Chai, and the first ninety minutes of the day

I have written two books in the time before my household wakes up. Here is exactly how, including the parts that do not sound good on Instagram.

People ask about my writing routine as if it were a secret. It is not. I get up at five-fifteen, make one cup of doodh patti in the same steel pan my mother used, and write until a quarter to seven, when my daughter's alarm goes off and the day belongs to everyone else. Ninety minutes, six days a week. Both of my books were written in those ninety minutes.

That is the whole secret, and it is not a very interesting one. What is interesting is everything that has to be true for it to work, and that is what I want to write down here, because most routine advice skips it.

Decide the night before

I never sit down not knowing what I will write. Before bed I write one sentence on an index card: the scene, the problem or the paragraph I will start with. Not a plan, just a door. At five-fifteen in the morning you do not have the energy to decide anything. If you have to choose, you will check your phone instead, and that is the end of your ninety minutes.

I do not open email, messages or the news until seven. This sounds obvious, and almost nobody does it. Every message is someone else's priority arriving in your head. Read one and your morning is no longer yours.

Lower the bar, then hold it

My target is 500 words or one revised page. On a good day I do 1,200. On a bad day I write 500 words I will delete next week. Both count. The novel was 94,000 words in its final draft; I wrote roughly 260,000 to get there. If you hold yourself to good words every morning, you will stop showing up. If you hold yourself to showing up, the good words come.

I write by hand for the first draft, in cheap exercise books from the stationer in Saddar, Rs 120 each. Typing it up later is my first revision. Writers I teach sometimes find this precious. It is the opposite: a notebook has no internet, no word count and no formatting to fiddle with, and it is the only tool I have found that does not try to help.

The chai matters too, more than it should. It is the signal. My body knows that the smell of cardamom at five-fifteen means we are writing now. Find your own signal and protect it: the same cup, the same chair, the same lamp. Routine is not discipline. It is making the decision so many times that you no longer have to make it.

If you have a job, a family, a commute and a story you have been carrying for years, ninety minutes is enough. It was enough for me. The hard part was never finding the time. It was deciding that the time was for this.