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- 📝 Joseph Heller’s Writing Routine
📝 Joseph Heller’s Writing Routine
"It's not a matter of time. I set a realistic objective: how can I inch along to the next paragraph? Inching is what it is."
Famous Writing Routines
February 27, 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.
Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays, best-known for his 1961 satirical war novel, Catch-22.
I don’t understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that these ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon. The ideas come to me; I don’t produce them at will. They come to me in the course of a sort of controlled daydream, a directed reverie.
There are very few authors in history who have managed to create the type of impact that Joseph Heller did with their debut novel. After all, Catch-22, in addition to being a classic satirical war novel, had embedded itself as part of the English language, even for people who have never heard of the book.
Born on May 1, 1923 in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, Heller spent the early years of his life working in several different jobs — a blacksmith’s apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk — before he enlisted with the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942. As part of the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force, Heller flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier on the Italian Front; an experience which would go on to inspire much of his debut novel.
Back home, after the war, he studied English and spent two years teaching composition at Pennsylvania State University, before spending time as a copywriter at various advertising agencies — at one point in time he worked with fellow future author Mary Higgins Clark. On the side, he wrote.
Heller was first published in 1948 when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. A few years later, in 1953, the writer was lying in bed in his West Side apartment when the first line of what would later become Catch-22 came to him. From there, the story quickly formed in his mind and he began writing the manuscript — Heller “spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years” while balancing it with his copywriting job during the day.
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