📝 Jayne Anne Phillips’ Writing Routine

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Jayne Anne Phillips didn’t plan on writing a Civil War novel. But over time, the idea kept pulling at her. She’d already written about Vietnam in Machine Dreams, and Korea in Lark and Termite. The American Civil War felt like the missing piece. Years of research followed—war diaries, asylum records, photographs, battlefield visits—and eventually, Night Watch took shape. When it was published in 2023, ten years after her last novel, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

That slow, immersive approach has defined Phillips’s career. She doesn’t write fast, and she doesn’t work from outlines. Her novels begin with a voice, a sentence, a fragment of atmosphere—and she writes her way forward, sentence by sentence, until something takes hold. “I compose line by line, as a poet does,” she’s said. “I never know what the final arc of a novel is. I’m really inside the material.”

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