Matt Haig’s Writing Routine

“I go months without being able to write anything. Then, when I get an idea, I could be writing 5,000 words a day.”

For a long time, Matt Haig didn’t believe he would make it to 25. At 24, while living in Ibiza and struggling with undiagnosed depression and panic disorder, he nearly walked off a cliff. That moment—the lowest of his life—became the beginning of a long journey back to himself. It would also become, years later, the emotional core of his breakout memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, a hybrid of personal reflection and pop philosophy that turned him into one of Britain’s best-known mental health writers.

Haig is 49 now, a father of two living in a bright, sea-facing townhouse in Brighton. The bookshelves of his home reflect the remarkable arc of his career: novels about aliens and immortals, children’s stories about Father Christmas, aphoristic essays on anxiety, and his mega-selling novel The Midnight Library, which has sold nearly nine million copies. “From that moment onward,” his agent Clare Conville told The New York Times, “it stopped being ‘a book by Matt Haig’ and started to be ‘a Matt Haig book.’ His name became the reason you wanted to buy the book.”

That wasn’t always the case. Early in his career, Haig was writing bleak, literary fiction—what he now calls his “karaoke Ian McEwan” phase. He was published by Jonathan Cape, a storied imprint, and burdened by the sense that he had to live up to a particular kind of literary seriousness. It didn’t last. Cape dropped him after he submitted The Radleys, a vampire novel set in the suburbs. “I felt: ‘No one else will ever want me now. Maybe I should never have been a writer,’” he recalled in The Guardian.

The novel was eventually published by Canongate and became a quiet success, followed by The Humans, the book that gave Haig confidence in his voice—equal parts earnest, fantastical, and philosophical. “It didn’t become a bestseller,” he said, “but it was the first optimistic book I’d written.” Then came Reasons to Stay Alive, and with it, a new public identity: the mental health ambassador, the open-hearted self-help writer, the author people stopped on the street to thank. It was overwhelming. “There was a moment when I would have pressed a button not to have written it,” he admitted to The Guardian. “Certainly not now. But there was a time when it was a bit too much.”

Since then, Haig has written in nearly every genre imaginable. His stories often share an emotional signature: a sense that redemption is possible, that despair is survivable, and that the smallest moments—books, dogs, sunsets—might just save you. His fiction is often about second chances, sometimes literally: in The Midnight Library, the protagonist explores parallel lives in a cosmic library between life and death. In The Life Impossible, a widow inherits a house in Ibiza and rediscovers herself in a plot that gently detours into telepathy, talking animals, and cosmic restoration.

For Haig, these stories aren’t just wishful thinking. They’re survival mechanisms. “A big impetus in my writing is hope and believing in change,” he told Goodreads. “I want this to be a book where people don’t necessarily have to believe the events in this book could be possible, but to believe that a new world view is possible.”

Matt Haig’s daily writing routine