The Ritual of Fine-Tuning My Writing

Most writers I know have rituals. These run the gamut from adjusting their desks a certain way to writing by candlelight to setting a glass of perfectly innocent booze on fire before each writing project as a sacrifice to the Writing Ancestors. They may sound silly, or wasteful (perfectly good booze, after all) or unintuitive, but in their own way, they all make sense. And by make sense, I don’t mean that the individual rituals themselves are constructed on a foundation of adamantine logic and garbed in shining steel armor of unassailable rationale. I mean that the idea and practice of rituals themselves makes pefect sense, particularly for us writer types.

Why? Because rituals are, in large part, about comfort. They are about adjusting one’s surroundings in a particular way in hopes of achieving a desired result, and once that change has been accomplished the ritualist is in a more comfortable place. More comfort means less brainpower devoted to worrying, to nagging thoughts and “what ifs” and everything but the task at hand (in this case, writing). More energy devoted to the task at hand generally means more and better work. The idea of doing more and better work becomes associated with the performance of the ritual, which makes it even more comforting, and, well, you see where this goes.

Now, I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that the performance of a ritualized behavior induces a shamanic trance, an ecstatic state of creative being. Others can debate that to their hearts’ content; that sort of thing really isn’t my style. What I can say definitively, however, is that I do have certain rituals built into my writing process, and that when I perform them faithfully, I tend to write better. I find myself less easily distracted, I write better, and I write longer and more quickly.

And again, I don’t think there’s a mystic or psychic or religious component to this. Rather, it’s just my way of lowering myself into the writing mood, which is all that it needs to be.

Like anything else, rituals evolve. Once upon a time, I’d put a finger of scotch (not the good stuff) out on my desk every time I sat down to write. Later, once I acquired a better appreciation for scotch (and found myself doing a lot of my writing in a building where a any hooch left unattended for more than eight seconds wasn’t safe), things changed. I did most of my writing late, late, late at night in those days, which meant mainlining caffeine, which meant mainlining Coca-Cola. Eventually it got to the point where I conflated writing with the presence of the sweet nectar of downtown Atlanta (Seriously. Downtown Atlanta is positively coated in the stuff. It’s terrifying) and found myself unable to get into a writing mood unless I’d Coked myself up. The fact that I rarely found myself able to sleep before 7 AM on the nights when I did this, well, we’re all young and stupid at some point.

And when the caffeine and the tooth-melting sweetness got to be too much for my aging dentition and sleep habits, I found rituals evolving again. As ridiculous as it sounds, there was a dry patch in there (no pun intended) after I kicked the Coke habit but before I found a comfortable routine to replace it. I lapsed a couple of times, went on binges when I felt desperate and blocked and in dire need of word count. After all, a frosty red can just said “writing” to me in a way that more sensible beverages didn’t. Without it, I felt uncomfortable and distracted, not out of any particular love of Coke products, but rather because drinking Coke was part of getting my brain in a receptive state for writing. It took, literally, years to retrain myself, including a sad and desperate fling with Caffeine Free Diet Coke (truly, the drink of the self-delusional).

These days, the daily ritual is, if nothing else, better for my teeth. Clear the desk, shut the door, start the music and, if I’m hoping to be particularly productive. It’s the pre-project ritual that’s gotten more complicated, a lengthy and reverent process of putting together a writing playlist that reinforces the mood and tone of what I want to write. Firefly Rain was Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and southern rock out the yin-yang; the work I did on Splinter Cell: Conviction was 98% action movie sountracks (instrumental only, thanks) mixed with a light sprinking of Foo Fighters. Why Foo Fighters? I have no idea. It just felt right, and once it felt right, I didn’t feel right not writing to it.

Like I said, ritual.

Perhaps the notion of sorting out a writing playlist has deeper or more logical underpinnings. After all, sorting out what music is or isn’t appropriate for writing a particular project is in large part defining what the project itself is or isn’t. You can’t know if something fits unless you have a good idea – conscious or otherwise – of what you’re going to be writing to that particular piece of music. After all, that piece of music can either reinforce or break the mood you’re trying to achieve – I at least tend not to get a lot of writing done when my lizard brain forces me to sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, for example – and so it’s a litmus test, a way of gut-checking whether I know what I’m writing well enough to actually get down to it.

Like I said, comfort. Purpose. Ritual.

And less flaming booze, which is always a good idea.