Ask Nora Roberts how she's written more than 200 books and you won't get a mystical answer. Her advice is blunt, and she's repeated versions of it for years. Most of it comes down to sitting down and doing the work.
Ass in the Chair
For all the books, Roberts's advice to other writers is short. Asked for her one rule during Lauren Collins's 2009 profile in The New Yorker, she gave it in four words: ass in the chair. The point is blunt on purpose. The work happens while you're sitting down doing it, and it doesn't happen while you're not. She's openly skeptical of writer's block, treating it less as a condition to cure and more as a reason to get back to the desk.
Ass in the chair.
Nora Roberts, quoted in The New Yorker, 2009
Roberts writes six to eight hours a day when she's deep in a book, and she's said the routine, more than talent, is what keeps the pages coming. She doesn't rely on a muse. She sits down at roughly the same time each morning and works whether the words arrive easily or not. She's put the same idea in sharper terms elsewhere, telling writers to stop making excuses and get to work, and adding that she takes her own advice.
She's boiled the whole engine down to what she calls the three Ds: discipline, drive, and desire. Talent still matters, but she's clear that it runs a distant second to showing up. Plenty of gifted writers never finish a book because they keep waiting for the mood to be right. Roberts finishes because she doesn't wait. The discipline is a choice she makes over again every working day.
The Blank Page Rule
Her other well-worn piece of advice is aimed at perfectionists. A rough page can always be fixed later, she points out, but you can't do anything with a blank one, so the job is to get words down first and clean them up afterward. It's the same principle as the chair. Momentum beats waiting for the perfect sentence to show up. This is also why she pushes through a messy first draft instead of polishing as she goes, a habit that lets her finish books at a pace most writers never reach.
None of this is about writing badly on purpose. It's about refusing to let a draft stall over a sentence that can be repaired in an afternoon. Finished beats perfect. A book that exists on the page can be improved, and a book stuck in your head can't be touched. That mindset is a large part of why she can hand her editor several manuscripts a year, decade after decade. Her advice sounds unglamorous because the work is unglamorous, and she's never pretended otherwise. There's no waiting for lightning to strike, just a chair, a keyboard, and the hours she's willing to give them.
The advice grows straight out of how she actually works. See the full Nora Roberts writing routine for the daily version of it.
What You Can Steal
- Sit down before you feel ready. The chair does more for you than inspiration ever will.
- Stop negotiating with yourself. Cut the excuses and start the session.
- Let the first draft be bad. A rough page is fixable, a blank one isn't.
- Make discipline a daily choice. She recommits every working day, and so can you.