Kingsley Amis's Daily Routine

Kingsley Amis won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils in 1986 and made his name with the comic novel Lucky Jim. His writing routine starts from an honest premise: he hated getting up early. He told the Paris Review in 1975 that he lingered over breakfast and the papers, really staving off the typewriter.

Once he sat down, he could stop whenever he liked, and he hated afternoons enough to let himself off whatever got done in them. In the later day Mason Currey describes, he wrote from 9:30 AM, took a pub lunch at 1:00 PM and an armchair nap, then came back for a last session from 5:00 PM. Dinner, Scotch and water and television filled the evening. The younger Amis, who started later and in pyjamas, appears on Currey's Daily Routines blog.

It suits reluctant starters: people who dread the first hour of work and do better once they are in it. It also suits anyone whose afternoons were never productive anyway.

You get 5.5 hours of writing in 2 sittings, a real break in the middle and an evening with nothing left to do. Keep the shape and scale back the drinks, since a long lunch and a nap do the same job. The 9:30 AM start, the evening session and a day that repeats all week are our reading of the sources.