Frank Herbert isn't the author to study if you want a neat morning ritual. For most of the years he spent building Dune, he was a full-time newspaperman who wrote fiction in the margins, backed by a wife who paid the bills and a research habit that ran for years.

The Direct Answer
He wrote around a full-time newspaper job, researched for years before drafting, and treated writing as work rather than inspiration.
His wife Beverly became the household breadwinner in the 1960s so he could keep at the fiction, and he didn't write full time until the early 1970s.

A Newspaperman Who Wrote Fiction on the Side

For most of the years that produced his fiction, Frank Herbert had a day job. He'd worked papers up and down the West Coast since he was a teenager, from the Glendale Star to Oregon's Statesman, and he spent roughly a decade as a writer and editor at the San Francisco Examiner's California Living magazine. The novels were written around that work. He didn't leave newspapers for full-time fiction until the early 1970s, years after Dune came out in 1965.

The setup held together partly because of his wife, Beverly. She took a full-time job writing advertising copy for department stores and became the family's main earner through the 1960s. That income bought Herbert the room to keep researching and drafting while the book was still years away from paying anything back.

What the record doesn't give is a tidy clock. There's no famous four-in-the-morning start or fixed daily word count attached to Herbert the way there is to some writers. What's documented instead is the shape of his working life: a paying job, a partner covering the bills, and a research habit that ran for years before the writing earned its keep.

Research First, Then Writing

If Herbert's routine has a signature, it's the order of operations. He researched hard before he committed to a draft. Dune alone took about six years of reading and note-taking before it was finished. His journalism had trained the habit: gather the facts first, then turn them loose in the imagination. Tim O'Reilly's biography describes the method as 'loading the computer,' cramming in real material until there's enough solid ground for the mind to reshape into fiction.

He was just as practical about the drafting. Herbert didn't sit around waiting for the muse to show up. He said he'd never had a writing block, and that looking back over his pages he couldn't pick out which had come easily and which he'd ground out on a bad day. The work was the work.

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating.

Frank Herbert, quoted in Shoptalk (1990)

That's the closest thing to a daily rule he left behind: show up and give the page everything you've got right then. For the story of how this method produced his most famous book, see the full Frank Herbert writing routine.

What You Can Steal