A Day in the Life of a Writer Who Never Really Stops Writing

I don’t have a writing room.

I don’t have a beautiful desk facing a window, with a cup of coffee sitting beside my laptop and soft music playing in the background.

Honestly, I don’t have a perfectly organized writing routine either.

I have a job.

I have so many responsibilities.

I have laundry.

I have messages I haven’t replied to in days. 

I have ideas arriving at the most inconvenient times and somewhere in the middle of all that, I write.

That is what a day in the life of this writer looks like.

6:00 a.m. - The day begins before the writing does

My alarm goes off, and for a few seconds, I negotiate with myself.

Five more minutes please!

Sometimes I win but other times, the alarm wins.

Eventually, I get up.

There is nothing particularly romantic about my mornings. I get ready, think about what needs to be done that day, and prepare myself for work.

Somewhere between brushing my teeth, getting dressed, and leaving the house, something strange often happens.

An idea appears.

Not really a complete idea.

Just a sentence maybe, a question or a thought that makes me stop for a second.

Sometimes, it is something I heard someone say or just something I experienced.

Sometimes, it is a completely random thought that refuses to leave me alone.

I have a loud mind and I have learned one thing about ideas:

If you tell yourself you’ll remember it later, you probably won’t. I don’t.

So I grab my phone and type it into my notes.

It might be terrible and never become an article.

But, I save it anyway because writers are basically collectors of things that other people walk past.

These could be a conversation, a facial expression, a strange encounter, a painful experience, a sentence overheard on a train or a thought I got at 7:13am in the morning for absolutely no reason.

I collect them all.

The commute is part of my writing room

One of my favorite things about writing is that I don’t have to be sitting at my laptop to be writing.

Sometimes, I’m on the train.

Sometimes, I’m just walking.

Sometimes, I’m staring out of a window in a cafe.

Sometimes, I’m doing absolutely nothing and my brain is doing everything.

Living in Japan has given me plenty to observe.

There are cultural differences everywhere.

The way people behave.

The silence on trains.

The whole architecture.

The tiny apartments.

The rules and routines.

The things that seem completely normal to everyone around me but fascinating to me.

Being an outsider in a place can make ordinary things look extraordinary and writers need that.

So while other people might simply see a train ride, I might see a story.

While someone else sees an old house, I might start wondering about the person who lived there.

While someone else hears a casual comment, I might spend the next three hours thinking about what it really reveals about human nature.

This is one of the strange things about being a writer.

You don’t really get to turn it off.

During work, I am not a writer

At work, I have another identity.

I am a teacher.

There are children to teach, routines to follow, conversations to have, things to organize and a hundred little moments that require my attention.

Writing has to wait.

But, it doesn’t completely disappear.

Sometimes an interesting moment happens during the day and I think:

That would make a great story.

Then I mentally put it in a little box.

I’ll come back to it later.

Of course, sometimes later comes and I’ve completely forgotten what the brilliant idea was.

That is also part of being a writer.

Apparently, creativity and memory do not always have a healthy relationship.

6:00 p.m. - The other shift begins

When work ends, some people switch off.

I don’t always know how.

I go home, eat, rest for a little while, check my phone and eventually open my laptop and this is where my second day begins.

The writer’s day.

Sometimes, I know exactly what I’m going to write.

Those are the good days.

I open the document and the words come.

Other days? Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I stare at the screen like it personally offended me.

I write a sentence, delete it.

Write another and delete that too.

I change the title and change it again.

Open another article and get distracted.

Check something on my phone.

Return to the article.

Wonder why I ever decided to become a writer in the first place.

Then, somehow, I write.

I don’t always write because I have something to say

Sometimes, I write because I am trying to understand something.

That’s probably the biggest reason I keep coming back to writing.

Writing helps me think.

There are things I don’t completely understand until I put them into words.

A feeling becomes clearer.

An experience starts making more sense.

A question becomes more interesting.

Sometimes, I begin an article thinking I know exactly what I believe.

By the end, I’ve changed my mind.

That is one of my favorite things about writing.

The page doesn’t always give you answer, at least, not completely.

Sometimes it gives you better questions.

10:00 p.m. - The dangerous hour

This is when I tell myself:

I’ll just finish this one paragraph.

That is a lie.

One paragraph becomes another.

Then I think of a better opening and realize the conclusion doesn’t work.

Then I start researching something.

Then I find another idea and write it down.

Suddenly, it is much later than I thought and tomorrow morning is getting closer.

Spending so many hours thinking gets me very exhausted but also satisfied because something that existed only as a thought has now taken full form.

A story has been born.

I don’t write every day

This might sound strange for a writer, but I don’t believe writing has to mean producing an article every single day.

Sometimes, the writing is happening silently.

I’m living, observing, thinking, questioning, learning and experiencing things.

All of that eventually becomes material.

A writer’s life isn’t just the hours spent typing.

Sometimes the most important part of writing happens when I’m nowhere near my keyboard.

I am simply living life enough to have something worth saying.

And then, there is publishing...

Publishing is its own little emotional roller coaster.

You spend hours writing something.

You edit it.

You change the headline.

You choose an image.

You read it again.

You find a typo you somehow missed about seventeen times.

You fix it.

You publish.

And then…

Silence.

No applause, no music.

Just your article sitting there.

Waiting.

Sometimes people read it.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes one stranger leaves a comment that makes the entire process worthwhile.

And sometimes an article you thought would disappear suddenly finds readers.

That’s the strange beauty of writing online.

You never really know where your words will travel.

Midnight  - Time to stop

Eventually, I close the laptop.

I tell myself I’m done.

But the truth is, I’m rarely completely done.

There is usually another idea waiting.

Another story, another question.

Another sentence I want to write down before I forget it.

So I put my phone beside my bed.

Sometimes, just as I’m about to fall asleep, my brain decides that this is the perfect time to solve the opening paragraph I’ve been struggling with all evening.

Of course.

Apparently, writers don’t have an off switch.

I reach for my phone.

Type the sentence.

Save it.

And finally go to sleep.

Until tomorrow.

So, what is a day in the life of this writer?

It isn’t glamorous at all.

It isn’t perfectly structured.

It doesn’t look like the photographs of writers sitting peacefully beside giant windows with notebooks and coffee.

It looks more like ordinary life.

Work.

Commuting.

People.

Responsibilities.

Random thoughts.

Late nights.

Unfinished drafts.

Deleted paragraphs.

New ideas.

And a persistent feeling that somewhere inside all these ordinary moments, there is a story waiting to be told.

I think that’s why I write.

Not because I have everything figured out.

Quite the opposite.

I write because I don’t.

Writing gives me a place to put the questions.

A place to examine the things I experience.

A place to turn confusion into words.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, those words will help someone else understand something about their own life too.

So if you ask me what a typical day looks like for a writer, I would probably give you a disappointing answer.

There is no typical day.

There is only life.

And then there is the writer inside me, quietly taking notes.

Because every day gives me something.

A thought.

A conversation.

A mistake.

A lesson.

A question.

A story.

And eventually, when the world gets quiet and I open my laptop, I try to turn those little pieces of life into something worth reading.

That is my day in the life of a writer.

I don’t simply write stories.

I live them first.