Like many people who aspire to be writers, I share the pastime of reading about the routines of successful writers—a popular pastime, as shown by many online articles and books on the topic (such as in the references below).

In his recent book about writing, Novelist as a Vocation, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami describes his routine, which belongs to the popular school of “write every day” but adds the more novel element of “write the same amount every day”:

When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day. … On days where I want to write more, I still stop after ten pages; when I don’t feel like writing, I force myself to somehow fulfill my quota.

He goes on to explain that if he wrote too much one day, he might not write anything the next, so he prefers to maintain steady output: “I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I’m working on a time card.” (He doesn’t write for a fixed amount of time, though, as is also common.)

This he regards as controversial, being contrary to many people’s—and many artists’—impressions of how an artist should work. “But why must a novelist be an artist?” he asks on the next page. “Who made the rule? No one, right? So why not write in whatever way is most natural to........

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