How Does a Professional Writer Spend a Workday?

Getting to Work

A professional writer will start her workday sitting down at the computer and reviewing the project she was in the middle of when she left off the night before. Some writers begin by revising the previous night's work, while some will jump right ahead into the next section and save the revisions for the end of the day. Writing is a solitary activity, and if the writer is working on a television show or for a newspaper, writing a novel or writing freelance articles, the writer will have some contact with outside sources but will usually end up taking the relevant information back to her desk and shaping it into a finished piece.

Slave to Words

Each writer structures his day differently. If the writer is working with a team of writers, the structure will be determined by the entity for which he is working. There may be script or story meetings that must be attended, where the character arcs, script and series outlines are hammered out in a group before each script is assigned to each writer. There may be editors to meet with who have notes to be incorporated into the writer's next draft. Freelancers spend hours researching their topics and interviewing people relevant to the story. Novelists continue work on their novel's outline, writing the next chapter in their novel or do a rewrite. A portion of each day is spent acquiring the next job, setting up the next writing project and reviewing all the various leads a writer has for future projects. In each writer's case, however, there is time spent imagining the current piece as a finished whole, and building the story from idea to outline to rough draft to polished draft. A writer is driven to find exactly the right words for everything. Conveying their feelings and information through the right carefully chosen words is their goal. Once written, there are many rewrites to perfect the finished product.

Working Late

If there is a deadline, a writer may stay up until all hours to get the project finished. A writer wants to go with the flow, once the flow of the words is happening, to maintain the rhythm when it is working well. If a writer is stuck, sometimes taking a short walk during the afternoon will release tension from sitting and focusing all day and help with writer's block. A writer will also spend some portion of the day reading. Reading for pleasure, reading current events, reading other work, reading their own work. At the end of a day, the writer will usually review what they have accomplished, or make a plan for the next morning's most important work. Some writers work until their creative juices are all dried up for the day, and don't like to review the work until the next morning to see it with a fresh mind.