Pratchett's routine is easy to admire because it was so unglamorous. It didn't involve dawn rituals or month-long retreats. He built the books out of ordinary evenings, then out of ordinary full days, and he guarded the habit more fiercely than almost anything else in the working week.
Evenings Around a Day Job
For years Pratchett wrote in the cracks of a normal working life. His day job was press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, covering a corner of south-west England that took in three nuclear power stations, and the Discworld books got written after hours. The rule was easy to state and hard to keep. Come home, sit down, put 400 words on the page before the evening was allowed to properly begin. He did it after long days, on tired nights, on nights he'd rather have done anything else. The count ran the schedule, and the count didn't care how he felt.
That's the version of Pratchett most working writers should study, because it's the one that fit around a full week of something else. He wasn't waiting for a free year to open up. He was carving books out of the two or three hours that were actually his.
There was no ceremony to get started and no waiting for the mood to be right. The 400 words were a bill that came due every night, and he settled it before he did anything he'd rather do. Over a few years, bills like that quietly add up to a bookshelf.
Full-Time, at a Wall of Screens
In 1987, once Mort had done well enough, he quit the board and wrote for a living. The habit survived the change, but the daily minimum grew to a thousand words, with the best days running far past it. Over time his desk became a small legend among readers: six monitors stacked in two rows of three, the current novel parked dead centre, the other screens holding research, email, letters, and the general admin of being a famous author.
The setup looks like excess until you understand it. Only one screen was ever really for the novel. The rest kept the surrounding life, the fan mail, the correspondence, the reference, out of the book's way while still keeping it within reach, so he never had to close the story to deal with anything else. Asked why on earth he needed six screens, he answered the way you'd hope.
Because I don't have room for eight.
Terry Pratchett, on his six-monitor desk
One of those screens sometimes ran a video game he kept going on its own, which he called bubblegum for the brain. The play wasn't a guilty break from the work. His daughter Rhianna has said the game time, and the general pottering that went with it, mattered to the writing as much as the words did. The routine left deliberate room for his mind to drift off and come back with something useful.
What stayed constant across both phases was a working day organised around a number. Whether that number was 400 or 1,000, the day wasn't finished until it was met. That's the whole engine. Everything around it, the screens, the game, the correspondence within arm's reach, existed to protect the one activity that actually produced books, which was Pratchett sitting down and adding to the story.
He kept the habit going through illness, too. After a 2007 diagnosis of a rare early-onset form of Alzheimer's, he carried on working, more and more by dictation and speech software as it got harder, right up to his death in 2015. For the exact numbers behind the schedule, see the full Terry Pratchett writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Anchor the work to a count, not a clock. Pratchett measured a day by words, not by hours logged.
- Write in the time you actually have. His early books happened in evenings around a job.
- Build breaks into the routine. The wandering was part of the writing, not a break from it.
- Keep the desk set up for one job first. The current book stayed dead centre; everything else lived around the edges.