Creative Rituals

The Rituals of Creative People & Why I Thought I Didn't Have One

I’m Laura, an author, who doesn’t have a creative ritual…

Rituals inhabit the land of the discipline, like the sort of people who wake up at 5am to go for a run, who have accomplished a physical feat before they’ve even properly started their day. That isn’t me, I wake up and simply hope for the best. Yet, each morning I make a decaf coffee, head into my garden studio, open my laptop, put on Classic FM or a deep house dj mix on YouTube (depending on my mood and how I’ve slept) and then I read through what I had written the day before. I do this consistently, to not do it feels like leaving the house without my keys or more purse, but it isn’t a ritual, right? It doesn’t feel grand, or interesting enough to be one…

Long before writers had access to Google Docs and and lattes humans recognised that the mind needed something to signal the shift between normal time to ‘work’ mode. That ‘lock in’ type of feeling, that I imagine athletes get as they do their warm-up routines, or surgeons feel as they scrub in before an operation. The signal is clear ‘it is time to work’. Psychologist call this the ‘pre-performance routine’, and they rely heavily on repeated cues to shift the brain into a more focused state, that it might remain in for quite a length of time. It is conditioning, you are training yourself into a state of optimal readiness.
I am mildly suspicious of the creativity-as-discipline crowd, and believe the prescribing any sort of rigour on art, on scheduling creativity, feels a bit joyless and doomed to fail when it comes up against the fickle nature of life.
…but then again, I’ve never really tried it properly.

The Professionals:

When I read Haruki Murakami’s routine it made me want to shut my laptop down completely. He wakes up at 4am, writes for 5-6 hours, then does some sort of physical activity like swimming, or running 10k. Murakami started with a routine that was less healthy, where he wrote and smoked until his fingers were stained. He came to the conclusion that this routine was not conducive to a long life and was unsustainable for a novelist who wanted to write for a long time. This lead to him creating a healthier ritual, which I understand, reading about the origins of his routine made me balk at it less, and respect it a little more, but as a chronically ill girly, mother, wife, woman who is juggling several roles per day… it isn’t for me.

We move on to a whackier routine, where Beethoven would allegedly count out sixty coffee beans before he would start composing. I’m not entirely convinced that this wasn’t compulsion rather than ritual but we have to respect the commitment.

Maya Angelou has this to say about her writing routine…

“I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine. I keep a hotel room in which I do my work—a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon. If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvelous. I edit while I’m working. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind.”

The hotel room is key here, a place that exists purely for work, that has none of the textures of home life to distract and disturb. I thought that this applied to me and my studio, but the studio is a place for multiple goings on, not just my work as a writer. In fact, it’s hard to get myself to leave the studio most days.

Psychologist Paul Silvia wrote that writers who write a lot aren’t necessarily more talented, they simply write every day without fail. It is the consistency that matters. In his work ‘How to Write a Lot’ he makes the case that protecting a writing routine is the most effective thing a writer can do for their craft. I personally feel that this is quite hard to do, Silvia tells us that we must build this habit, but he doesn’t share how to do it without making it feel as though we are commuting and clocking in at the writing factory. I suspect that this is where the idea of ritual comes in.

When I looked at the ritual of other writers I came to the conclusion that a ritual just as to be consistent, it doesn’t have to be extravagant, only mean something to the writer, or the creative.

Let’s try it out…

I started quite modestly but sitting down to write in the studio, with my decaf as usual, but always at the same time of day. It isn’t the earliest of starts by any means, but 9am gave me enough time to oversee breakfast before school, to ensure my teenager was eating more than just biscuits and left full of something more nutritious, it gave me a little time to get myself ready also. So no, no 4am start for me, some experiments have predictable outcomes.
From 9am until 3pm I wrote, and illustrated, and researched and surprisingly I built a good creative structure, but did have to remind myself to take breaks. 3pm rolled around and I naturally started to slow down, I found myself shutting down my laptop rather than leaving it idle to return to later, I tidied up my paints in the studio and left everything clear for my session the next day. Before I would keep returning to my work in the evening, distracted by making dinner or the loud chatter of my family, half trying to create, half trying to have a conversation.

This might have more to do with the benefits of not being interrupted, but I found this ritual useful as it required nothing strenuous, just me showing up. It also made me look a little closer at what I already do…

I mentioned my daily habit at the start of this essay, and now if someone described it to me I would immediately label it as a ritual. Repetition, transition, it all has the hallmarks of a ritual, perhaps I didn’t label it as such because it didn’t ever feel that serious, it was very ordinary, almost cliche. Coffee and a laptop, how original of me.
Perhaps that is the point though, that rituals done well and often probably won’t ever feel as though they are rituals, they just fit into the daily rhythm of a creative life.

If you are in search of a ritual of your own, here is what I would suggest thinking about…

1. Take a good look at what you already do, it is likely that there is already something there to work with, like a place, or a drink, a time, a playlist. Perhaps you haven’t properly examined it because it doesn’t seem very impressive on the surface. Look again.

2. If nothing is jumping out at you then create a ritual that starts small, begin by lighting a candle that signifies that your work has begun, perhaps don’t begin with a 10k run, that could always be added later. Give your new ritual a couple of weeks to settle in (they need time to bed in) and take note of anything that shifts or grows organically from it.

Not everyone comes to writing and creative pursuits from the same space. You might be the sort of writer who gets to the end of a busy week and writes simply for the joy of it, with no goal in sight, a Sunday spent in a poetry journal or world building. Or perhaps you are like me, who needs to maintain continuity, who is working on one large project that they are contracted to finish. Maybe you are a professional, like a copywriter or a journalist, and the luxury of ritual has long been overtaken by the pressure of output. At what point to ritual turn into labour?
Perhaps, as creatives, it is best to look closely and see if the ritual is serving us, or if we are serving the ritual.

What I do know now is…

I’m Laura, an author, and my creative ritual consists of a cup of decaf in my studio, and a good playlist.

Please feel free to share your rituals with me, I would love a glimpse at what a day in the life of another creative looks like!

Laura ♉︎