There is only one piece of writing advice
It is endurance that counts
I was interested to see that
, who wrote Daily Rituals, a book which documents the writing habits of dozens of great authors, told about his own writing ritual recently.What’s one secret about your writing process that you haven’t shared publicly? Or a quirk, you’d be happy to share?
I have a couple quirks! I get up early to write, and there is a particular boiled-wool scarf that I must have draped over my shoulders in order to begin. I also at some point got attached to grinding precisely 50.3 grams of coffee for the daily pot of coffee that my wife and I share. I’m not sure why! The number just feels “right.” Though I’ve written a great deal about others’ rituals, I’m not too interested in interrogating my own.
I have read as much as I can on this topic over the years. The single best resource is probably this page on Gwern (as well as Daily Rituals). I even wrote a long review of Patricia Highsmith’s diaries about this topic. And my conclusion is that there are no universal rules other than the one I heard in a screenwriting tutorial,—sit your ass in the chair and type.
That’s what struck me about Mason’s interview. There probably are ritualistic things he does, such as the scarf and the coffee, but they don’t really matter. Or if they do, they matter to him and wouldn’t matter to you in the same way. What he’s really good at, and what comes across in this answer, is that he gets up and he sits his ass in the chair and types.
There are as many ways to do that as there are writers. Diana Wynne Jones wrote in an armchair with coffee and a cigarette. Anthony Trollope got up at five in the morning and wrote before work, timing himself to make sure he was productive enough. Alice Monroe wrote while her baby napped. Hilary Mantel worked in an office her husband had to collect her from at the end of the day, hungry, tired, in need of a blanket. Maya Angelou wrote on a bed with a Bible and a bottle of sherry. At six-thirty in the morning.
There’s a lot of commentary about the things that can stop you writing—money, children, time, jobs (did I mention children?)—but while these are relevant, they are not the central point. Everyone has something stopping them from writing. Confronting the blank page isn’t hard because of your circumstances, it’s just hard. For sure, it’s harder for many people, but the advice applies all the same that you need to sit you ass in the chair and type. Gerard Manley Hopkins wasn’t allowed to write poetry in his Jesuit order so he composed sonnets in his head, a form he chose because it was short enough that he could remember the lines while he worked the vegetable garden.
Some people think they need a room of their own but Samuel Smiles didn’t and Katherine Rundell writes in coffee shops (when she doesn’t get up at five a.m). Virginia Woolf had a mentally troubled sibling, who was later institutionalised: her need for a room of one’s own was understandably specific to the challenges of her childhood home, as well as being a feminist necessity.
Whether or not you can get such a room, you still need to sit your ass in the chair and type. I often go to the library to escape the noise of my home. I sit in a small niche, away from everyone else. And I hear traffic, building work, chairs scraping, sneezes, the lift door that gets jammed on the second floor, footsteps, the swing of the door and then the muffled slam. There’s only one thing to do and you know what it is by now.
I like the crude nature of this advice because it expresses the challenge as an imperative. Too much writing advice can distract you from this one simple thing. As Patricia Highsmith said, all writing advice comes down to this: “I have been forcing myself to write for an hour a day for years… It is endurance that counts.”
Force yourself to sit your ass in the chair and type.
Following on your observations: I think if you are ready to write, the various intrusions and distractions don’t stop you. Your writing interferes with your focus on those things.
If you’re not ready to write, the perfect situation won’t help.
“Ready to write” means “ready to neglect things,” and those things could be noise, or your son, or your health.
There's an apocryphal saying attributed to Hemingway that's similar. Supposedly, when asked what the most difficult thing about was, he was said to have answered, "sitting down."
As simplistic and ritualistic as the notion of 'just do it' is; it is fundamentally true. Yet, what prevents writers from doing just that is the same brain generating ideas and plots, choosing words to create sentences that become paragraphs that become chapters is the same brain preventing the writer from doing it. The writing brain has to overcome its own inertia weighed down by doubt and distraction. It's an incredible act of hubris to create something essentially out of nothing then offer it up to public scrutiny.
Within the internal struggle of the self--the ego that will carry a writer's ideas forward and the protective shield against emotional pain--rituals can provide the psychological safety required to get the Thing into words. The rituals make what comes after the sitting down doable. Like a football player with lucky socks, the ritual externalizes the doubt and fear. Perform the ritual correctly and all goes well; if not, well, the brain has an excuse for not completing (or starting) the task. Much less inner turmoil for a writer to blame dirty socks and bad coffee for lack of results than their own musty, futzy brains.
My third book comes out on September 26th in the States. It took five years to actively research and write all while working full-time running a small publishing company. I could have finished it sooner had I not got trapped in a cycle of self-doubt paralysis that prevented the "sitting down." It took giving myself a serious reckoning to accept that my work will be criticized (if not ignored!) and nit-picked as much as it could be praised. It takes a hearty psyche to knowingly fling one's work into the public square to be judged!
And finally, as all writers must do in this modern age, flog, flog, flog...here's the link to Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat--An American History. https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Food-Religious-Movements-Influenced/dp/1934170941/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1D10HAT353K96&keywords=Holy+food+ward&qid=1690283793&sprefix=holy+food+ward%2Caps%2C171&sr=8-1