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- 📝 Gillian Flynn’s Writing Routine
📝 Gillian Flynn’s Writing Routine
"Sit myself in my chair and threaten myself like a recalcitrant child: you will sit in this chair and you will not move until you get this scene written, missy."
Famous Writing Routines
March 13, 2025
Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.
Gillian Flynn is an American writer, best-known for her three novels, Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl, all of which have been adapted for film or television.
I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.
Before Gillian Flynn was a best-selling author, she was a journalist. She freelanced briefly at U.S. News & World Report, before being hired as a feature writer at Entertainment Weekly in 1998. After being promoted to a television critic, Flynn continued to write about films until she was fired 10 years later. The author has credited her background in journalism in helping her novelist career.
Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, both of Flynn’s parents were professors at Metropolitan Community College–Penn Valley. As a young girl, her father would regularly take her to watch horror movies, giving her a taste of the macabre that would later show up in her work.
“My dad was a film professor, and so I inherited his love of movies, and for me, especially scary movies,” she recalled in an interview with The Daily Beast. “We had an old top-loading VCR and I watched Psycho a million times. In the mirror, I obsessively practiced the final shot of Anthony Perkins: the Norman Bates smile right at the camera. I can still do it really well.”
Later, while she was working as an entertainment journalist, she began writing on the side, chipping away at her stories during the nights and weekends. Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects, was published in 2006 and won several awards from the Crime Writers’ Association, including the New Blood Fiction Dagger and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.
She continued to juggle working as a journalist and her writing, until the end of 2008 when she was laid off from Entertainment Weekly. It was around this time that Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places, was published, and Random House asked her for a follow-up. The author decided to go all-in as a full-time writer and began writing her next book, Gone Girl.
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