In my late twenties, when I made the commitment to seriously pursue fiction writing, I developed an odd relationship with the TextEdit app on my laptop. Through a glitch of some sort, the app highlighted my words a light gray…every single time. But there was something visually soothing about it that I started drafts in the app before transferring over to a Google Doc. I can’t recall when I stopped, but the ritual was short-lived.
Writers are a notoriously ritualistic bunch: Colette picked fleas from her bulldog before writing; Maya Angelou mostly wrote in hotel rooms. Honoré de Balzac purportedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day to rev his creative engine. Then, there are authors like Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, and Ernest Hemingway who took to drugs and alcohol to open their minds to the creative process.
A ritual can be a sacred or meditative experience. It can help us tap into our emotions, improve our concentration, and think more deeply, according to Psychology Today. It can even be a form of creative input—like going for a walk, reading, or watching the leaves bristle in our backyard. Writer Mason Currey tells Vox, “Rituals create and mark a transition towards a different kind of mental or emotional state.”
While rituals are an effective way for us to ease into our creative work, what happens when we are unable to complete a ritual? If you inhabit an all-or-nothing mindset like I do, missing a ritual could mean missing out on your creative practice. For example, if your pre-writing ritual is to go for a walk around your neighborhood, but your usual path is under construction, do you miss out on writing for the day, week, month it takes for the path to become walkable again?
While rituals are an effective way for us to ease into our creative work, what I mean to say is that rituals can be a double-edged sword.
Last year, while writing and editing a short story about loneliness and a bee, I took to the kitchen table mid-mornings before my workday. There was something about the location that generated an energy within me that was conducive to this particular story. But then the moment passed, and the kitchen table was not my spot anymore. Instead of using it as an excuse not to write, to procrastinate, I learned to be flexible, to push past the need for any particularities.
In Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande emphasizes the importance of being able to write whenever—regardless of day, time, or place. To nurture that flexibility, Brande shares an exercise with readers: ahead of the day, choose any 15-minute interval to write—and stick to it. “The important thing is that at the moment, on the dot of the moment, you are to be writing, and that you teach yourself that no excuse of any nature can be offered when the moment comes.”
Flexibility doesn’t sacrifice consistency, and that’s why I favor routines over rituals. Dictionary.com defines routine as “a customary or regular course of procedure.” An additional definition is “dull or uninteresting; commonplace.” Where rituals evoke a sense of ceremony, routines thrive in the everyday.
One could argue that my beloved writing sprints are ritualistic. To some extent, I’d agree: these sprints are a mindful approach to the writing practice. But more accurately, they are my routine. Writing sprints keep me coming back to the page day in and day out, and I complete them at varying times, which gets me in the practice of being ready to write at a moment’s notice, to Brande’s approval I’d like to think.
My point is that, as writers, we might find ourselves dwelling in the periphery of writing, wanting to write but not being capable in that moment, and I’d hate to think that a ritual could be whipped out from our Rolodex of excuses and spur more friction between ourselves and our creativity.
With that, here’s a challenge: Choose a 15-minute interval to write, stick to it, and make sure the writing circumstances are different from your usual set-up.
My kernel of advice: Do whatever you need to to get to the page, but don’t let it get in the way of the important work.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby read Inverno by Cynthia Zarin for her book club, and she immediately thought of Natalia’s latest kernel on plot. Zarin uses a non-linear plot structure to tell the story of two star-crossed lovers. Synchronously, the craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison that Shelby ordered—not knowing anything about it—came in this week. And it’s all about non-traditional plots. In the introduction, Alison states, “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. … But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?” Shelby’s excited to dive in!
Natalia finished There There by Tommy Orange and took note of the non-scene and expositional nature of a lot of the work. This might have to do with the large cast of characters, 12, which means character setup was happening often as the characters took turns starring in each chapter. She’s also been enjoying the lectures from the Tin House Winter Workshop and took a deep-dive into the easily unacknowledged passage of inherent time in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
This week Sarah discovered the work of the Appalachian writer Ann Pancake through a graduate seminar she is taking. Pancake’s 2007 novel Strange as This Weather Has Been was simply stunning: a multi-generational, multi-POV story that exposes the devastation of coal mining in West Virginia and struggles to answer the question of whether it is better to stay and fight or leave and save one’s family. Sarah cannot believe this novel is not better known. Its language is lyrical. Its dialect is pitch-perfect. Its worldview is philosophical, ecological, and deeply humane. It should be an American classic. Go out and read it right now!
After a week full of AWP, Neidy returned home to a week full of the Tin House Winter Workshop. She has started reading Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind and is deep in revisions on a short story she composed in January.