Every year, I do a 24 hour writing marathon. I write for twenty four hours straight and try to beat last year’s word count. I’ve done it four times and failed once. Here’s my schedule, survival tips, how to stay awake and productive, plus a cheat sheet for how to build creative stamina all year round.
My 24 hour writing marathon started as kind of a joke, and now it’s something I’ve learned a lot from and want to teach you about. This is an informal guide and a living document that I’ll keep updating as I keep learning.
Obviously these tips may help you if you’re trying to stay awake (and productive!) for a 24-hour marathon, but I also hope they’ll help you write a non-ridiculous-amount on a non-marathon writing day. You don’t have to do a 24 Hour Writing Marathon to apply these tips for creative stamina, or to benefit from setting up a joyful, challenging, unusual day that defines you as a writer. Whether your peak writing stamina capacity is 90 minutes of focus or an entire round-the-clock day, I hope this 5-minute read helps it feel more possible (and more exciting) to plan the best day you can have as a writer.
Scroll down to see: My 24 Hour Writing Marathon Schedule, Writing Marathon Prep Tips, Why Writing Marathons Are Bad, How to Build Creative Stamina, and ways to Join a 24 Hour Writing Marathon with Me (Free, obvi!)
My 24 Hour Writing Marathon Schedule
Around 7am I wake up (no alarm clock) and have an unhurried morning. At 10am, I start writing. I write for 50 minutes and then take 10 minutes away from the desk to stretch, eat, drink, do a bathroom trip, and/or shake out my hands so I don’t get cramps or carpal tunnel. At the start of the hour, I start the cycle again. 50 minutes of writing, and a 10 minute break. I do this twenty four times in a row.
My marathon day is simple, because the less I have to think about structure or planning, the more brain capacity I have for writing.
Writing Marathon Prep Tips
* SLEEP. Get sleep. Don’t start tired. You’re about to be up all night tonight. You need a full tank of brains. Don’t show up half-empty.
* CAFFEINE. Minimal, moderate, steady. Don’t chug a red bull. Don’t chug anything. Sip, alternate your soda or coffee or tea with actual water, and don’t give yourself the flying jitters. Your marathon adrenaline and dopamine will give you more energy than usual, so you might even need less coffee than on a normal day.
* FOOD. Prep your space with simple, available sources of protein. I’m talking protein shakes, yogurt, anything that comes in doses of less than 300 calories and is quick to consume with little-to-no prep or cleanup. Your breaks are only ten minutes long and you won’t have time for a food coma, so think “snacks” rather than meals. This doesn’t mean you need to eat junk, but you can have a little junk as a treat if you want. It’s great to have chopped veggies, and I also like to have a bag of disgustingly spicy snacks chips on hand as a last resort, in case I need to regulate my nervous system with comfort junk because writing got intense. It’s good to have some instant carbohydrate fuel (ice cream, muffins, whatever you’re into) available to keep you going if you hit an energy wall, but just like with caffeine, you want to sip not chug. Keep your nutrition minimal, moderate, and steady.
* MOVE YOUR MIND. You can do a whole marathon on one writing project (a single story or screenplay or book, etc) but for my brain at least, I have learned it goes a lot better if I let myself hop around and work on different pieces of the project, rather than a linear start-to-finish path. I suspect I’m not alone in this. At different points in the marathon you’ll likely be capable of different kinds of work. You probably can’t predict these in advance. Listen to your brain and body along the way, and do what feels doable in each hour, whether that’s outlining or drafting or zooming in and out and then jumping right into the messy middle. If you try to move in one linear line from start to finish, you might slow down and sometimes get stuck, and that can crash your marathon. If you keep moving at all costs, you’ll make more overall progress in your 24 hours. Some hours you’ll probably be in great shape to outline or see the big picture. Other hours might have easy-flowing words where it feels like lightning has struck and you’re able to babble out a huge chunk of what you’re writing. A few hours may feel slow but kind of laser-precise, so might want to give yourself permission to get obsessed with slow word-by-word drafting of a single vital scene. It’s helpful to have a general plan (“I want to make big progress on my screenplay”), but it’s great to stay flexible as you discover what you are (and are not!) capable of along the way. I think this is true of your writing career in general, but it’s especially vivid during a marathon, when your energy might ebb and flow more dramatically.
* MOVE YOUR BODY. It’s good to move a little during your break (I’ve been caught dancing to “HANG WITH ME” by Robyn) but you don’t have to work out or hit a yoga mat. I do suggest that you occasionally change the position in which you do your actual writing. Sit for a while, switch to a standing desk, lay on the floor with a notebook, go from the kitchen table to the office to the laundry room, pace back and forth in front of a whiteboard for a while, or whatever is available to you. If you write every hour for twenty four hours in the same place in the same body position, you are doing this the hard way (and lowkey murdering your hip flexors and wrist tendons.) Change keyboards, change tools, change furniture, change heights. Switching postures will vary the places your body holds tension. You’ll probably never be tension-free during your writing time, but if you can rotate where the tension is living, you’ve got a huge advantage.
* COMMUNITY. You know how people run marathons? In PACKS. It makes it easier for your body to do something when it’s surrounded by role models who are doing it too. My best marathons have been the once where I did them with a buddy, either in person or online. I usually say something like “I’m going to do this for 24 hours, you can drop in as often or whenever you want, and stay as long as you like.” It’s been beautiful to give friends and colleagues an excuse to write, and it’s satisfying to feel connected along the way. (If you share the time with others you can use part of your hourly 10 minute break to be social, but I do suggest taking at least 5 minutes each hour just to tend to your bodily needs like food/water/bathroom.) You can do it online with your own private Zoom room that’s just friends or family, or use a “body doubling” platform like FLOWN (the home of my November 2025 marathon.)
