As you may have heard, we’ve been avoiding the office this week. Which means our Elevator Interview — the weekly chats we’ve been conducting with Times writers and editors to get inside their heads about how they do their jobs — took place over email.

That was no problem for Veronica Chambers, who has an early morning writing ritual that, at times, has involved her sleeping on her kitchen floor to ensure that she would be so uncomfortable that she wakes up early. It appears to have worked: She is the author of more than a dozen books, including her most recent, “Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter,” and is editor of the Times archival storytelling project, Past Tense.

IHW: Tell us about your morning routine, if you have one.

I am all about the morning. I was a night person for a really, really long time. And then, little by little, I trained myself into being a morning person. When I wrote my first book , I loved sleeping in so much. But I wanted to be a writer so I had to work it out because I had a full-time job. I would literally set the oven timer for six hours, which was the max time on my oven, and then I’d sleep on the kitchen floor so I’d be uncomfortable enough that I’d wake up.

Toni Morrison once said about writing at dawn: “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives.”

I’ve been really lucky to interview Ms. Morrison onstage three times, and although there is an entire universe that worships her, I take her writing advice very, very personally and seriously. So I try to do a little reading or a little writing most days at sunrise.