The one writing ritual you can’t give up
Most authors have writing rituals, ranging from the pragmatic to the bizarre. Hemingway famously wrote standing up, and Edith Wharton lying in bed. John Cheever wrote in his underwear but Victor Hugo went one step further and wrote nude. Truman Capote avoided Fridays, never beginning or ending a piece of writing on that day. Poet Frederick Schiller couldn’t write without the smell of rotten apples emanating from his desk drawer.
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My own writing ritual has been simple: one cup of coffee and I’m away. I’m not alone in this. Apparently Honoré de Balzac would drink up to fifty coffees a day, making my own one or two cups seem positively puritan. He would write day and night, and when the coffee stopped taking effect he would chew on coffee beans.
Unfortunately I don’t have de Balzac’s constitution and my doctor has forced me to abandon caffeine. I must confess, it’s been tough. A coffee always immediately clicked me into gear. It was a signal to myself: time to work. And the caffeine buzz gave me that ability to embrace the empty page with enthusiam, even on days when I felt terribly tired. So I miss it. Desperately.
As I mourn caffeine and attempt to make do with roasted dandelion ‘coffee’ (it’s as bad as it sounds), I thought I’d ask some of my fellow writers about the one writing ritual they couldn’t give up. Here goes…