The year I wrote every morning before the sun came up

I had wanted to be a person who wrote every day for about nine years before I became one. The gap between those two states was not willpower, or a better notebook, or any of the things I told myself. It was that I kept trying to write at the end of the day, when there was nothing left.

Why the evening never worked

The theory was sound enough. Finish work, eat, sit down at eight, write for an hour. I did this perhaps forty times in two years. What actually happened on the other six hundred evenings was that I sat down at eight, read the news instead, and went to bed feeling like someone who had failed at something small.

The problem was never the hour. It was that by eight in the evening I had spent all day making decisions, and writing a first draft is nothing but decisions — which word, which order, whether this paragraph earns its place. I was arriving at the desk already empty.

You cannot schedule discipline into a part of the day that has already been spent.

Half five, badly, every day

So I moved it. Alarm at 5.30, desk by 5.40, write until seven. No phone, no inbox, no reading anything first — that last rule turned out to matter more than the hour itself. The first three weeks were genuinely miserable and the writing was worse than the evening writing had been.

I kept a tally in the back of the notebook, because I did not trust my memory of how it was going. One line per morning: the date, roughly how many words, and a single word for how it felt.

Five hundred and twelve mornings later, the tally says something I did not expect. It was never the word count that moved. It was the proportion of mornings I described as easy: one in nine for the first three months, one in three by month eight, two in three by the end.

Six hundred words, give or take, the whole way through. The output was flat from the first month to the last. What changed was that it stopped costing me anything to produce it — and that took the better part of a year, which is roughly eleven months longer than any article about habits had led me to expect.

The three things that actually helped

Three, out of a great many things I tried.

1. Stopping mid-sentence. Finish the session with a line half-written. Tomorrow you sit down with somewhere to go instead of a blank page — the single most useful trick I know.
2. Laying it out the night before. Notebook open, pen on top, kettle filled. Six seconds of effort that removes every excuse available at 5.31am.
3. Permission for a bad morning. Two hundred words counts. Showing up and writing rubbish counts. Missing a day entirely counts, as long as it is one day.

What it cost

An hour and a half of sleep a night, for the first two months, until the bedtime moved on its own and stopped being a decision. Most weeknight evenings past ten, which I did not miss nearly as much as I expected to. And a certain amount of being insufferable about it at dinner parties, which I am told has not entirely passed.

The honest caveat: I live alone and I do not have children. Half of what made this possible was a quiet flat at half five in the morning, and that is not a thing you can decide to have. If your mornings already belong to somebody else, the hour is wrong for you and none of the rest of it will save it.

If you want to try it

Start with the tally, not the alarm. One week of writing down when you actually have energy — not when you think you should — will tell you more than any routine borrowed from someone else's life. Mine turned out to be the morning. Yours might be Sunday afternoons, and that counts too.