Routine Machine: How successful people improve their morning routine, daily habits and guarantee themselves results by Lamerton John

Author:Lamerton, John [Lamerton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Let's Tell Your Story Publishing
Published: 2019-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Stephen King has written 59 bestselling novels and more than 200 short stories. His books have sold more than 350million copies. But Stephen King doesn’t write books.

He just writes.

An average of ten pages per day, every day.

Stephen King is a Routine Machine. “If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind. I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace,” says King.

Over a three-month period, that simple “ten pages a day” routine amounts to a 180,000-word novel. King adds: “The first draft of a book – even a long one – should take no more than three months.” He feels that by dragging the process out beyond three months, the story starts to feel a little foreign and the writing process starts to feel like hard work.

Once the first draft is complete, King then takes an extended break of around six weeks to rest and recuperate and allow the story to “settle”. He can then revisit the draft with an open mind and fresh perspective, allowing him to spot glaring plot holes or inconsistent character traits more easily.

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees,” he says. “When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

The forest isn’t the only thing that Stephen King is looking at. He’s primed his environment by lining up lots and lots of “monkey see, monkey do” visual clues to help make his “ten pages a day” routine easy.

He says: “I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8.00 to 8.30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places.

The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.”

And what does one of the world’s most prolific writers do when he’s not writing? He reads, of course! When asked on Twitter recently how many books he reads in an average year, King replied: “About 80. So many books, so little time.”

In an average year, King reads more than ten million words. Ten pages a day sees him writing a further 720,000 words each and every year. And he’s been doing this for the last 45 years. That’s how a person who doesn’t write books sells 350million of them.

Sir Terry Pratchett also wrote every single day, but whereas Stephen King would focus on one novel for three months solid and then rest and recuperate, Pratchett would just keep on writing, often having several books on the go at any one time.

At the time of his death in 2015, Sir Terry had written more than 70 books, including 41 in the Discworld series. He averaged two books per year. He also left behind as many as ten incomplete, unpublished works on his computer.

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