I agree with Sherman Alexie about not ritualizing writing habits. The more you ritualize, the more excuses you give yourself to not do it. Is that an accurate paraphrase? My writing habits have changed over the years, and I have allowed myself the overindulgence of ritualization, but I find now that avoiding ritual has resulted in greater productivity. In the beginning, when I first tried my hand at short stories, I was nineteen. I sat in my parents’ basement late at night, churning out an interconnected collection of Winesburg-derivative work, and when I got a laptop, I sat at their dining room table, listening to Ryan Adams’ Gold, composing my first novel, which was a strange mishmash of Thomas Mann, Nabokov, Alan Hollinghurst, and Dante (all writers a novice has no business trying to imitate). Neither project amounted to much, but I imagine most writers have to go through a juvenile period of throwing words on a page and burning their influences out of them. After this, I went through a period in my early-2os where I more pretended to be a writer than actually wrote. Every once in a while, I’d return to that first novel and try to rewrite it, but always came to the same conclusion: it wasn’t very good. It had moments, flashes of solid storytelling. But I may have been better off if I’d recognized sooner that it was unsalvageable. If I’d abandoned it and tried something else, I might have progressed more quickly, but I wasn’t ready to do that. I’m sure some writers experience something similar to this as well.
It wasn’t until I started dating my wife that I buckled down and wrote methodically. I decided then to take it more seriously. It had long been something I wanted to do, but I’d been circling without focus. The first year we were together, I set a goal to publish my work by the end of the year, and I did, and I haven’t stopped since. By then, I’d become a morning writer. I liked to wake up and brew a pot of coffee and sit in the part of our apartment, in a room in the loft we’d designated as a study, and spend the morning working. If my wife planned for us to do something too early, it put me in a foul temper (which is a more dignified way of saying it put me in a snit, which was the first word that came to mind). I still wrote even when we had something planned, but I had to cut back on the coffee. After all, if we had to drive, I didn’t want to ask her every twenty minutes to pull over so I could the restroom (yes, dignity!). In any case, at that point, I’d made coffee integral to the process, and if I couldn’t have coffee while writing, I chalked the day up as a loss.
These days I work whenever I find the time, wherever I am, whenever an idea comes to me. It used to be I’d let inspiration marinate, which is really a convoluted way of saying I procrastinated. I wanted to wait for the perfect time to get it down, the perfect moment without realizing there was a never a better moment than the present for this. Writing the way I do now is a necessity driven by having children. Kids demand attention, so I’ll take what I can get, which are usually the small moments between tasks, a lunch break at work, the train ride to and from. The only other options available are to give up writing, which isn’t going to happen, or become one of those self-centered fathers who is never present, which I try to avoid as best I can. To this end, I’ve started to carry around Moleskin notebooks of various sizes. I stick the smaller ones in the inside pockets of my jackets, the larger ones in my bag, and I’m often seen wandering down the street with an notepad out, scribbling, looking up every once in a while to make sure I don’t run into anyone. I’ve had to stop being precious about what I put on the page and trust the editing process to refine my ideas and get them right.
The one thing that hasn’t changed since I was nineteen is the trance-like state I enter when writing is going well. It’s like Alice’s rabbit hole. The world outside falls away, and I’m swept entirely within the world of words I’m creating. This happened even with my earlier work, less often it’s true, but it happened, and I’ve learned to trust this feeling, which I chalk up to intuition. Still, it feels like magic, and when I mention above that I used to procrastinate, it was really with the trance in mind. If I could invoke it, bring it upon myself, I’d get an idea down right. I only had to wait for that perfect time, and to an extent, I retain that urge. But I’m older, more seasoned. The thing I’ve learned that stops me for ritualizing is that the trance can’t be invoked. I can either sit around waiting for it, producing nothing, or sit down each day and try to produce something and hope the trance overcomes me. Thing is, the trance is more likely to take place when I’m working every day, which means I have to keep going without it. I have to endure days of frustration when it seems none of my work is any good. On days it’s not going well, I write maybe a hundred or two hundred words and delete half of them during an edit. But when the trance comes over me, it’s euphoric. It’s akin to an athlete hitting his stride, lighting up the court, knocking down a succession of three point shots, or a musician finding his groove, setting his audience alight with instrumental pyrotechnics.
When it’s gone I’m spent. For the next few hours, I’m limp and useless, like an addict coming off a high. But it always feels worth it. I look at whatever I’ve written, and what I write in these moments is inevitably the high point of any given story. So the trace needs to be protected. And to do this, I’m still somewhat precious about my writing time. I can do it whenever, wherever. But if I think there’s the possibility the trance might come, I need to hide away. If it’s broken, if my wife opens the door and comes upstairs to ask me a question about paint chips and scares the muse away, I’m tempted to react like this:
I agree with Sherman Alexie about not ritualizing writing habits. The more you ritualize, the more excuses you give yourself to not do it. Is that an accurate paraphrase? My writing habits have changed over the years, and I have allowed myself the overindulgence of ritualization, but I find now that avoiding ritual has resulted in greater productivity. In the beginning, when I first tried my hand at short stories, I was nineteen. I sat in my parents’ basement late at night, churning out an interconnected collection of Winesburg-derivative work, and when I got a laptop, I sat at their dining room table, listening to Ryan Adams’ Gold, composing my first novel, which was a strange mishmash of Thomas Mann, Nabokov, Alan Hollinghurst, and Dante (all writers a novice has no business trying to imitate). Neither project amounted to much, but I imagine most writers have to go through a juvenile period of throwing words on a page and burning their influences out of them. After this, I went through a period in my early-2os where I more pretended to be a writer than actually wrote. Every once in a while, I’d return to that first novel and try to rewrite it, but always came to the same conclusion: it wasn’t very good. It had moments, flashes of solid storytelling. But I may have been better off if I’d recognized sooner that it was unsalvageable. If I’d abandoned it and tried something else, I might have progressed more quickly, but I wasn’t ready to do that. I’m sure some writers experience something similar to this as well.
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