Becoming the Conduit: Five Tips for Creating Your OwnWriting Ritual
Hint: it’s not about the hotel room or the aging apples.
People are obsessed with the writing rituals of famous authors. Whether it’s scrawling longhand on yellow legal pads (Susan Sontag), renting a hotel room for peace and quiet (Maya Angelou), or composing naked (Hemingway and Victor Hugo), there are legion stories about how various authors throughout history accessed the muses.
Our collective fixation on these rituals is an attempt to tap into literary genius by tracking its breadcrumbs back through the minds of renowned authors. The thinking seems to be: perhaps if I begin each work day by “sniffing a drawer of aging apples,” as Flaubert did, then my next book will sing like Madame Bovary…
Alas, no. Many a writer has attempted to imitate the rituals of others and simply become tired, confused or drunk. The path to establishing a successful ritual is actually much simpler: you must find the one that works for you.
Here’s a wonderful and telling quote by Toni Morrison about her writing ritual:
I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark — it must be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come… And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular…
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 transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.
Regardless of whether you like coffee, or can manage to wake before dawn, the key to all ritual lies in Morrison’s line: preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular. Most writers find that they need some way of coming into that space of creativity and vision and image and nonlinear thought that allows for the best writing to flow. But how do we devise rituals that prepare our mind to write?
When cultivating your writing ritual you might consider:
- Choosing a regular time of day to write. Your mind will become habituated to creating at that hour.
- Finding the space to write that feels the most comfortable for you, whether it’s your kitchen table or a park bench. I know a famous author who writes lyrical prose in crowded coffee shops listening to hard rock. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you.
- Trying writing by hand for a change. Ideas often flow faster when you’re untethered from the computer.
- Writing some stream-of-consciousness pages first. Many writers prime their creativity by writing freely for a few minutes before jumping into a more directed project.
- Creating for just one person. Maybe it’s your husband, wife, child, friend. Bring to mind who you want to move, impress or make laugh with your work, and then resolve to forget about what anyone else may think.
Writing rituals develop through trial and error. In time, you’ll figure out what distracts you from your work (unopened mail, phones, noise etc.) and what helps you keep your focus and attention on crafting your words. Writers experiment to see what inspires them, and with repetition it becomes a simple, replicable habit.
The main thing is to give yourself the chance to develop a ritual that facilitates your writing, but doesn’t create more excuses or barriers. If you start thinking, “I can’t write today because I don’t have my favorite pen, or my special cookies to snack on, or my lucky sweater…” then you’re heading out of ritual and into obsessive territory.
The trick is to create rituals that are expansive enough that you can enact them even when you’re traveling, even when you’re busy, even when you’re exhausted. Rituals should support you, never limit or imprison you. In the immortal warning words of E.B. White, “ A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”