An Exclusive Look Inside My Writing Routine

Tom Cox

29 Jan 2026 — 6 min read

Me, writing a book

I normally wake just before 3am, get immediately into my tracksuit and go for a run around the bathroom, but not for long, since writing time is of the utmost value to me and I’m at the height of my intellectual powers early in the morning. If I’m going easy on myself I might grab a cup of coffee and a couple of houseplants from the living room and take them back to bed with me for a quarter of an hour or so. But after that it’s discipline time: no procrastination allowed through the doors. If you are like me you will discover that there’s a particular fizzing inspiration that needs to be bottled at this time of the day, lest it leak away. My own method is to squeeze it straight out of my pores into the jars from my fridge I save after I have scraped them clean of the chutneys and pestos they were made for. I then label these with my beloved Dymo Labelwriter 360. I am rather specific about the labelling because I place a high value on accuracy, and I always give the inspiration a star rating out of five. More recently I have started to permit half and quarter stars, which gives room for the greater nuance and self-criticism that I increasingly pride myself on. I have also taken the precaution of making the lettering bigger since the night in 1997 that Barbara Kingsolver stayed here, got up even earlier than me and, having mistaken the contents of one of the jars for homemade lemon curd, spread it liberally on three slices of sourdough then immediately went home and wrote The Poisonwood Bible.

So many authors will offer the advice “Write drunk, edit sober.” I would counter that by saying: remember everyone is made differently and do whatever works best for you. Lunchtime is generally the part of the day where I will crack open a couple of bottles of vodka, read over my morning’s work and inject it with some much-needed colour, mostly by boldly revolutionising the traditional role of the comma or trying to find needlessly complicated ways of conveying simplistic or overused ideas. Some writers find it impossible to listen to music while they work but I can happily say that I am not one of them. I find that, if I absorb the work of a composer enough times, its spirit and mood will quite literally enter my prose. I am not ashamed to aim well above the brow with this, mostly focussing on pieces that prioritise texture, sonic mastery and transcendental ambience over lyrics. The theme tune to the TV series Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds is a particular favourite right now.

One of editing’s most underrated skills is, however, knowing when to stop. 2pm is always the cut-off point for me and that’s non-negotiable. I generally spend the rest of the afternoon chilling out in my favourite local cafe, repairing the lever-operated siphons on their rest facilities, or, if I’m still hungry for inspiration, heading out to shops and listening to the conversations of strangers in an attempt to sprinkle the dialogue in my writing with extra gritty realism. I find that B&Q, with its focus on life's indispensables, its special warehouse intimacy and profusion of arguing couples is particularly rich hunting ground. You might remember the oft-celebrated line “Phil, do NOT just ignore me and piss off down the masonry aisle” from my 2008 novel The Empathy Of Owls. That in fact came near verbatim from a visit I made to the Sutton-In-Ashfield branch of the hardware chain. My one alteration was to change the name of the perpetrator to Phil since his real-life moniker, Goosepenis, didn’t seem to fit the character I’d spent the previous 850 pages painstakingly constructing, nor his day job as a neonatal nurse.

Sometimes I read about the intensely disciplined writing routines of rival authors and think, “Okay, super impressive, but who is taking the kids to school here? Who is doing the vacuuming and dusting? Who cooks your meals?” So, for total transparency, and to prevent anyone mistaking me for a combined artistic and domestic superbeing, I will pre-emptively answer each of these questions. My children were stolen during a holiday in Tunisia in 2019 and, although I have since tracked them down and been in touch with all eleven of them, they are adamant that they are doing perfectly fine there and assure me I don’t need to worry. I own a highly sophisticated waterproof robot vacuum cleaner who, with great patience and effort, over a number of hard yet rewarding years, I have taught to scale walls to heights of up to six feet. That leaves to me only the job of cleaning the few very lofty surfaces in the house and I find that I can wait to do that in the downtime between novels, as nobody ever really looks up there anyway and I don’t get many houseguests (Barbara Kingsolver was the most recent). I do all my own cooking with fresh ingredients from the local organic gardens of unsuspecting strangers and make my own water fresh from the tap, directly into the glass. Because this takes time and effort, my day is already so brimful, and thinking is scientifically proven to be the most tiring activity a person can do, I have long since accepted that evenings are not my Creative Time. I stagger into bed around 9pm, first being careful to move each of the houseplants I left under the duvet that morning, and soon find myself tangled in the reassuring drapery of sleep. Even in the deepest rest, though, my mind insists on telling itself the stories it thrives on, so I make sure I keep a notebook near the bed at all times. I hope I might write something in it one day.

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My latest book is Everything Will Swallow You. You can read extracts from it here and here. My other recent ones (all available from Blackwell's with free international delivery) are - in reverse order - 1983, Villager, Notebook (republished in April!), Ring The Hill, Help The Witch, 21st-Century Yokel, Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind and The Good, The Bad And The Furry.