You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Passion beats perfect conditions

Most advice about writing tells you to protect your time—build walls around your schedule, find a quiet room, silence your phone. Hemingway agrees you need that ruthlessness, that refusal to let the world interrupt. But then he pivots to something less obvious: the best work doesn't actually come from perfect conditions. It comes when you're emotionally alive, when something matters enough to pull words out of you that wouldn't otherwise exist.

The catch is that "in love" doesn't necessarily mean romance, though it can. It means being consumed by something—an idea, a project, a person, even an argument you need to settle on the page. It's that state where you're not forcing words but following them, where the work almost writes itself because you care too much to let it be mediocre. You've probably felt this in your own life: the email you wrote furiously at 2 AM, the letter you couldn't stop revising, the message you crafted with real precision because it mattered.

This suggests something uncomfortable about productivity culture. All the time management in the world can't manufacture what genuine urgency and passion create naturally. You can create the conditions—the solitude, the discipline—but you can't manufacture the fuel. The best work requires both the ruthlessness to protect your attention and something worth protecting it for.