Stephen King (b. 1947)
King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quite before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30. Some days he finishes up as early as 11:30, but more often it takes him until about 1:30 to meet his goal. Then he has the afternoons and evenings free for naps, letters, reading, family, and Red Sox games on TV.
In his memoir On Writing, King compares fiction writing to “creative sleep,” and his writing routine to getting ready for bed each night:
Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule–in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk–exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night–six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight–so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey