T.J. Klune's Writing Routine

T.J. Klune spent ten years as a claims adjuster at Geico before a company executive touring his Virginia office paid him what Klune has called "the most soul-crushing thing anybody can hear." After reviewing his work, the executive told him: "You are very good at insurance." Klune gave two months' notice and left in February 2016. Four years later, The House in the Cerulean Sea became a New York Times bestseller, won the Alex Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and turned him into one of the defining voices in cozy, found-family fantasy.

Klune has ADHD, and he talks about it as the organizing fact of his working life, not an aside. The routine that produces his books, gentle, generous stories about people building homes and families out of unlikely material, is itself built with almost engineering-grade structure: a fixed morning schedule and outlines that can run past 100,000 words before a single chapter of prose exists. The softness of the fiction and the rigor of the process behind it aren't in tension. One makes the other possible.

Ten Years, Then Two Months' Notice

Klune's path to full-time writing ran through a decade at a corporate insurance job, starting at Geico in 2006, while he wrote and published fiction on the side, not through an MFA program or a bidding war for a debut manuscript. His first novel, Bear, Otter, and the Kid, a contemporary drama about a found queer family, came out through an independent publisher in 2011 and sold well enough to convince him the second track, the writing one, might eventually become the main one.

It took a strange, small moment to force the decision. A senior executive toured his office and, after going over his claims performance, told him he was very good at insurance. Klune has described that compliment as the worst thing he'd ever heard, precisely because it was true and precisely because it wasn't what he wanted to be good at. He'd already saved close to a year's salary as a cushion. He gave two months' notice and left in February 2016, ten years almost to the point after he'd started.

That decade of overlap matters to how Klune talks about his craft now. He built the second career inside the margins of the first one, with no financial safety net or industry connections to fall back on, which may explain why the discipline in his current schedule reads less like an aesthetic choice and more like a habit that had to survive being squeezed into evenings and weekends for ten straight years.

The Strict Morning, By Necessity

Klune is open about having ADHD, and he frames his writing schedule as a direct response to it rather than a personal preference. "I keep to a pretty strict schedule," he's said. "Given I have ADHD, I need routine in order to function properly. I write first thing in the morning for four or five hours." After that block ends, the day shifts to marketing, publicity, and what he's called "an email inbox that never, ever empties no matter how long I spend on it."

The order matters as much as the hours. Klune protects the morning for fiction specifically because it's the part of the day least likely to get eaten by something else. Publicity and correspondence expand to fill whatever time is available to them, and by putting the writing first, he makes sure the one task he can't do at 4pm gets the hours when his attention is most reliable. He's called himself "extremely fortunate" to make a living doing it, but the schedule itself reads less like gratitude and more like maintenance: a structure built to keep working regardless of how he feels about the work on any given morning.

A 100,000-Word Outline for the Softest Books in the Room

It would be easy to assume that cozy fantasy, gentle stakes, found family, a general absence of villains, comes from a loose, unplanned process. Klune's actual method is close to the opposite. He's said plainly that he "plots out ridiculous amounts" because of his ADHD, and that the combined outlines for The House in the Cerulean Sea and its sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, ran to roughly 100,000 words before he considered either draft ready to write. That's close to the length of a finished novel, spent on preparation before a single chapter of prose exists.

The outlines don't stop at plot beats. Klune has said they include details with no direct function in the finished book: a character's birthday, their favorite food, small facts that exist purely so he knows the people he's writing well enough to keep them consistent across hundreds of pages. That level of preparation gives him room to be generous on the page precisely because the mechanics are already solved before drafting starts. He already knows who Arthur Parnassus is, in granular, practical detail, well before writing the scene, which is where that knowledge gets to relax into warmth instead of scrambling to stay coherent.

Klune has also described letting new ideas restructure a project mid-draft rather than forcing himself to stick to the original plan. If something better occurs to him partway through, his stated approach is to incorporate it, even if that means reworking earlier material. The heavy outline works as a floor solid enough to renovate on top of, not a cage, without the whole structure collapsing.

Writing What Wasn't There

Klune is open about being asexual and neurodivergent, and he's said directly that those experiences shape which characters end up on the page. He's built a career writing gay and queer protagonists in genres, fantasy, romance, found-family fiction, where those characters were historically scarce, and he's framed that choice as a response to their absence rather than a marketing strategy layered on afterward. The books read as generous partly because Klune is visibly writing toward people he didn't get to read as a kid himself.

That same directness shaped a harder chapter of his career. In 2018, after his publisher at the time dismissed a manuscript he cared about as "weird, even for TJ," Klune self-published The Bones Beneath My Skin rather than shelve it. He later discovered financial improprieties at that same publisher and pulled more than twenty of his titles from them, choosing to self-publish rather than leave his backlist somewhere he no longer trusted. It's the same instinct that shows up in his outlining: when something matters enough, Klune builds the structure himself instead of hoping someone else will hold it up for him.

Sources

Klune's account of leaving Geico, including the executive's comment and his decision to save a year's salary before quitting, comes from CNBC's 2024 profile "NYT bestselling author TJ Klune on finding success" and its syndicated NBC affiliate coverage. His statements on his ADHD-driven morning schedule are from his 2022 interview with The Nerd Daily, "Q&A: TJ Klune, Author of 'Heat Wave.'" His account of the roughly 100,000-word combined outline for The House in the Cerulean Sea and its sequel is from his interview with The Portalist. His Wikipedia entry and the Locus Magazine feature "TJ Klune: The Idea of Kindness" provide additional biographical and bibliographic detail. See also: TJ Klune on Wikipedia.

What You Can Steal

Klune's routine is proof that structure and warmth aren't opposites. Here's what actually transfers:

Protect the one time slot nothing else can touch. Klune's mornings belong to fiction before publicity, email, or anything else gets a claim on them. Whatever eats your attention last will always try to eat it first if you let it.

Build routine around what you actually need, not what sounds impressive. Klune's strict schedule exists because his ADHD requires it. Design your structure around your real constraints, not around what looks disciplined from the outside.

Over-plan the parts that would otherwise derail you. A 100,000-word outline sounds extreme until you realize it's what let Klune write warmth instead of scrambling for consistency. Solve your weak points before drafting, not during.

Save your runway before you jump. Klune banked close to a year's salary before he quit Geico, turning a leap of faith into a calculated decision.

Write toward what you didn't get to read. Klune's catalogue exists because he built the books he wished he'd had. That absence is a legitimate source of material in its own right.

The Routine at a Glance