📝 Jennifer Egan’s Writing Routine

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Jennifer Egan has made a career out of taking literary risks. In an era where many authors find their niche and stay firmly within it, Egan moves restlessly from one form to the next—satire, historical fiction, gothic noir, even fiction told through PowerPoint. Her Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, stitched together thirteen interlocking stories across time, characters, and mediums, including a standout chapter rendered as a slideshow. In her follow-up, The Candy House, she picked up those narrative threads again, this time plumbing the eerie consequences of a future in which consciousness can be downloaded and shared.

But long before she was experimenting with epistolary tweet fiction or weaving Silicon Valley angst into speculative drama, Egan was just another young traveler backpacking through Europe in the 1980s—lonely, frightened, and unknowingly writing her way toward a calling. “There was a kind of clarity to being reduced to myself in this extreme way,” she told The Guardian. “Somehow in that extreme state, I wrote constantly; harrowing journal pages where I’m narrating my own panic. ‘I don’t understand why I can’t make it stop’—trying to understand what I was scared of.” That trip—and the journals it produced—set her on a path toward fiction.

Egan’s early career was defined by stylistic leaps between novels. After her debut, The Invisible Circus, she swerved into noir satire with Look at Me, then into gothic fiction with The Keep, before upending conventional form entirely with Goon Squad. The one throughline has been her refusal to settle. “I’m kind of looking for thrills, honestly,” she told The Guardian. “That’s what it’s about.” Each new book offers a creative repudiation of the last. “Whenever I finish a project, I want to do something totally different,” she said. “It’s a kind of ritual cleansing.”

That tendency to shed skins isn’t just about formal restlessness. It’s also a way of chasing something deeper—what she once called “the essential solitariness of humans.” Her characters are often caught between hyperconnectivity and private despair, especially in The Candy House, where a social media magnate invents a system that allows users to upload and share their memories. “We crave connection,” she told Rachel Barenbaum, “but the most defining aspect of the human experience is that we are fundamentally alone.”

Yet solitude, for Egan, isn’t something to fear. It’s a requirement. “I’m a pretty solitary person,” she said in a Goodreads interview. “Solitude is something that I live, that I need to do my work.” She speaks with clarity about that tension: how we want to be known, but also want to conceal; how technology enables sharing, but also performance; and how fiction, in the end, becomes a place where these contradictions can live side by side.

She is fascinated by secrets—by shame, by addiction, by the acts of concealment that run beneath ordinary life. She’s also deeply preoccupied with time: how it bends, how it leaks, how it rearranges identity. “I start with a time and a place,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s what I need to get started—and an intellectual question.” For Look at Me, that question was about image culture. For Goon Squad, it was time. For The Candy House, it was consciousness itself.

Still, for all the theory and structure behind her books, Egan’s process is surprisingly grounded. Her fiction begins not with outlines, but with mess—fragments on legal pads, ideas written longhand in near-illegible script. “The actual creation is always by hand, away from the computer,” she told WSJ. “My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around.” She accepts the badness of those first drafts as necessary. “Writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen,” she explained. “But then there will be good moments.”

In that, Egan is unusually self-permissive, willing to let writing be what it is before shaping it into something more. “The goal is to write regularly enough that it feels weird not to do it,” she said. “It’s very much like exercise in that way.”

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