3d • General discussion
THE RITUALS
Victor Hugo gave his clothes to his manservant before sitting down to write, with explicit instructions not to return them until his pages for the day were done. He wrote naked, and he wrote well, which is either a coincidence or the point.
Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his study. His wife described the smell as nauseating. Schiller described it as essential. He said he could not write without it.
Henrik Ibsen pinned a portrait of his greatest rival, August Strindberg, above his writing desk and stared at it every morning before beginning. Whether this was motivation or exorcism, he never quite explained.
These are not the eccentricities of unwell men. These are technologies.
The hardest part of writing is not the writing. It's the moment of crossing from ordinary life into the concentrated state where real work happens. The ritual is the bridge. The brain learns to associate a strange and specific behaviour with the state of deep focus that follows it. After enough repetitions, the rotting apples become a trigger. The naked body becomes a signal. The portrait of the rival becomes a provocation. The ritual doesn't create the concentration. It summons it.
Nabokov composed entire novels on index cards, each card a single scene or passage, stored in a long box and shuffled like a deck when the structure needed rethinking. He said he saw the whole novel complete in his mind before writing a single word, and the cards gave him the freedom to enter the story at any point, in any sequence. The card system was not a quirk. It was a deliberate method for keeping the architecture visible.
The question worth asking is not whether your rituals are sufficiently dramatic. It's whether you have any. And whether you've built them on purpose or stumbled into them by accident. Because the writers who finish things, as opposed to the writers who intend to finish things, almost always have a way of beginning that is exactly the same every time.
What's your ritual? 👇
Mine was an early-morning coffee shop, so it started slowly until the place got busy. That buzzing would give a sort of rhythm. I would drink my cappuccino slowly, and write for two to four hours, until that buzzing distracted me too much, so I’d leave.
pps it's still my quirk ..
have a great weekend :)🌻🙂
2
1 comment
THE RITUALS
powered by
skool.com/marcello-iori-7056
A home for storytellers who want to write and share their best work and build a career through writing. Best Creative Writing Masterclass lives HERE
Suggested communities
Powered by