Why Joan Didion’s Daily Routine Always Started and Ended With a Drink

There are some writers who start the day with a cup of black coffee, and others who flip through a few chapters of a favorite book to get the ball rolling. No matter how deliberate—or dysfunctional—the means, every literary mind, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, eventually finds its way to the blank page.

Joan Didion’s daily routine definitely fell into the latter camp.

The California native dissected American culture with a characteristically sharp, detached eye in modern classics like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking. But behind the iconic, oversized sunglasses and cool demeanor was a writer whose approach to her work was as disciplined as it was eccentric. And with that discipline came a set of peculiar rituals—including a pair of liquid bookends that shaped her entire day.

Here are four of the most unconventional habits that reveal how Didion prepared to look at the world before, during, and after putting pen to paper.

Cracking Open a Cold One

Whether she was waking up from a deep slumber in her Malibu dreamhouse or a restless night in her New York City apartment, Didion’s first stop in the morning was the fridge. Like clockwork, the journalist would crack open a crisp, ice-cold Coke to kickstart her day, often paired with a side of salted almonds, a cigarette, and the sweet sound of silence. Then, as she drained the last few drops of soda—always specifying "regular Coca-Cola, not Diet"—Didion would start to hammer away at her typewriter, those first few lines fueled by that potent combination of caffeine and sugar.

The Retyping Ritual

“Stage fright,” “writer’s block,” “performance anxiety”—three names for one underlying feeling of fear that surfaces before the work even begins. Didion’s seemingly counterintuitive solution? Retype, revise, repeat. She didn’t just pick up where she left off the day before; instead, she began every writing session by retyping everything she had composed the previous day from the very beginning.

This wasn’t just self-imposed busy work; it was a clever way to trick her brain into a rhythm. By physically forcing her fingers to re-create the sentences, idiosyncrasies, and cadences she had already established, Didion found an almost foolproof way to coax her distinctive voice out of hiding. “I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning,” she once admitted in an interview. “It gets me past that blank terror.”

The Pre-Dinner Pour

“Write drunk, edit sober” is one of the most famous aphorisms associated with the craft. But while literary legends like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald notoriously let booze bleed into their writing hours, Didion did the opposite.

For her, alcohol wasn't a creative fuel—it was a psychological palate cleanser. When the writing day finally came to a close, Didion implemented a not-so-dry decompression ritual to detach from her work and eventually put on her editor hat.

She found that necessary distance at the bottom of a glass, usually filled with bourbon on the rocks or white wine. "I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day," she once explained. "It removes me from the pages." The pre-dinner pour allowed her to step back and view and edit her work with an unbiased eye. Once she jotted down notes for the next morning, she could officially leave the page behind and glide into the night.

Bedtime Stories

For most writers, putting a manuscript to bed is a metaphor. For Didion, it was a literal sleeping arrangement. When she was nearing the finish line of a major project, she didn't just leave her work on the desk overnight—she brought it under the covers.

"Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it," she once revealed. "Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.”

Sharing a room with her pages meant her brain never stopped working on the book, even in her sleep. It’s the perfect final quirk for a routine built on crisp sodas, relentless retyping, and evening unwinding. More than anything, it shows that Didion didn’t just work on her stories; she lived within them.

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