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I’ve always been interested in the daily routines of writers, ever since I decided to become one. The big question in a young writer’s life is “when do I get to call myself a writer?” When I get published? When I make some money? When I feel it suffuse my being? Writing is a craft, but it is also an art, and as an unfortunate side-effect of this dual status writers take many quasi-religious attitudes toward their work. My answer to this question is simple: you can call yourself a writer on any day when you did some actual work.

On other days, you are not a writer. On the days when I’m a writer, I wake up at seven, have breakfast, exercise for thirty minutes, and shower. I prepare something to drink (often tea) and sit down at my desk. Right now, I’m drinking hot chocolate. I write from 8-12, working on my main project (right now it’s a novel called The Crow Murders; this is also my PhD thesis, so it’s my “job” as a student to write this novel). Sometimes I dip into something else (like this article) although I try to keep myself from dipping. Often other tasks interrupt me, but I am trying to get better about leaving everything else until after noon, including e-mail. Everything. I am a worrier, but I try not to worry until noon, when I start freaking out about all the things I should have been doing when I was writing The Crow Murders instead.

I also try to stay off the Internet during working hours, my time-waster of choice. It’s difficult. There is always an excuse. Something that helps is a trick I read about in an article by Cory Doctorow: whenever I want to insert something I need to fact-check, like the proper spelling of a city or the circumference of Mars, I type “TK” and move on. This keeps me off the Internet. I can go back later on and plug all of that stuff in without breaking my writing flow. As Doctorow writes, “‘TK’ appears in very few English words . . . so a quick search through your document for ‘TK’ will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards.” I must admit that just now I couldn’t resist and I broke away from writing to look for that quote and the article too, when I should have just typed TK. I also wasted time downloading a copy of Doctorow’s book Content and reading the introduction when I should have been writing. (Doctorow gives most, if not all, of his books away for free on his website; I recommend Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.)

I listen to music almost all working day, except when I read, but when I write I try not to listen to anything too catchy or with which I could sing along. So I end up listening to instrumental music (like Glenn Gould or Sigur Rós) or heavy metal (right now I’m listening to Amon Amarth’s album With Oden on Our Side and Lamb of God’s album Wrath). I don’t need music to write, but I use it as something to give the world outside of the computer screen continuity, and I turn it up loud for a wall of sound that I don’t listen to so much as use to block out distracting noise (like the mail arriving, dogs barking, pipes groaning) and isolate myself inside the sound. I might make a playlist in my iTunes for a longer project, so while I’m working on The Crow Murders I sometimes click on my “Crow” playlist. The idea is to channel the tone or the energy of the music into the writing, but to be honest I doubt if it accomplishes anything.

I break for lunch and maybe read or walk from 12-1. From 1-4, I do “other stuff.” This “stuff” often includes other writing, such as freelance work I’ve taken on. I write a humour column called “Haiku Horoscopes” so the afternoon is when I’ll work on that. I might call or e-mail people (friends, publishers, magazines). I might catch up on my reading, or do research. I also try to do all my busywork in the afternoon, like going to the library, running errands, updating my website, cleaning the bathroom, more exercise, and so on. All the stuff that is there to interrupt the writing I try to put off until the afternoon, rather than putting the writing off. Sometimes it doesn’t work, or I can’t help myself, or I have a commitment, like I have to attend a meeting or teach a class before noon. In these instances I try to do all my errands in the morning and write in the afternoon, just reverse the order of my workday.

I try to “submit” something every workday. That might mean pitching ideas to magazines, sending or resending a manuscript to a press or journal (solicited or unsolicited), submitting work I’ve agreed to do in advance (like my horoscopes or a book review), or just proofreading something that’s already accepted. I might submit a job application (if I’m looking for work) or send a draft of something to my supervisor at the university. I don’t always meet this goal, but I meet it more often than I expected to when I started.

Sometimes weird things come up. The other day, I was derailed from everything because some idiot hacked my website. So I had to deal with that (as of this writing it’s still not all fixed). The next day I got a call from Coach House, accepting my poetry book Clockfire. Two different things that needed to be dealt with right away, one bad, one good. But in both instances the writing suffers, the book loses even if I win. I get a lot of calls from telemarketers, and it drives me crazy when they interrupt my work. (It just happened as I was rewriting that sentence.) I can’t just ignore a ringing phone so I bought a phone with a button I can press that makes the ringer silent. The problem is that sometimes I forget to turn the ringer back on when I’m done working and I miss all my calls for a day or two.

I am a firm believer in regular production over sporadic bursts, although sometimes outside pressures (a job, personal issues, visitors, etc.) get in the way of the work. It’s difficult to dedicate yourself to something without immediate financial rewards in a country where capitalist ideology is entrenched. Even if there is long-term potential for money it’s difficult, and in most cases there is not. So sometimes the work suffers, but I try to keep to this schedule as much as possible and I try to work on a large project (like a book) and also a small project (like this article) every day, so that I always have large projects advancing forward while I keep up a profile through regular production and publishing.

I view my writing as my work, whether I am writing an article and getting paid for it or crafting some poetry that won’t make me a dime. The money isn’t important; it’s the work that’s important. The work deserves respect. It’s important to me to be as professional as possible. I treat writing like I would treat carpentry. If I’m not going to work hard and enjoy the work, then I might as well quit, leave it to others and get my old job at the donut shop back.

As a writer, every day you can choose to work or not work. Even if you have a terrible job where you are in a factory for 14-hour shifts seven days a week, you can write on your lunch break or for ten minutes before you start the shift. I try to work as often as possible so that I can call myself a writer as often as possible. That was my goal as a child and it remains my goal today.