A writer of my acquaintance once told me that she could only write when she was sitting at her desk, with her cup of tea, with the light entering the window and refracting at an exact angle through the crystal she’d hung there. She didn’t say what happened to her writing when the Earth continued to rotate. She also didn’t say what happened when there was no traveling sunbeam entering the crystal. We lived in a gray, rainy place.

I don’t mean to pick on her. Writing is difficult work, and if the adverbs and the world’s indifference don’t kill you, the solitude will. But if your plan is to write only when conditions are right…you are not going to write.

A routine is more important than whatever you hang in your window. But if you have a life, how the heck can you fit another routine inside it? I struggled with this issue for years, until I read “How I wrote a book in 15 minutes a day” by Julia Dahl.

Dahl believes that all of us can find 15 minutes each day to write, and when she wrote this essay she had a job, a baby, and a husband to contend with. Writing in micro-units is not a new idea—Brenda Ueland suggested it back in 1938 in If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. (Ueland suggested stealing the time from your day job, a suggestion I ran with for decades.)

It’s an idea that has been promoted in other fields as well:

Carving out 30 minutes a day to spend in the garden might be a challenge for you at first, especially if it’s winter and dark for much of the day. But it is amazing how quickly half an hour disappears when you get involved in something you enjoy. (Greg Loades, The 30-Minute Gardener)

I am not a morning person. Ask anyone who ever tried to manage me. Neither is Julia Dahl; she writes in the middle of the day. I am more the type of person to hits his stride after midnight. But I did it. I trained myself to wake up before 6am, an idea I once would’ve considered blasphemy. As soon as I had armed myself with coffee, music, headphones, and my lucky hoodie, I found I had no trouble writing for 15 minutes. 15 minutes was not intimidating at all. In fact, I often wrote for up to two hours, which is exactly what Dahl found when she tried this. Somehow her baby grew up. Somehow my wife contends. This experiment went so well that I often returned to my task later in the day.

That was in October 2024. It was tough sledding for me at first, especially at Thanksgiving, the holiday that throws most of us off the rails. But here I am on June 1, 2025, and the word count on my novel stands at 55,407.

My writing slowed in May as I plowed into the climax of my book, which I envisioned years ago. What I didn’t envision was how difficult it would be to write it so that readers would understand it. I feel like I’m driving a Norwegian icebreaker named Fraya through the Barents Sea.

Many mystery readers enjoy a police procedural, and when the characters and the story are sufficiently compelling, that book will escape genre boundaries. But if, in writing the current scene, I turn this book into a train procedural, no one will read it except for the people who real railroaders fondly refer to as Fucking Rail Nuts. And all the FRNs will do is complain that I got the gear wrong. I am not writing for middle-aged male rivet-counters. Who buys most of the books? The middle-aged women who hold the world together. Their only experience with trains might be the Polar Express or your man Thomas.

My point is that this is how you get things done, or this is how I get things done: One step at a time. Sometimes, very small steps. When the time comes to revise, I’ll set aside a bigger chunk of my day. But for now, and because I have no publisher waiting for me, I’ll take my little slice of dawn. The dogs will wait.