Margaret Atwood's Writing Routine

Margaret Atwood is the writer in this archive whose routine most resembles actual working life. She doesn't have a single sacred hour. She doesn't have a fixed desk. She doesn't have a rule about the same chair in the same room at the same time. She writes on planes and in hotel rooms, at kitchen tables, in longhand notebooks she carries around in her bag, and on whatever typewriter or laptop happens to be at hand. The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, The Blind Assassin. All written by a woman who has rarely had the luxury of a tidy daily schedule and has written sixty books anyway.

The routine matters because Atwood's career is proof that the rigid daily ritual is a preference, not a requirement. Many writers treat the sacred-morning-at-the-same-desk model as the only legitimate way to produce serious work. Atwood's output, both in volume and in quality, is a fifty-year refutation of that idea. She produces at the rate of a disciplined full-timer without pretending she has the life of one, and the gap between those two things is where her method lives.

The Flexible Discipline

In her Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, No. 121, conducted by Mary Morris and published in the winter of 1990, Atwood is asked about her writing schedule. Her answer is one of the most refreshing things a major novelist has ever said about the subject. She more or less shrugs. She writes when she can. She doesn't have a fixed time. She has been working around other things for her entire career, and she has produced a canonical body of work without ever enjoying the luxury of a sacred morning block.

What she does have is discipline of a different kind. She writes every day she can, which is most days, and she doesn't wait for the right conditions. If she's on a book tour, she writes in the hotel room between events. If she's traveling, she writes on the plane. If she's at home, she writes at whatever surface is clear. Her discipline lives in the commitment to produce regardless of the circumstances, with the schedule treated as incidental.

This is a harder discipline than the fixed-hour kind, even though it looks looser on the surface. A writer who only works at the same desk at the same time each morning has built a set of cues that prompt the mind to produce. Atwood has had to produce without those cues, which means the switch has to be entirely internal. She has practiced flipping that switch for sixty years, and by now it happens almost automatically. Sit down, open the notebook, start. The environment is incidental. The decision is what gets her into the work.

Writing on Planes

One of the details Atwood mentions most often in interviews is how much she writes while traveling. Planes, trains, hotel rooms, the backs of cars. The travel time that other writers treat as dead time is, for Atwood, some of her most productive writing time. She has a notebook with her. She opens it. She writes. The plane is moving, but the book is advancing.

The lesson here cuts against a lot of received wisdom. Most writing advice insists on quiet, privacy, and control over the environment. Atwood's practice suggests the opposite. A noisy environment you can't control is sometimes better than a quiet one you can, because the noisy environment doesn't give you the option of fussing over the setup. On a plane, you can't organize your desk or arrange your tea or choose the right music. You can only write or not write. The absence of options turns out to be a kind of freedom.

"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."

Writers who travel often, or who have families, or who have day jobs, or who live in small apartments with other people, tend to read Atwood's version of this advice as permission. You don't need the writer's shed. You don't need the block of silence. You need a notebook and an hour and a mind willing to drop into the work without negotiating with the conditions first. The novels that come out of this approach don't read as more hurried or less considered than the novels written in sacred morning blocks. Atwood's prose is as finely crafted as any writer's of her generation, and a lot of it was built on tray tables.

The Notebook Always

The constant in Atwood's kit, across all the different locations and years, is the notebook. She carries one. She writes in it by hand. She has said in multiple interviews that she does the early stages of every novel in longhand, because the slowness of the pen keeps her in a different relationship with the prose than a keyboard would. Typing is fast, and fast isn't always what the first draft wants. Longhand forces a kind of patience that lets her feel the sentences before she commits to them.

The other function of the notebook is portability. A laptop needs a surface, a power source, and some kind of stable environment. A notebook needs a lap. That difference sounds small, but over the course of a career it adds up to thousands of hours of writing time that a laptop-dependent writer would have lost. Atwood has written in waiting rooms, on trains, in the backs of cars, and in the middle of events she was supposed to be attending. The notebook made all of that possible.

There's a third function that I think matters even more, which is that the notebook is private in a way a screen isn't. When you write on a laptop in a public place, people can see your screen, and you tend to write defensively because of it. A notebook is opaque. No one knows what you're writing. The privacy gives the first draft the freedom to be bad, and first drafts need to be bad in order to eventually be good. Atwood's notebooks are full of material that never made it into the books, and the notebooks were the place that material could safely exist until she figured out what to do with it.

The Long Game

Atwood has been publishing for more than sixty years, and the shape of her career says something the shorter routines in this archive can't quite capture. Consistency over decades beats intensity over months. She has produced at a steady rate across every stage of her life, through marriages and raising a child and travel and fame and illness and grief and all the other things that make a writing life complicated. The routine, such as it is, was built to survive those complications rather than to exist in their absence.

This is the part of her practice that's hardest to see from the outside. A twenty-year-old reading about her flexible schedule might conclude that she just got lucky or that her method isn't a method at all. What's actually true is that she committed, decade after decade, to producing work under whatever conditions the day handed her. That commitment is the routine. The changing locations and tools are just the surface. Underneath is a daily decision, repeated something like twenty thousand times, to open the notebook and write.

In her essay collection Negotiating with the Dead, published in 2002, she talks about writing as a kind of conversation across time. The writer produces the work, and the work reaches readers decades later, sometimes centuries later, and the conversation continues. That conception of the work requires a long view. You're not trying to finish a book this month. You're trying to build a body of work that will outlive you. And the only way to build a body of work is to keep showing up, regardless of whether the day is convenient or the desk is available or the mood is right. Atwood has done this for six decades. The catalog is what that looks like when it works.