Elizabeth Strout’s Writing Routine

“I write first thing in the morning after having breakfast with my husband,” she told The Guardian. “Then I clear the table and sit down to work.”

Elizabeth Strout published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, at 43 years old. Before that, she spent years writing stories that were routinely rejected by literary magazines. She knew they weren’t quite good enough yet. “I understood that it wasn’t quite good enough, but I also understood that it was getting better,” she told Booth. When her work finally did get published, it didn’t take long for readers and critics to catch on. In 2009, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, a novel told through linked stories about a blunt, complicated woman living in small-town Maine.

Strout has built a career writing about the kind of people who rarely appear in fiction: aging, lonely, often invisible to others, quietly suffering. Her most well-known characters are Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, two very different women with two very different voices. Olive is sharp, unsentimental, and often harsh. Lucy is quiet, emotionally raw, and observant. What they share is emotional depth and interiority, a sense that their lives are shaped as much by silence and memory as by action.

Strout is especially skilled at capturing the internal weather of her characters. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, she writes about a woman reflecting on her troubled childhood and strained relationship with her mother. The story is told in fragments, moving back and forth in time, and it’s driven less by plot than by voice. Strout told the Women’s Prize that the novel began with scenes of a mother and daughter in a hospital room. “It just kept coming to me and unfolding to me as I heard her voice,” she said.

That voice-driven approach defines all of her work. Her books don’t follow traditional narrative structures. They unfold in episodes. Some of her novels, like Anything Is Possibleand Olive, Again, are structured as interconnected stories. Others, like Oh William! and Lucy by the Sea, feel like a series of personal reflections strung together. “I seldom write anything from beginning to end,” she told the Booker Prizes. “I will write in little scenes and then eventually they pull together. (Or they don’t.)”

Strout’s later books have returned again and again to Lucy Barton, a character she says is not autobiographical but deeply familiar. “As long as I can hang on to her voice I can go with her,” she said to the Booker Prizes. “She allows me to look at the really quiet parts of living.”

Her writing is shaped by deep observation and a commitment to honesty. Strout said she’s listened all her life. Hilary Mantel once praised her for being in “perfect attunement to the human condition.” Strout agreed. “I have listened all my life, listened and listened and listened,” she said. “Perhaps from that very commitment I have learned over the years to be in ‘perfect attunement.’”

Elizabeth Strout’s daily writing routine