Do not hoard your best material or ideas for some imagined later work; give whatever you have to the thing in front of you immediately. The supply is not depleted by spending, it is replenished by it, and what is withheld tends to rot rather than ripen.
The sentence you are writing is a probe you push into the dark, feeling for the next move; it is simultaneously a pick that digs and a thread you follow back out. You discover the book's true subject only by following where the line leads, not by knowing the destination in advance.
The part of a draft you are proudest of is often a self-indulgent intrusion that serves the writer rather than the work, and it frequently must be removed. Learning to kill the showpiece is the discipline that distinguishes the writer's ego from the writing's integrity.
A fixed daily routine is not a cage but a scaffold that catches time and prevents each day from dissolving into chaos or whim. The structure protects the work precisely because it removes the need to decide, each day, whether and how to work.
Dillard watches aviator Dave Rahm fly aerobatics and sees an artist composing beauty in a medium that vanishes the instant it is made. His total mastery and the invisibility of his finished work model an art pursued for its own form, where the maker inscribes shapes no one can keep.
The work happens in small, often ugly rooms with the view blocked, because scenery and comfort distract from the only landscape that matters, the page. The romance of the writing life is largely absent from the actual labor, which resembles patient, solitary manual work more than visitation by a muse.