Daryl Muranaka asked Barack Obama:

As a president who has spent a lot of time working on your writing craft, I wanted to ask about your process. Did you set aside a daily time to write or do it in clumps? Given your busy scheduled, I'm wondering how you fit in the time to not just write but also THINK about the actual words and structures you were going to use. How long would you take on your first sentences for the chapters and for the memoir itself?

Barack Obama By my second term, I actually had my staff clear out some “POTUS Time” for me in the afternoon a couple times each week, precisely so that I could think. I didn’t have time to keep a regular journal, as some presidents have done. But I would jot down certain moments and events as they transpired, just because I kind of knew that the very specific ways in which those events unfolded would be important to me later. There’s a good story, for example, from my first year in the White House, where I crashed a secret Chinese meeting at a climate summit, upending all their protocol, because I knew it was a good moment – but it also directly led, many years later, to the Paris Agreement.

So, there are instances like that where I wrote something down. I didn’t need to catalog people’s characters and personalities, that kind of stuff I just carry in my head and don’t have a problem accessing. But I’ll be honest, the internet made writing this book much easier than it would have been a couple decades ago. I could just pull up my own schedule from a certain day and contemporaneous news articles from that day to remind me of some context. So not having to comb through reams of paper while writing was a blessing – it let me maintain some sort of rhythm.

As for the way I write, that hasn’t changed much over the years. I still prefer to write late. I do my best work between ten p.m. and two a.m. I’m focused then in a way that I’m not during the day – during the daytime, I’m too easily distracted. I still write on yellow legal pads; I’m still very particular about my pens. They’re uni-ball Vision Elites, by the way. Always black.

I’ll sketch out a first draft of each scene or chapter on paper. That’s always the biggest challenge. The drafting. I actually really enjoy the editing process. I always liked marking up the drafts that my speechwriters would prepare in the White House. I’d do the same to my own written pages. Then I’d make some real revisions when I take those pages and type them into Word. I’d say I don’t take too long to think about actual words and sentences and structures, and just start writing. I’ve always thought you just have to get started. Editing and revising is where you can really make things happen.

Finally, as much as I love books and reading in new voices, I actually didn’t do a lot of reading while I was writing. Part of that is because I have to avoid excuses to procrastinate. But part of that is because, when I’m reading books, particularly ones I’m enjoying, I can get swept up in their voice. I can hear them in my head. And I wanted to avoid that while trying to write my own. But now that I’m finished – with the first volume, at least – I’m catching up on some good fiction that I’ve been missing.

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