Taylor Jenkins Reid's advice to other writers tracks pretty closely to how she actually works. It's less about tricks and more about discipline: show up on a schedule, resist the urge to over-plan, and ground your fiction in something real before you start inventing.

The Direct Answer
Treat writing like a job with regular hours, skip the outline, and research the real world before inventing your characters.
She's said outlining is a common mistake, and that starting with a character in a moral dilemma tends to produce a truer story than plotting everything out first.

Show Up Whether or Not You Feel Like It

The clearest piece of advice running through Reid's interviews is about discipline over inspiration. She's talked about working a regular weekday schedule and sitting down at the desk the way anyone would show up for a job, rather than waiting until she feels ready or inspired. For a writer with as many long, structurally complicated novels as she has out, that consistency is doing a lot of the actual work. Inspiration can get you a scene. A schedule gets you a finished book.

Skip the Outline

Reid has been direct about this one: she thinks outlining is one of the biggest mistakes writers make. Her own approach starts with a character and a moral dilemma, a person placed into a genuinely hard situation, and then she writes forward to see how they respond rather than deciding the plot in advance. Her advice for other writers leans the same way, favoring discovery over a rigid map, on the idea that a story worked out honestly on the page tends to feel more alive than one that was fully decided before the writing began.

That doesn't mean her books are unstructured. Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo are both built on careful, deliberate architecture. The structure just seems to come later, in revision, once she can see the shape of the story she found by writing it first.

Do the Research Before You Invent

The other advice that runs through how she talks about her own work is about grounding. Before she creates a fictional figure, she wants to know who really existed in that world, whether that's classic Hollywood, a professional tennis tour, or a NASA mission. She's brought in real experts, like a retired NASA flight director for Atmosphere, and leaned on real research materials, like Karina Longworth's Hollywood history podcast for Evelyn Hugo and pro-tennis memoirs for Carrie Soto Is Back. The advice underneath all of that is simple: invented characters land harder when the world around them checks out. You can see how that research feeds her actual process in the full Taylor Jenkins Reid writing routine.

Follow the Character You're Most Curious About

A throughline across Reid's novels, from Evelyn Hugo to Daisy Jones to Carrie Soto, is a fascination with ambitious women making messy, self-interested choices instead of easy or likable ones. That interest in morally complicated characters seems to guide her advice as much as any technical habit does. Pick the character you're most curious about, not the one who is easiest to root for, and let their contradictions drive the story instead of smoothing them out for the reader's comfort.

What You Can Steal