Kristin Hannah’s Writing Routine

“I can write in my backyard, by the fire, on the beach, on an airplane. It helps to be disciplined, but I also believe creativity follows discipline.”

Before she became one of the most widely read historical novelists in the world, Kristin Hannah was a law student with no plans to leave the profession. But life had other plans. She was in her third year of law school when her mother, dying of breast cancer, made a quiet, offhand prophecy: “Don’t worry, you’re going to be a writer.” It didn’t feel like a revelation at the time. Hannah was focused on surviving torts and final exams. But the idea lingered, and in her mother’s final months, they began to write a book together.

Her mother chose the genre—historical romance—and Hannah went along with it, scribbling ideas on a legal pad by the hospital bed. “It gave us something uplifting to talk about in the last days,” she said. The book was never published. Hannah later stuffed the draft into a box marked “Do Not Publish Even After Death.”