📝 Colson Whitehead’s Writing Routine

“I don’t go out. I forget to eat. I sleep very little. And once it’s done, I veg out and play video games for six weeks.”

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Of the four people who have won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, only one has done it with back-to-back novels: Colson Whitehead. The first came in 2017 for The Underground Railroad, a genre-defying reimagining of slavery in which the titular railroad is rendered as a literal, subterranean train system.

The second came three years later, for The Nickel Boys, a stark and devastating account of abuse at a segregated reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida, based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys. That novel cemented Whitehead’s place as one of the most important American writers of his generation. It also nearly broke him.

Writing The Nickel Boys, Whitehead later said, was emotionally depleting. The last two months of the process left him depressed, “staring off into space” after each workday. He immersed himself in the stories of the boys who had lived and died at Dozier, studied photos of the school, and spent his days writing about cruelty, violence, and the failure of America to reckon with its own past. He never visited the site—by the time the characters came to life on the page, the idea of going revolted him.

That combination—historical rigor and creative freedom—is a hallmark of Whitehead’s work. His books jump across genres and tones: he’s written a satirical coming-of-age story (Sag Harbor), a post-apocalyptic zombie novel (Zone One), a comic noir crime caper (Harlem Shuffle), and a nonfiction book about the World Series of Poker (The Noble Hustle). He’s written fiction and criticism, horror and humor, fantasy and reportage. “You can do anything if you’re good enough,” he often says. The only rule he sets for himself is: don’t write the same book twice.

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