Daily rituals keep famous writers on track... and they can help you too!

I'm constantly pitching the virtues of daily writing rituals with my academic clients.  Rituals help you short circuit the planning/prioritizing/fretting part of your brain and skip straight to the doing.  One client I worked with several years ago had a very complex writing ritual that involved two cups of coffee, just so, 10 minutes of free writing, 5 minutes of non-writing reflection, several minutes of consulting her list of upcoming tasks, and then...and only then...did she get started with the meat of the writing.  It seems like quite a circuitous route to get to the task for the day, but it really only took about 20 minutes and it prevented the anxiety that usually accompanied her writing.  By preventing anxiety, she prevented procrastination.  Imagine if you could run a 20 minute getting-ready script and then get right to your writing.  Doesn't that sound better than the 2 hours of whatever the heck you're doing instead of writing?

I believe the human mind craves regularity & deplores too much choice.  Let's make it comfortable to creating routines that facilitate our higher goals!

My fascination with writing rituals makes me especially delighted to find this: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/
It's a whole blog devoted to highlighting famous writers' rituals, some of which make my past client's look incredibly mundane!

Here's Steven King's:

“There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,” he said. “I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning,” he explained. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.

“It’s not any different than a bedtime routine,” he continued. “Do you go to bed a different way every night? Is there a certain side you sleep on? I mean I brush my teeth, I wash my hands. Why would anybody wash their hands before they go to bed? I don’t know. And the pillows are supposed to be pointed a certain way. The open side of the pillowcase is supposed to be pointed in toward the other side of the bed. I don’t know why.”

Lisa Rogak, Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

(Thanks to St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books.)