Rebecca Yarros doesn't write mornings, and she doesn't count words. Her routine is built around the hours her house actually goes quiet, and around a scene-by-scene method that looks nothing like the daily-word-count advice most writing guides hand out.
Night Shifts, Not Morning Pages
Yarros writes at night. She's explained the choice as coming from two directions at once: her ADHD, which makes late hours the time with the fewest distractions, and her family, since three of her six children are still at home and night is when the house actually goes quiet.
She doesn't set a daily word count either. Instead, she measures a session by whether the scene in front of her is finished.
I never set a word limit for my day because I write by scenes. I sit until the scene is done.
Rebecca Yarros, in an interview with writer Justin Cox
The discipline isn't in hitting a number. It's in sitting down at all, including on the days she doesn't want to, which she's said is the part that actually keeps a series like the Empyrean books moving between releases.
The Desk Itself
Because Yarros has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that affects her joints, her workspace is set up with that in mind. For the Empyrean series specifically, she's described writing with two monitors: the manuscript on one screen and a PDF of the previous book open on the other, so she can check herself against what she's already established instead of accidentally breaking her own world-building. She's also named noise-cancelling headphones and the focus app Brain.FM as tools she leans on to get into a session.
When a scene stalls, her go-to isn't forcing it. She's pointed to music, giving herself permission to step away, and sometimes talking through a plot problem out loud with another writer, not for notes, just to hear herself think. Read more in the full Rebecca Yarros writing routine.
Rebuilding Toward an Eight Hour Day
The routine above describes how Yarros works session to session, but the hours around it have shifted. During the stretch that produced Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm, she was regularly logging 12 to 15 hour days. She's since said she's trying to bring that down to something closer to eight hours a day, five days a week, in part because two of her children reached their senior year of high school and college in the same year, and she wanted to be present for that instead of buried in a draft.
What You Can Steal
- Find your actual quiet hours. Yarros writes at night because that's when her house goes quiet, not because mornings are supposedly sacred.
- Measure sessions by the scene, not the clock. A finished scene is a real unit of progress. A word count can leave you stopped mid-thought.
- Build a setup around what your body needs. Her dual-monitor, continuity-checking setup exists because of her EDS. Build yours around what actually helps you, not what looks right.
- Notice when the hours stop working. She's actively cutting hers down. A schedule that worked for one book isn't automatically the schedule to keep.