* ICE PACK. This tip is kind of morally filthy, but if you need it you need it. Sometimes the brain is willing but the body is sleepy. If you’re really nodding off but you’re really on a creative roll and/or have something to prove, you can keep yourself awake by cracking an emergency instant cold pack (like they have in medical supply kits), wrapping it in a t-shirt (so you don’t get freezer burn on your skin), and tucking it into the back waistband of your trousers. Please don’t do this if the shock will give you a heart attack; you know this better than I ever could, so listen to your body about it and do not listen to me. (I’m not a doctor; I don’t even play one on TV.) You can also just splash cold water on your face or neck, but that doesn’t always work for me personally, so when it’s 3am and I need to stay at the desk, this is my one true secret.
* WRITE SOMETHING IMPORTANT. It’s easier to stay focused when you actually want to make what you’re making. If you’re trying to write something that doesn’t really matter to you… maybe don’t write it? It’s better to write something you care about, are excited to finish and share, or at least feel curious about exploring. This is true any time you write (in my opinion), but I bet most people would agree that feeling there’s some ACTUAL MEANING behind your project is especially useful for staying motivated after seventeen or twenty-three straight hours of work. Plus, meaningful work can help prevent burnout. (I’ll do a whole blog post on the “why” of that eventually, and maybe even a class or a video on burnout prevention strategies for writers, so if you want to hear about that resource when it’s available, sign up for my super-informal-and-infrequent e-mail list.)
Why Writing Marathons Are Bad
Writing marathons carry the baggage of an ableist and exclusionary hustle culture. You’re more than what you produce, and not everyone needs to be pushing themselves to their limits all the freakin’ time. Or ever. You don’t owe anyone your exhaustion.
I know how lucky I am to have a brain and body that’s capable of this kind of stamina, and I know it’s not merely willpower, discipline, or my own choices that are responsible. It’s authentically doable for me to devote an entire round-the-clock day (plus prep time before and a nap right after.) That’s available to me in my current circumstances, but many or probably most of my favorite writers could never make that work because they’re in bodies with different rest needs, movement needs, or neurological capacities than mine… or because they have schedules that don’t allow for this kind of big open space.
This is great for me, but it might suck for you. If it would suck, please don’t do it. People run physical marathons in many different conditions, but not all bodies would be “healthier” if they pushed themselves all the way to that 26.2 mile limit. A writing marathon is the same; 24 hours is possible for me right now, but life comes at you fast. At some point, my life or my body will doubtless change, and the ceiling on my focus and stamina will change with them, and a marathon like this might not be fun or useful anymore. When that happens, I’ll find out what my healthiest ceiling is at that time, and I hope I’ll be proud of the art I can make within that boundary, even if it’s much smaller than the space I’m currently lucky to let writing occupy for me right now.
I encourage you to hold yourself to a standard that’s AUTHENTICALLY RESPECTFUL of your unique time, space, body, and season of life. Writing marathons are bad if you use them to cajole yourself, harm yourself, or tell yourself that you could never do something that matters just because you’re not a living nightmare like all-day-all-night-write-a-thon-Meg. Instead of a writing marathon that’s the same size as mine (a stranger on the internet), I wonder what your perfect writing day might look like.
3 hours with a group of friends? 20 minutes with a slice of cake? Whatever feels like the BEST DAY OF YOUR WRITING YEAR is the thing to plan for, build, and do. The 24-hour writing marathon is the best day of my writing year, but I don’t want you to have my best day. I want you to have yours.
How to Build Creative Stamina
My best method for how to build creative stamina all year round is based on elite athletic training, plus a little splash of applied neuroscience. Here’s an older blog post on how to build a writing habit without burnout that goes into a fair bit of depth, but what I’d really love is to chat with you about this; what your current capacity is, how to grow it, and what practices from my toolkit will work best for your goals, your actual brain, and your real life. If that sounds cool, let’s grab a sliding-scale coaching session together.
Join a 24 Hour Writing Marathon with Me? (Free, obvi!)
Join a 24 Hour Writing Marathon with Me? (Free, obvi!)
Whenever I do a writing marathon that’s available to share in community, it’s come-and-go, so you can drop in for just a few minutes or for as long as you like. My next online writing marathon starts at 10am PT on Thursday Nov 13 2025. Free to attend (as always), and for the first time ever I’m doing it as a partnership with the virtual co-working platform FLOWN. If you’re not a FLOWN member you can sign up for a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) and hop right into the room. Drop in and out as you please… or hang in with me the whole time, if you’re feeling really ambitious! Get more information at FLOWN’s page about National Writing Month 2025.
If you want to hear about all my future marathons, sign up for my email list. (I barely use it, which means when I do, it’s actually worth reading!)
xo, megan
Or just go home to the blog.
These (hopefully) really quite helpful creative writing tips offer what I’ve learned as an award-winning author who writes a million words a year, and what I’ve learned about supporting others as a private writing coach.
There’s no one way to write. There’s only your way. I hope some of my tactics and ideas can help you find it.
Yup, I’m a writing coach.
I work with folks at all levels of experience and all levels of income. My writers range from unhoused teens living on the streets to C-suite executives who want to up-level their communication. If you want a private coaching session but can’t afford it, email megan@howtowritesomething.com and ask for scholarship info.
curious/confused?: what does a writing coach do (and not do)
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