This week when I sent up my computer in my new office, I placed my two-inch tall Indian atop the monitor before I turned it on. Seated cross legged, he holds his pipe and wears a war bonnet and an expression that is at once stern and contemplative.
I bought him the summer I was eight, when I spent a week with my grandparents at their rented cabin on Loon Lake. Our last day there, they took me to a souvenir shop to get a keepsake. Both of them insisted a cedar pencil box would be more appropriate and useful, but I knew I needed the little statue.
I was right. He has served me well. He attended college with me and has lived on my desk for nearly 40 years. I don’t believe that he makes my writing any better, and certainly, he hasn’t stopped my computer from suffering glitches, but his familiar presence makes me feel better and that’s what counts.
I’m not alone in my need for a routine as I write. When I feel guilty about filling my craving for security with a two inch high figurine, I console myself with the knowledge that Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk and took a heady whiff as he began his writing day. Colette warmed herself up to write by picking fleas from her cat. Rudyard Kipling insisted on having the blackest ink he could obtain. Without that ink, he believed his writing suffered.
Ernest Hemingway stood up to write. Benjamin Franklin preferred to write in the bathtub and Mark Twain wrote best lying down. Gertrude Stein wrote poetry in her Ford when it was parked at the curb in front of her house. Charles Dickens liked to walk twenty to thirty miles before he wrote, and Stephen King takes a ritual vitamin pill before sitting down at a desk where his papers are "all arranged in the same places."
Back in the Midwest, where I was born and raised, we called those and similar routine habits “crutches.” Crutches were things to be avoided at all costs, even by people who legitimately couldn’t walk without them. Relying on something outside one’s self for comfort or stability was a sign of weakness. Worse yet, these quirks were a mark of eccentricity – not a trait that was valued in that time and place.
Psychologists tell us that transition rituals and objects provide a necessary way to mark both spatial and temporal boundaries and to move from one activity or place to another. Think about it. Business people dress in suits each morning as a way to separate their work life from their home life. They take a special coffee cup to work as a way to personalize their work environment. Commuters gear up for the day ahead on the train to work and unwind on the way home. Many people transition from their work week to the weekend with Friday happy hours.
As writers, our rituals aren’t so institutionalized. Because we work at home, these routines may be even more important anchors for us than for people who work in offices outside their homes.
The writing books are of little help when it comes to devising transition rituals. We’re the ones who must decide what cues we want in our writing space that will signal us it’s time to get busy setting words on paper. No one can tell us whether that means a room of our own, solitary time in the morning before the rest of the household wakes up, wearing a special “thinking cap”, or listing to a particular piece of music.
We have to decide for ourselves what routine activities we can engage in after we’ve written for several hours in order to re-enter family life as full participants. When we don’t do this, we may be present in body, but we’re not emotionally all there.
It’s up to us to come up with effective rituals to help ourselves retain our sanity as we gain closure on a project and during the times when we’re in between projects. I like to go out to eat Chinese food the day I finish a book. Next comes a week-long movie binge, followed by a reading binge and then a period of normalcy.
I know that I’m getting ready to begin a new project when I clean old work off my computer desk and begin building a new nest of papers. Looking down over what would appear as chaos to an outsider, my Indian smiles serenely. “Get to work,” he seems to be saying. Most of the time I do just that.
Write about the objects you surround yourself as you write. What meaning do they hold for you? If you were to design the perfect writing space for yourself, what colors, smells, sounds, textures and sights would fill it? What special symbols would you place in this space? What steps could you take within the next two weeks to make this dream a reality?
Observe yourself for a week, paying attention to the things you do to get ready or put yourself in the mood to write? How do you fill your time between the instant you end a writing session and the time you reconnect with the world? How do you fill your time between writing projects? Brainstorm some activities and experiment with to see how they work as transition rituals. Write about the experience.