📝 Richard Powers’ Writing Routine

"For most of my life, the ritual was to get to work at seven or eight in the morning and work for five or six hours, until I had 1,000 words I was proud of."

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.

Richard Powers is an American author, best-known for his novel, The Echo Maker, which won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Attend to your story; sit and stare at it on the screen; write or don’t write, but be there, your mind clear of any other distractions, preferably all at one stretch, for several hours a day, five days a week, month after month after month, if you’d like to try to write a long piece of fiction.

Richard Powers | North Central Review

Richard Powers was taking a walk in the woods one day. The American novelist and university professor was in California where he was teaching a course on creative writing at Stanford. Surrounded by tech behemoths like Google, Apple, Intel, HP, Facebook, and Netflix, Powers would head up to the Santa Cruz mountains whenever he wanted to disconnect and be amongst nature. It was during one of those trips that he was inspired to write his 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory.

“When I came down from the mountains that day, I began to read,” Powers said in an interview with PBS. “I read how 98 percent of the old-growth redwood forests had been cut down, and that figure would have been close to 100 percent, if not for ordinary, non-political people who, only a few years ago, decided that 98 percent was enough.”

After a renowned writing career dating back to the 1980s, where he wrote stories that wove in themes from science and technology, Powers was obsessed about these trees. He went on to read over 120 books and moved to the Great Smoky Mountains for his research for Overstory.

Over the next several years, Powers would continue to work on the novel, writing and re-writing the drafts. He would have spent longer on the book had it not been for Donald Trump winning the 2016 US presidential election.

“When the Trump administration began overnight to undo a half century of hard-won, bipartisan environmental protection, even opening some of the last few remnants of public old-growth forest to logging, I knew it was time to publish the book,” Powers revealed. “I would happily have kept working on it for much longer, otherwise.”

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