What’s Your Ritual?

As we enter “process” week at the Book Writing World–the place we start each quarter, because you can never be too familiar with how you best work and how to support your own success–I’m looking at the many faces of effective writing habits, rituals if you will, that I’ve seen blossom over this year in the BWW.

One person writes 1000 words a week, another commits to one sentence a day (often it’s more, but that gets the document open and the writer connected), a third writes 16 hours over the month, another the first hour-and-a-half of the day in a cafe on the way to work. I personally love a cafe and a steaming bowl of chai. (Yes, bowl, which I get at the Guerilla Cafe in Berkeley.)

Is all of this just the bells and whistles, or does it really matter? It matters when you find your own ritual, what keeps you going so that you make the habit boring, something that happens day in and day out, week after week, and you move all the drama into the writing itself–into the story.

Here’s a list of the rituals of several authors.* You can test drive some of them, and they’re fun to read, but the real place to find to juju that will juice you is in what’s worked in the past–what’s helped you change jobs or find an apartment or plant a garden. (Other people’s rituals work best as a way to remind yourself that you’re not crazy–or no crazier than any other writer.) Find your rituals, in other words, in your already-in-place habits. They won’t look glamorous to you–their yours, your own working magic. But hey, when you need magic, and writers do, your own working magic is the best you can hope to find.

*Thanks to The Derek Haines, Author Daily for this and for listing the Book Writing World in top stories.