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- 📝 Philip Roth’s Writing Routine
📝 Philip Roth’s Writing Routine
"Every sentence raises a problem, and essentially what you’re doing is connecting one sentence to the next."
Famous Writing Routines
February 02, 2024
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.
Philip Roth was an American novelist and short story writer, best-known for his book, Goodbye, Columbus, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral.
Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare. Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare. There’s a tremendous uncertainty that’s built into the profession, a sustained level of doubt that supports you in some way.
In 2012, after spending over 50 years as a writer, Philip Roth announced his retirement. The author’s 2010 book Nemesis – a story set in 1944 centred around the effect of the polio epidemic on a Newark Jewish community — was Roth’s last, although he didn’t know it at the time.”
“I didn’t know it would be my last book,” he recalled in a 2013 interview with NPR. “But I was months trying to start something new, and I wasn’t having any success, and it occurred to me I didn’t have to do this anymore. I’ve been doing it since about 1955 and so I gradually stopped writing, and found that it was very pleasant, and indeed I haven’t written for several years now.”
Retirement suited the author well. For someone who spent the past five decades writing six to seven days a week, not having to wake up and head to his desk to work was a burden lifted. “It was a constant mental activity, really,” he reflected. “And now I just listen, and it’s quite nice. I go home and go to sleep. It was on my shoulders all my life, so I really didn’t even know it was on my shoulders.”
For the acclaimed Roth, who was one of the most awarded authors of his time — throughout his career, he received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral — writing never got any easier, despite his immense success over time. The act of putting words on paper was positively tortuous for Roth.
Solving the problem of the book you’re writing always remains hard work, and your progress is snail-like. Even if you write a book in two years, sometimes you get a page a day, sometimes you get no pages. Every sentence raises a problem, and essentially what you’re doing is connecting one sentence to the next. And you write a sentence and you have to figure out what comes next or what doesn’t come next.
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Read the rest of Philip Roth’s writing routine here.
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