I once heard a fellow author say out loud at a book event that a daily bout of writing is essential for anyone who wants to be an author, as if it were jogging or some other muscular exercise.

If it works for you, fine. It doesn’t work for me. Not only do I not have to write every day I deliberately avoid doing so. This is a job, one I do five days a week, Monday to Friday, from around eight in the morning to five in the afternoon. Weekends are for other things. I need a break from the book. I want to go back to it on Monday morning feeling fresh and enthusiastic.

That’s not to say I don’t think about the manuscript at weekends, or do some other work then. Research, scribbling down ideas, reading. But not writing. The Monday to Friday thing is a habit I’ve got into over the years, and I happen to think that habits, when it comes to work, are very good ideas.

Here’s how I discovered that.

For the first ten years of my writing career I did two jobs – as a journalist for the Sunday Times and as a writer trying to produce one book a year. This isn’t a situation I’d ever want to go back to. It was hard work, involving long hours, seven-day weeks and few holidays. But I had no choice. Writing novels didn’t pay the bills. It was either two jobs, give up the dream of being an author, or starve.

Most people will try to start off this way. You’d have to be pretty brave or foolish to abandon the day job and declare to the world you’re going to be a writer. Even if it works, you’re probably looking at a couple of years before you see much income, so best make sure there’s plenty of money in the bank.

Let’s assume you have to start your novel alongside another career. How do you make both work? You need a habit, a routine and you need to stick to it. Mine worked like this. I angled my way into freelance journalism after a staff career on national newspapers. Freelancing meant I controlled my time, not someone else. After a while it resulted in a contract with the Sunday Times which meant I could rely on guaranteed income each month in return for a guaranteed amount of work.

Once I got into that position the division between books and journalism almost defined itself. With fiction, I soon discovered I work best in the mornings. That’s when the creative side of me is most alive. So I gave over mornings to the novels. In the afternoons I worked on journalism. Five days a week. Seven when necessary. It was difficult at first. After a while it became second nature. And eventually the books became sufficiently popular that I could put journalism behind me for good.

It’s important to integrate the job – or chore if you like – of writing fully into your life. To allow that part of the day or night or both will be given over to working on a novel and nothing is going to get in the way.

We’re surrounded by so many distractions these days it’s easy to lose sight of priorities. For the writer there’s only one: keeping the work in progress alive and kicking, and growing organically a little each week. Anything that drags you away from that necessity is the enemy, a pitfall that can leave you a wannabe author for ever.

My distractions are different these days – emails from readers, events, promotions, interviews and the necessary task of communicating through the web. But they’re still distractions that need to be contained, pushed always into parts of the day when I would never be writing on the book.

Why are routines so essential? Simple. Because once you find the one that works, you no longer have to ask yourself, ‘Shall I write?’ You do it because that’s the time of day you devote to your novel.

Routines take away the conscious decision to hit the keyboard or not. If you’re as fundamentally lazy as I am, that’s a wonderful thing.