Leigh Bardugo writes like someone who used to hold down other jobs, because she did. Her routine runs on a tight outline and small daily targets rather than marathon sessions. She's laid out the whole method in interviews.

The Direct Answer
She outlines a book down to a single page, expands it into a rough zero draft, and writes toward small daily goals.
She's compared her outline to a one-page book and calls the expanded draft its musculature, per her Writer's Digest interview.

The One-Page Book

Bardugo is an outliner who works through a three-act structure. She takes an idea and writes it out onto a single page, so she has, in her own description, a book that happens to be one page long. From there she fills in everything she already knows, scene ideas, snatches of dialogue, the major emotional beats, until the page grows into a loose, messy zero draft. She's called that expanded version the musculature of the book. The finished novel gets built on top of that frame, which is why she rarely faces huge structural cuts later.

Small Daily Targets

She's practical about output. Her standard advice is to set goals you can actually meet, something like 500 words a day or a 30-minute writing sprint before work starts. A target you can hit on an ordinary bad day, then repeat tomorrow, beats a heroic quota you abandon by week two. She also insists the first draft belongs to you and nobody else, so there's no reason to feel ashamed of pages that come out rushed or sloppy.

The process of writing a book is not one of falling in love. It's one of staying in love.

Leigh Bardugo, Being Boss podcast

That line is really about the daily grind. The rush of the original idea won't carry you through an entire book, so the job is to find a fresh reason to show up to the same story every single day.

Writing Around a Day Job

Bardugo wrote Shadow and Bone while working as a Hollywood makeup and special-effects artist, after earlier stretches in copywriting and journalism. She's pointed out a difference that shaped her: writing advertising copy all day left her writing muscles worn out by evening, while long hours on a film set gave her mind room to wander and generate story. Her blunt takeaway is that you can hold down a job, sometimes two, and still finish a novel.

She's also learned to stay flexible about method. Ninth House refused to be fast-drafted and pushed her through slow, repeated iterations she hadn't needed before. The lesson she took from it is to let each book ask for its own process instead of forcing every project through the same machine.

For her worldbuilding method and craft principles, see the full Leigh Bardugo writing routine.

What You Can Steal