On rituals and writing

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at quarter before one in the stretch of early afternoon, I would push open the side-doors of the Union, a peppermint dissolving languidly on my tongue, and stop by Panera to fill my thermos with coffee in anticipation for two and a half hours of lecture.

Late every evening, at whatever obscene hour I decide it’s time to call it a night — to exalt my pillow in my dreams — I pull on my soft, black sweatpants, wash my face, pouch up the cushions into a more lively, dynamic and agreeable arrangement, and clamber into my bottom bunk with a book to fall asleep to.

And every day, before I sit down to begin a writing endeavor, a lunch-date, breakfast-date, midnight-rendezvous with words, if you will, I clear my desk, and turn on the relevant lighting appliances while I boil two cups of water to steep tea in the one, singular mug I own.

Rituals – mundane as they are, my life is guarded by them, as I assume yours is too to some degree. And this was what my fiction-writing professor inquired of his class. Searching into the small coterie of students, apprentices to his own craft, he posed the following queries. “Do you have a writing schedule? A particular fetish-object? Do you believe in the chisel or the muse?” And as the class, seated conveniently in a somewhat elliptical circle, proceeded to give in fine detail of the elaborate rituals they undertook in order for the words to surface and break into the realm of the consciousness, like swimmers gasping for air, I realized the eccentricity of the writer-personality. Twirling, tapping, and balancing pens and pencils, we all took turns to embrace the spotlight with some small tale of our lives. Some spoke of their joy of burning the midnight oil, driven by the ineffable comfort of the dark and the pin-point stars fastened to the sky; some, the pressing deadline chasing at their coattails. So far, nothing too shocking considering that we were, after all, a class of undergraduates; we were, on average, nocturnal. Others somewhat deviated from the “norm” a bit in either direction, with their best work penned on retractable airplane desks soaring 500 miles an hour over the steel blue Atlantic and thus, the mind and the corporeal body were equally engulfed in coils of wispy clouds. The rest of us, more earth-bound, alternatively would look up towards these tresses of blue sky for inspiration during the peak of the day, when the sun shone squarely on our pages, and while the wind could playfully nudge our curiosities. One classmate only used a typewriter for composition, to “feel the tactile sensation” of pressing a thought to paper, one discrete letter at a time. Meaning, would in effect, be knit together by these quick little physical displacements made by the synchrony of interphalangeal joints. Also suggested were stress balls. There were ski-masks. Apple jacks. Nothing was too bizarre or inconceivable for our group.

As I packed up my belongings and thoughts at the end of the class, I began to wonder at how some of the most renowned writers, those that were or would be commended generously generation after generation throughout the continuum of time, have organized their days and their habits around their passion for writing. I discovered, (to a slight dismay) that often, it was the other way around. Kafka who worked an office job during the day, allegedly started writing at 11 at night, and wrote “depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o’clock, once even till six in the morning.” Flaubert was “unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate.” Toni Morrison found her frame of mind for ingenious, sharply brilliant composition through coffee and watching the sun’s rays break the air of the cold horizon. “I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning.” Writing before dawn began as a necessity for Morrison, who found time only in the tiny hours of the morning before her children awoke, to lay down sentences from the fountain of her pen. Other fascinating rituals for writers (and artists) can be found here.

As for myself, I don’t think I’ve permanently fallen into one tradition or another that I must follow before I write. At least, nothing that extends beyond testing the buoyancy of a tea-bag (earl grey) in a mug adjacent to my notebook. Noon, midnight… my habits are eclectic and uncertain as I stand on the threshold of adulthood. More or less for now, I adopt Eliot’s approach to writing. “The poet’s mind is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” Whenever the right moment arrives, when that tremendous electrical storm shatters the attic upstairs after days of deliberate observation, you’ll find me furiously, ecstatically scrawling on any portable surface, never mind if it’s the backside of a half-destroyed menu or one of those programs they hand out before a concert or play. Some days, when the receptacle is empty, I try to schedule time to write and I stand convinced that the tea helps.

Now, I turn the inquiry over to you: What are some of your own idiosyncratic writing rituals, if any?

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.