WRITING RITUALS: DEVELOPING THE HABIT

People often ask me what a typical writing day is like for me. As a juggler of many roles: author, book marketer, business writer, teacher, parent, community activist, etc., no day is typical, but habit plays a major role for me in keeping my nose to the grindstone. I’m not blessed with the ability to wake up at dawn, (and the rare times I do, I have absolutely nothing worth saying) but on the days I’m not teaching full-time, I do try to get to the computer within an hour after I wake up—by nine or nine-thirty at the latest. I find that building in little rituals helps, allowing myself a quick glance at the newspaper over breakfast before carting a large mug of tea upstairs. I find this habit so ingrained, it feels a little bit like Pavlov’s dogs. I find myself facing the computer without even thinking about whether I should write, clean the house, run errands, grade papers, or work on a paid project. Then, I actually build in a limit of 30 minutes of procrastination time which serves as both a warm-up and a way of not succumbing to distractions later, I check my e-mail and social networking sites, and play no more than one—all right, maybe two—games of solitaire. While people may scoff, I find that spending 10 minutes thinking about nothing but the patterns of cards frees up my brain to create without thinking about the pressing administrative minutiae and other demands of the day, all of which—out of habit—I’ve trained myself to save for later.