Editor note: I wrote this post a few months ago but somehow never published. I hope you like it.

Mornings are a great time for writers. I heard this phrase a lot of times, and indeed it appears to be true, at least for me, and other writers that I know.

As I’m typing these words, the clock has just passed 5:15 am. I used to wake up at 6 am for writing, but now I switched to 5 am because it’s even better for me. This way I save time and write in creative mode at the same time.

While I could simply wake up and start writing right away, I’ve found that there are a few tips that I can use to save my sanity and avoid early morning troubles. You should try to follow them as well if you want to start writing early in the morning.

  • Drink water. The first thing you should do when you wake up is to drink some water and go to the bathroom. Water helps to hydrate and refresh your body and gives you some energy. If you want, you can also keep a glass of water on your desk or eat fruit.
  • Do some stretching. It’s a good idea to do some movement to wake up the bones and muscles of your body before you start writing. Five minutes are enough to get up to speed. Start with your fingers and wrists and move to your elbows, shoulders, neck and back. One way to stretch these parts is to do slow and large rotations like in this video. You may want to repeat some of these stretches every 10-15 minutes while writing.
  • Be easy on your eyes. Perhaps the worst thing you could do is to write with a bright background which would kill your eyes. I use a program named WriteRoom which offers a dark background and it’s easy on your eyes. I can write for many hours with it without fatiguing my eyes. There’s an equivalent software for windows named DarkRoom which works similarly, although I’ve never tried it directly.
  • Respect silence. If you wake up early in the morning, chances are that the outside world is still sleeping, thus there’s a lot of silence around you. You should respect that quietude. Even if you live alone, act as if there’s someone else sleeping in the room next to yours.
  • Write an outline in advance. It’s a good idea to think in advance what you’re going to write. Don’t wait until when you wake up to decide. Write an outline the evening before and allow your brain to sleep on it. Doing so will enable your brain to think and digest the argument while you are sleeping, and you’ll eventually wake up full of new ideas ready to be written.
  • Avoid distractions. If you want to remain in the productive flow of early mornings as long as possible, you should avoid any kind of distractions. Don’t check your emails. Use a full screen software. Turn off audio notifications the evening before, and when you turn on your computer, make sure your text editor is already open. If you are addicted to your cell phone, turn it off as well.
  • Set a minimum time. If you run out of ideas while writing, don’t give up. Early in the morning is usually a matter of minutes before new ideas will start to flow again in your mind, and the last thing you want is to stop writing just before they start to arrive. I usually set a one hour minimum time for writing in the morning, and then I often find myself writing begging for more as new ideas arrive.
  • Reread again after a few hours. When you write in the morning, you should not spend a lot of time editing. Editing can be done later in the day when your mind is fully awake. Even after 3 hours that you are awake is enough. My policy is to write for quantity in the morning, and then to go back to it during the day to fix errors and maybe to rewrite parts that don’t make much sense.

These tips are what I use for writing early in the morning, and they have been proven effective in the past months since I started to implement them. They are not rules set on stone, but rather guidelines that you can follow and adapt based on your needs.

I realize that not everyone wants to write early in the morning, so if you are a night owl, that’s fine, do what works best for you. But for those who wants to start their day early, these tips should be of help.