JOELFALCONER

I used to write for productivity publications. I’d spend a lot of time thinking about how we motivate ourselves, how we create, looking at tools we use to organize our lives. After all that time, I came to the realization that tools don’t really matter, and systems rarely get to the heart of what actually makes them work, perhaps so you remain dependent on them. The brain is trained on rhythm and habit. If you create a rhythm to your tasks and then force yourself to follow the same process for getting things done until it becomes second nature, eventually you’ll find that doing that work is more of a habit than trying to avoid it.

It is the same with writing. Many writers, and you’ll see a lot of them come out of the woodworks around this time of year, wonder how you can “enter the zone” and get your book done as if it’s some kind of magical thing that happens to you. My contention is and always has been that creation is an act, not a state. Your environment or your mood don’t matter because there is no ideal environment or ideal mood for getting the work done. These are romanticized notions that almost every writer believes in despite the fact that they do not exist. Writing isn’t a romantic thing. It’s a hard slog. You have to force yourself to get through your words for the day. There’s nothing magical or sexy about it–it’s about sitting in your chair and not stopping until you’ve written what you need to write.

So, the act of creating anything will always start with your conscious determination to sit down and do it, no matter how you feel, until you’re done. But thanks to the way our brain works, we can train it to kick into gear a little faster when you do make that decision to sit down and write. This is called the writing ritual by many, and while I find any phrase that includes the word ritual annoying and airy-fairy, I won’t be a contrarian for the sake of it and go changing it.

Creating the Ritual

There’s not a lot that defines the ritual itself because they’re all different. It comes down to the environment that you find most ideal for writing. There’s no ideal writing environment, but if we’re in control of developing the ritual, we can make it as close as possible.

You can tweak it until you’re happy with it, but try and get it right within the first few goes. The ritual doesn’t do anything special at first; you have to repeat the same set of circumstances until your brain learns to perceive the ritual as the signal to get creative and write. This takes time and consistency. Think about all the variables of the writing room. You want to minimize distraction and discomfort without getting so comfortable as to make yourself too drowsy for writing. There are generally a few common features of writing rituals which I’ll go through here.

Music

Music is primarily a tool for blocking out distractions such as noisy people in adjacent rooms. My kids like to laugh and cry loudly and my wife sure knows how to raise her voice when they play up. I close the door and play music loud enough to drown them out without being so loud that I can’t concentrate.

Your choice of music matters. Much of the music you listen to on a daily basis is probably going to be more distracting than screaming children or ringing phones. I use Chopin, a fifteen CD collection ripped into iTunes that goes for over a day so I never have to think about the playlist even during the longest of writing sessions. It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata that inspired me to take up music and become just like the deaf old man at the age of six or seven, but for some reason Chopin makes me want to write. If you can’t think of any good writing music in your collection now, give it a shot.

Classical piano–or classical in general–is perfect for the job because it has no lyrics to take your mind away from your own words but has plenty of dynamic range to keep you awake.

The Brain Dump

Every morning I write three pages, long-hand, in a notebook. There’s no structure or plan for it. You just write whatever you’re thinking about. Maybe you’ll just end up writing about how terrible your coffee was today, or maybe it’ll be some existential revelation that’ll inspire you and make its way into a story. It doesn’t really matter, just keep going until you’ve got the three pages.

This is something I picked up after reading an excerpt from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She calls it the Morning Pages and it has something to do with getting your Inner Censor out of the way. No disrespect to Julia, since she inspired this practice for me to begin with, but I find her take on it to be a little too fluffy and spiritual for my tastes. I consider it a way to simply get the pen going and words spilling out on the page so that I’ve already bypassed the mental barrier to writing when it comes time to write something structured such as an article or story, which puts more pressure on the writer. It’s simply a daily exercise to remind myself–my subconscious, I suppose–that no set of special circumstances or flash of inspiration is required for productive writing.

Maybe you have too much going on in your head when you sit down to write, or maybe you just have mental roadblocks to writing that need to be erased by a few pages of zero-pressure jibberish. If that’s the case, try it out. Some people use word puzzles and games. Others use writing challenges–there are mailing lists out there you can subscribe to where you receive a weekly or daily challenge to write a page of a story based around a concept, sentence, or basic plot, just to get you going. Whatever floats your boat.

Location

I like to write in a dim room. Some people find they need the lights on or sunlight streaming through the window. I just open the blinds enough so that I can see everything in the room without letting in so much that it’s bright or increases the temperature (my descendants are all white Europeans, and lighting a cigarette near me will probably cause me to break out in a sweat). If you like to write in the morning when your head is full of melatonin, maybe you’ll prefer writing outside right under the sun. However you like your lighting, it’s an important thing to consider when you’re building your ritual. No wonder Catholics and pagans like candles.

The view from your writing spot and the air flow are also small things you might not have considered. Some people like to see their backyard or a pond or a mountain while they’re writing. I like my desk and computer just fine; they’re not very stimulating so they don’t interfere with what I’m seeing for a scene in my head, and they remind me that I’m here to get something done. I work with the window open right next to me. I always used to hate a breeze on me while working, but realized that the extra oxygen was helping me focus, so over the years I’ve come to depend on a good nearby window suppling a steady stream of fresh air and a little bit of natural lighting.

Dealing with Others

One of the biggest problems with getting anything done in any area, writing or not, is the steady stream of distractions we’re faced with. It can be family, Twitter, email, phone calls, or a whole list of other things. Some people recommend letting distractions in while you work in case something turns out to be a nugget of inspiration. I prefer to shut everything down and focus on the writing and replenish my pool of ideas and inspiration separately. My family knows that opening my office door when there’s some crazy piano music coming from the other side is a death sentence. I silence my phone and flip it so the screen faces the desk. I quit distracting programs like Skype and make my email and social media tabs disappear.

Fiercely defending your writing time from distractions is one of the most important parts about building a ritual. The ritual should help you accomplish that, not bring out more distractions. Put a sign on your door if you have to, and turn your phone off if you can’t ignore the faint glow of a face-down phone receiving a message.

Making the Writing Ritual Work

I once did some reading about neuro-linguistic programming for a story I was working on. Although I agree with Penn and Teller on pseudo-scientific stuff like this, I realized that the NLP practice of associating a mental state with a gesture, environment or other set of conditions is pretty much what the writing ritual is all about.

If I wasn’t clear earlier, coming up with some list of conditions and calling it a writing ritual doesn’t actually do anything. Replicating those conditions every time you write, and ensuring that you write no matter your mood every time you create those conditions, eventually trains your mind to recognize the signals to switch mental states so you have to fight yourself less to get started. You have to stick with it every day without expecting immediate results. Don’t expect magic. You’ll be disappointed.

I also recommend that you don’t recreate the conditions of your writing ritual at any other time. This will weaken the association between the conditions of the ritual and the act of writing, making it less effective. If you want to use the principles to become more effective in another area, that’s great. Come up with something else.

One final piece of advice: whenever you get a chance, do some writing without the ritual. In fact, get as far away from all the components of the ritual as you can. You don’t want to become too dependent on this ritual, so if you’re creatively lubricated enough to write without it, take advantage of the opportunity, or you’ll come back to the problem we encountered at the start of this article–requiring an ideal writing environment and mood to begin.