Practice, process, ritual: Begin a book of rites
Writing rituals are things you do that honor your writing life by creating space, protecting time, and encouraging a focus on joy in your work. I think of ritual as actions that shift the flow of creative power toward you.
Rituals can be derided as ‘empty’ or ‘meaningless’ or ‘performative’—if prayer is directed thought, ritual can be conducted thoughtlessly, and anything that isn’t writing doesn’t matter or count. But ritual really means an act of ceremony—time, space, and proscribed practices to observe and honor something important. Ritual can:
Create harmony between what is invisible within us and what is visible in our environment (eg “Being calm releases my madman creator, so I light this candle and take three breaths before I begin to manifest and remind me of that state of calm.”)
Prepare you for engaging in different kinds of creative work (“Before I outline, I conduct a visual assessment of my environment, which allows me to engage in the spatial awareness that helps me outline.”)
Ritual can show up in your writing in many ways including:
The space you create: the room, the chair, the music you put on, the candle, the specific corner at the specific cafe
The boundaries you set: closing a door, blocking off time in your calendar
Your inspirations: having a specific book you read to spark ideas, the photograph you look at of the subject you’re writing about to ‘get into’ them before writing
Your preparations: visualization, drawing, pre-writing mindfulness exercises, the walk to the cafe, your peripateticism.
You may be more familiar with the ‘creating space’ aspect of ritual, but hopefully you can tell from this list that ritual is equally about protecting time. “Be able to write at any moment in case inspiration strikes!” won’t get you as far as “create and protect time specifically to write and support your writing.” In addition to setting boundaries, other kinds of rituals can help you ‘create time’ as well: the cafe you have to go to when doing scene work might take fifteen minutes to get to—great, now you have fifteen minutes to think, so that’s fifteen more minutes you got to be in practice today. If I have a visualization ritual at the start of my outlining stage, I need to include that in the plan I make for my writing time.
In this way—and by finding what makes the process more comfortable, inspiring, enjoyable, or exciting to you at different stages—you honor the practice and process over the anticipated, hoped-for product. This protection from other demands and habits is a huge accomplishment to even do once, but will get easier the more you do it. Eventually, you may find yourself protecting your writing self “thoughtlessly” (naturally) through ritual.
Things to do and start this week related to your writing rituals
This week, consider: if ritual is about observing and honoring, what does that mean to me? What is it that I want to observe and honor in my rituals?
Record what rituals you have already.
Whether you call it practice, process, or ritual, begin to identify what is necessary for you to do your best work, and to enjoy it or take some delight in it.
You might know a whole host of these or recognize at least one. Think about your practice and process for moments of ritual. Never leaving the house without your notebook and taking a walk to think during your outlining stage can both be considered rituals. Do you put The Office on in the background for the right level of joyful distraction? Ritual. Talk to your dogs about what you’ll be working on? Ritual. ‘Put on comfy clothes,’ perhaps, or ‘Sit near the door so I can let my mind wander when people walk by.’ Ritual.
Allow space for the entire thing, for the thinking part and the reading part and the doing nothing part. Remember that there are different rituals for different kinds and stages of work.
Investigate what effect these rituals have on you. Write a couple of sentences about each, maybe more. They may reveal very important things about how your specific creativity works.
(Begin to connect the rituals to the stages.)
Separate rituals from conditions. The point of all this is not to become precious about writing—writing is hard work. Conditions are things like, ‘This special pen only” and “This seat at this exact coffee place or else.” If you need a bunch of conditions in order to write, that can end up functioning as avoidance.
Write down your special conditions and ask, are they ritual-worthy, or can you do without them? Are they standing in place for something you really need, or can a ritual replace one or more of these conditions? If they don’t carry thought, if they are not the action that shifts power and leads to writing, they’re not worthy ritual. Toss any thought of what you don’t need.
Also, ask if you can turn any of your conditions into helpful rituals. For example, if your condition is ‘needs to not be too quiet,’ try replacing that with an action that can get you the quiet you need, like going to the cafe when drafting or identifying the right kind of music to play at home.
Next, and this may continue indefinitely, experiment with new rituals.
Explore some new acts of observance and honor. Focus on rituals that can help create space and protect time for your writing, like always closing the door to your office when writing, or taking a few deep breaths when you sit down, or silencing your notifications.
Don’t stress too much about ‘effects’ or ‘impact’ just yet. Perhaps you make it a ritual to put your note-book in your jacket pocket whenever you leave the house, without intending to use it. Just make the putting-in-pocket the ritual. See what happens.
Muriel Barbery wrote, “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found?” Finding and creating rituals asks us to tune our attention to where beauty and joy and depth can be found in our work and in the dailiness of our lives. The more you tune in to where space can be created and time protected, you are practicing writer’s focus and imagination.
Record all of this. “Ritual” also means “a book of rites”—you might think of recording your findings in such a book.
When you discover or uncover something repeatable that helps you stay attentive, observant, and ‘in’ the work, and what you can do to protect time and space for your writing, record it in your book of rites.
You might also record what all these findings reveal about you, your values, and how you want to grow.
This is a living document.
Do you need to share any of these rituals?
If you want to try the ritual of ‘closing office door,’ make sure you communicate to anyone you live with that this is something you would like to try, and get them on board with your experiment.
If you have any rituals that you love, can you share them to inspire others? (Can you comment on this post or email me?)
Ritual and practice
Writing may be considered a ‘spiritual’ practice of which ritual is a part, and I encourage you to explore whatever that assertion makes you feel. Whether you embrace it, resist it, or lean around it, journal about what this notion brings up in you—is writing a spiritual practice? If so, how? If not, how do I describe it? And consider what it might mean for you, if you were to say yes to such an idea, or, if you already believe in it, to question it. I don’t need the word ‘spiritual’ personally, but writing is a practice—act, or condition—of devotion to your own value and gratitude to your body, a creative act that shifts power, an honoring of perspective as a force, and an opportunity to do what I call “reaching toward”—how doing, sharing, and receiving writing is ultimately about connecting human beings, which is part of my own understanding of ‘a deeper way.’
Perhaps, after you’ve created your own writing ritual to perform this week, you can explore some of these questions in the sacred space you make.
Next week, I’m taking you in the opposite direction—how to be prepared when inspiration does strike and there’s no time for ritual! AKA becoming a note-taker.
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