The Power of the Writing Ritual
and the joy of solitude
We embrace rituals in so many aspects of our lives: the morning ritual (coffee, shower, bed-making), the evening ritual (pajamas, reading, lights-out), holiday rituals, rituals to celebrate and to mourn. Your writing life deserves a ritual too. In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey describes the writing rituals of some of the world’s best-known writers.
Thomas Wolfe began writing at midnight, with copious amounts of coffee and tea. W.H. Auden started with coffee at 6:00 a.m. and worked until 11:30. Patricia Highsmith (whose Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction should be on any suspense writer’s bookshelf) wrote for three or four hours every morning, in bed, with cigarettes and coffee. Is it any wonder, with all that coffee sloshing around on the desks and in the beds of writers, that this newsletter is called The Caffeinated Writer?
“In the right hands,” Currey writes, ritual—or daily routine—“can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all), as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism.”
I try to get in at least one hour of writing in solitude every day. I get up earlier than my husband and son, grind the coffee beans, and fill the drip machine with water to the six-cup line. I can’t write without coffee! I’ve tried; it just doesn’t work for me. The smell of the coffee and the act of brewing it is a Pavlovian signal for my brain to get to work. What I don’t do while the coffee is brewing is look at my phone. Random, pointless mental noise—the stuff of smartphones—is the enemy of creativity. I use those few minutes instead to get the blood flowing to my brain and my limbs. I stand there in the kitchen doing jumping jacks or arm circles, or I go downstairs and do a few strokes on the little portable rowing machine I bought during lockdown in Paris. When the coffee maker beeps, I fill my mug and go to the old blue velvet chair in the living room, prop my feet on the ottoman, pull a soft blanket over my lap (mornings in Northern California are cold year-round), and start writing.
For an introvert, the solitude is the easy part (not finding solitude, necessarily, but enjoying it). Sitting down to begin writing is the hard part. Fortunately, depending on the day’s commitments, an hour often turns into an hour and a half, two hours, three. Hour two is always easier than hour one.
Weekends are best for me, because my family sleeps late and I’m not making a lunch or driving to school and back. Think about what day and time is best for you. Can you create a writing ritual two days a week? Three? The quantity isn’t as important as the commitment. Once a week is the minimum, but don’t be too hard on yourself if your life is just too busy with work and family to enact your writing ritual several times a week. If you can write every day, that’s wonderful, but you don’t have to write every day to be a writer.
Commit to breaking through the barrier by simply sitting down at your laptop or with your notebook. Why alone? Because solitude is where the deep dives into your subconscious happen. If you don’t have the luxury of “a room of one’s own,” create solitude with noise-canceling headphones. If you’re writing in a a public space, like a cafe, try to mimic solitude by limiting your conversation with other humans. If networking is your go-to state of being, this won’t be fun (at first), but once you get into the habit of inhabiting solitude for an hour a day, you will crave that mental alone space.
Establish your ritual, the habit that tells your brain it’s time to write.“Writing every day” may not sound like a fun ritual. “Brew the coffee,” however, is a simple ritual that offers many rewards. When you tie your easy ritual, “Brew the coffee,” to the more challenging ritual, “Sit down and write,” you have created a habit that will work for you.
My hour doesn’t always go to the same project. Monday I may spend an hour on my novel-in-progress, Tuesday I might work on an essay, Wednesday I might write a lecture for one of my writing classes. Although writing on the same project every day provides continuity, a willingness to move among projects will make it more likely that you really do write a new days a week.
Just like fasting until noon or putting the dishes away before bed, the more times you practice the ritual and habit of writing, the easier it is to stick to it.
Can you be a serious writer without writing every day? Absolutely! But you must have some sort of habit linked to the calendar: write three days a week, or every Saturday, or all summer, every summer. Rituals help. Ritual helps the habit stick, and it also makes the process more joyful.
You can read about my most recent book, The Wonder Test, here.
Books mentioned in this post:
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, by Patricia Highsmith