John Grisham's Morning Writing Routine Explained

John Grisham does not believe in fate. He believes in moments. Twice in his life, he says, a light switches on and nothing afterward looks the same. The first happened in a finance classroom at Mississippi State in 1975. Saigon was falling, the Vietnam War still hung over his generation, and a classmate who had actually served in combat tore into a professor who argued America should have fought harder (35:53). Grisham, twenty years old and drifting through a general business major, struck up a conversation with the veteran afterward. The older student told him to drop business and study accounting instead, because it would prepare him for law school. Grisham took the advice that same afternoon.

"There was this one golden moment when the light goes off in your life and something happens that you don't know really what it is." (John Grisham, 35:53)

The second golden moment arrived five years later, when Grisham was a thirty-year-old small-town lawyer hanging around his local courthouse, dreaming of becoming a big trial attorney. A judge cleared the courtroom one day so a ten or twelve year old girl could testify about being raped (42:48). Grisham, an officer of the court, stayed. He watched the child move through "every emotion known to the human soul" for an hour, then watched the defendant sit unmoved. Walking back through the empty courtroom later to retrieve a forgotten briefcase, Grisham imagined a different ending, one where a grieving father might take justice into his own hands. That image became A Time to Kill, the novel he had never planned to write.

Neither moment was engineered. Both arrived while Grisham was simply present, paying attention, doing the unglamorous work of showing up at a courthouse or a lecture hall. That distinction matters, because the rest of his story on Mel Robbins's podcast is not about luck. It is about what he did with five years of mornings afterward.

One Page, Every Day, Same Chair

Grisham started A Time to Kill on legal pads at age thirty, writing by hand before work. He took weeks off when motivation dipped, then discovered his wife Renee kept asking where the next chapter was. "I realized that you have to do a little bit every day, or it's not gonna get done," he says (15:53). The habit that followed has not changed in roughly forty years: wake at 5 a.m., sit at the same desk, drink the same coffee, and write at least one page before doing anything else (17:01).

"Write a page every day. Stop talking about it. Don't talk your book to death. Sit down and write a page every day." (John Grisham, 16:38)

The habit produced an early lesson in discipline, but not in craft. His first manuscript, typed out, ran almost 1,000 pages (18:45). His editor cut a third of it, and Grisham realized he had wasted roughly a year of writing on material that never belonged in the book. From then on, he adopted a rule borrowed from novelist John Irving: know the ending before writing the opening scene (19:25). He also learned to compress any new story idea into a thirty-second pitch, testing it on Renee before investing years in it (20:07). Writers who skip outlining, he says, tend to sprint through fifty thousand words on pure inspiration, then write themselves into a corner they cannot escape (19:46).

Before any of this, Grisham worked a string of jobs that had nothing to do with literature: laying asphalt, driving a bulldozer, selling underwear at a Memphis Sears, where he nearly got fired for refusing to accept a suspicious return (27:38). He does not frame these as wasted years. "Every job you ever have is material for the rest of your life," he says (27:11), and the itch to avoid that kind of work for good is part of what pushed him toward college and eventually law school.

One early setback left a deeper mark than any manual labor job. In a community college English class, after turning in a term paper, his professor accused him of plagiarism in a hallway, in front of no one who could vouch for him, with no way to prove his innocence (29:53). He received an F on the paper and the exam, and a D-minus for the course. He left the school. Years later, when he began writing novels about wrongful convictions, he traced some of that instinct back to the hallway. "It's very traumatic to be accused of something when you know you're innocent," he says (33:01), and that specific, searing unfairness became a recurring engine in his fiction and, eventually, in his advocacy work.

The Deal That Found Him

Grisham finished The Firm in 1989 and sent it to his agent, who was lukewarm and wanted changes Grisham refused to make. The manuscript sat, unsold, through the holidays. Then, without Grisham's knowledge, a Hollywood scout obtained a bootleg copy over Christmas break and circulated twenty-five photocopies to studios and production companies (55:06). By the time anyone thought to ask whether Grisham himself had been contacted, a bidding war was already underway between Paramount, Universal, and Disney's Touchstone. His agent called on a Sunday morning asking for authority to accept the highest offer, before Grisham even knew a number was involved (56:40). Paramount Pictures won with $600,000, more money than Grisham had earned in ten years of practicing law (57:25). The book deal, and the sales, followed.

It would be easy to read that sequence as pure chance. Grisham resists the word, even as he uses it. "I know you make your own luck," he says, "but I got a huge lucky break with The Firm" (54:14). What preceded the break was five years of 5 a.m. mornings, a flop of a debut novel, and 28 rejection letters for his early manuscripts (58:58). The lucky break found a writer who had already built the discipline to use it.

Grisham also describes a habit of pattern-matching himself against people further along than he was. As a third-year law student, he skipped class to watch two accomplished trial lawyers face off in a civil case, taking notes on how they worked a courtroom (62:35). Later, as a novelist, a young bookstore executive told him offhandedly that "the big guys come out every year," naming Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Robert Ludlum as novelists who published annually (60:56). Grisham adopted the same release cadence and has kept it for 35 years. He also describes standing in a Waldenbooks store, intimidated by the wall of bestsellers, and deliberately flipping the comparison: reading a mediocre popular novel and thinking, "I can beat this" (63:59). Looking up supplied the craft to chase. Looking sideways, at writers no better than he was, supplied the nerve.

That same restlessness eventually pulled him toward the Innocence Project, an organization working to overturn wrongful convictions. Grisham read an obituary about a man who came within five days of execution in Oklahoma despite being innocent, and the story would not leave him (68:56). He has spent twenty years since writing and advocating around wrongful convictions, work he says keeps him from sliding into despair about the state of the world. His method for staying functional is the same one that got him through five years of rejection letters: narrow the focus to what is within reach. "What can I do today to make it a little better?" he asks himself (71:22), rather than absorbing every grim headline at once.

The through-line across law school, underwear counters, courtroom benches, and bestseller lists is less about talent than about continuation. Grisham's golden moments were brief and unplanned. Everything that mattered afterward happened on ordinary mornings, one page at a time, for years before anyone outside his kitchen knew his name.