Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

One of the most accomplished and prolific sci-fi writers of the 20th century, over a nearly 60-year-long career, Ursula Le Guin produced an enormous body of literary work. 

Her work included, but was not limited to the six books in which she created the world of Earthsea and other acclaimed sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven.

“Some of us are Norman Mailer, but others of us are middle-aged Portland housewives.”

The quote is from a 1976 interview with science-fiction fanzine Luna Monthly. Though Le Guin may have thought of herself as one of the latter, “middle-aged Portland housewife” is hardly the way the rest of us would describe her and her prolific career shows her schedule worked great in her case.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.  

• 5:30 a.m. - wake up and lie there and think.
• 6:15 a.m. - get up and eat breakfast (lots).
• 7.15 a.m. - get to work writing, writing, writing.
• Noon - lunch.
• 1:00-3:00 p.m. - reading, music.
• 3:00-5:00 p.m. correspondence, maybe house cleaning.
• 5:00-8:00 p.m. make dinner and eat it.
• After 8:00 p.m. - I tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this.

This was Le Guin's daily schedule first appeared in an interview she gave in 1988 (and more recently reappeared in Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations).

Flaubert and Le Guin’s case (or in the case of a writer like Haruki Murakami - shown in the image -, who rises famously early and runs famously hard when working on a book). 

Their domestic lives, well-ordered to the point that an outside observer would find them boring, facilitated the creation of literature like none that had ever come before.