A lot of us carry around a picture of what writing a book looks like: a long, quiet day, a full pot of coffee, maybe a cabin somewhere, and chapters pouring out. I've never written that way. Most of what I write, including the pages of The Immortal Child I'm working on now, gets done in short sessions at night, after the day has been put away.
For a long time I thought of that as a compromise. Now I think it's simply how a lot of books get written by people with full lives. Here's what those nights have taught me.
Small sessions add up
A short session can feel like it doesn't count. One scene, a few paragraphs, sometimes a single conversation between two characters. But a novel is made of exactly those pieces. When I look back over a month of nights, the pages are there, and they got there one small sitting at a time.
The trick is to stop measuring each night against the whole book. The question isn't "Did I finish?" It's "Did I move it forward?"
Leave yourself a door
The hardest part of a short session is the first five minutes. If I sit down not knowing where I am, I can spend the whole night just finding my way back in.
So I try to end each night knowing what happens next. Sometimes it's a note at the bottom of the page, sometimes it's half a sentence I deliberately leave unfinished. It's old advice, and it works: the next night starts with a door already open.
Let the world hold your place
Worldbuilding helps more than I expected. Years of building worlds for Dungeons & Dragons taught me that once a place is solid, it does some of the work for you. When I sit down at night, I'm not inventing a city from nothing. The bazaar of Sunat Kabisa and its great tiled square are already there, waiting. Lately my nights have been spent in that bazaar with Omar, a young street musician who can charm almost anyone, and stepping back into his world feels less like starting over and more like coming home.
Protect momentum, not perfection
Night pages are drafts, and some of them are rough. I let them be rough. If I stop to polish every line, the next session starts with a chore instead of a story. Revision comes later, with fresher eyes. The nightly job is just to keep the story moving.
Some nights are quiet
Not every night produces much. Some nights are a paragraph and a note to myself, and that's fine. A writing habit isn't a streak you break; it's a place you keep coming back to. The quiet nights keep the door open for the good ones.
If you're trying this yourself
If you're writing around a busy life, here's what I'd pass along:
- Pick a regular time, even a short one, and treat it as yours.
- End each session knowing the next step.
- Aim for a scene, not a chapter.
- Let rough drafts be rough.
- Count the nights you showed up, not just the words.
A book written in small pieces is still a book. It just arrives a little at a time, the way most good things do.
Thanks for reading. If you'd like to see where this world began, The Unfettered Child is the first book, and you can find it on my Amazon author page. I also share writing-night updates on Facebook and X.
— Michael