📝 Anne Tyler’s Writing Routine

“The way you write a novel is for the first 83 drafts you pretend that nobody is ever, ever going to read it.”

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Anne Tyler has spent most of her life writing about families. Over the course of 25 novels and six decades, she’s chronicled the messiness, tenderness, and quiet strangeness of ordinary domestic life—usually in Baltimore, always with precision and grace. Her stories are populated by characters who aren’t so much eccentric as deeply specific: a computer technician who measures his life in rigid routines, a lonely matriarch running a restaurant no one ever finishes a meal in, a self-help publisher haunted by the ghost of his wife.

She is, as John Updike once wrote, “wickedly good.” And perhaps because she’s been so consistently good for so long, she’s also become somewhat invisible. “I worry that I’m taken for granted,” she told the New York Times in an interview, “because I don’t make a fuss.”

Tyler doesn’t do book tours. She rarely gives interviews. For most of her career, she avoided publicity altogether, preferring the company of her characters to the demands of the literary world. “Any time I talk about writing,” she explained in a conversation with the Irish Times, “then I can’t do any writing for the next bit after that. My mental image is that the Writing Elf goes off in a sulk.”

And yet, she keeps going. At 83, Tyler still writes every weekday morning, still fills unlined pages with neat longhand script, still listens closely for the voices of her characters. “There’s something addictive,” she said in a 2025 interview with the New York Times, “about leading another life at the same time you’re living your own.”

She does not keep copies of her books in the house. She orders them on Kindle if she needs to check something. When asked why, she replied plainly: “Why would I bother?”

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