quickly, and she forgives the mess while she's in it.
I do tend to, like the protagonist January, write very quickly and very badly.
Emily Henry, The London Magazine
That speed is deliberate. Henry has described letting a ball of momentum roll downhill and carry her through the draft rather than stopping to perfect each scene. The trade-off is a long revision phase afterward. For People We Meet on Vacation, she wrote a quick draft to see whether the idea felt as good on the page as it did in her head, then spent roughly six months reworking it on her own before it reached her editor (Writer's Digest).
She also plans very little going in. Henry has called herself thoroughly not an outliner, discovering plot and structure as she drafts rather than mapping them out first. The ugly draft isn't a failure state for her, it's the tool she uses to find out what the book actually is. That's why finishing one matters more to her than getting each sentence right on the way through.
When She's Stuck, She Goes 'Hiking Around'
Henry has been candid that she spent years mistaking a fear of failure for writer's block. Her fix has a name. She calls it 'hiking around,' and it means what it sounds like: she has her characters walk around doing nothing particularly interesting until something happens that turns the story in a new direction. The walking usually gets cut in revision. The point is the movement, which pulls her out of her own head and away from the pressure to be perfect (Rare Birds Books).
Put together, the routine is unglamorous and repeatable. Write most days, write quickly, let it be bad, keep the characters moving when you stall, then fix all of it later. For the wider picture, see the full Emily Henry writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Show up on the bad days. Henry's whole method is writing when it feels wrong, not waiting to feel ready.
- Let the first draft be ugly. Speed beats polish early, since you can't fix a page that doesn't exist yet.
- Keep moving when you stall. Write a dull walk-around scene to unstick yourself, then cut it in revision.
- Stop hunting for a ritual. The candle won't write the book. Sitting down does.