Designing A Ritual: A Collaborative Essay
Megan Eralie-Henriques & TTLJ Staff

A few months ago, I began the pursuit to add writing rituals into my life. The first step of this was to read craft books in hopes their authors would reveal something about the actual process of getting oneself to sit down and write. I was looking for the parts that happened before pen ever touched paper–a “how to get in the mood to write” guide. So, I tried the rituals of many writers and concluded the same thing every time: they never felt like me (because they weren’t). 

I wasn’t looking for the right thing. I wanted someone to tell me what to do, and I wanted it to work. But in order for a writing ritual to harness my creative energy, it had to come from me. I needed to shift my perspective. When a writer reveals their writing ritual to me, I am not meant to copy/paste it into my life. I am foraging for inspiration rather than instruction. 

As I researched writing rituals, the first trend I noticed among them is that many “famous” writers credit waking up at 4 a.m. as their key to success. I had professors in college who swore by this too. This advice, I know for certain, is not for me. But there is something, for me, about the act of writing in the morning. I get to my office by nine AM most days, and once there, I spend thirty minutes or so working on my book, writing something new, or revising a poem–whatever feels exciting. I’m never strict about this time and how it’s spent, choosing instead to follow the whims of writing. Even if sometimes the whims are thirty minutes conducting a deep dive on snail bites. This is not time wasted.

Some writers depend on certain types of music, others like EB White swear against it in favor of the noisy “carnival” of family life surrounding him in the living room. Whether it’s ambient noise, absolute silence, or something in-between, sound seems an important part of the writing ritual. For me, sound is mood based. There are days I need silence. Most days I need Tchaikovsky bursting my eardrums.

Of course, there are many mentions of the various drugs and alcoholic drinks infused in a writing ritual, but the direction I see in this is to look for ways to step outside the work. Find a new stimulant. Get up. Get out. Then return to the work. Never underestimate the value of taking a break. Go for a walk, call Grandma, play a few days of Stardew Valley, bake a cake. Find what’s invigorating and do it.

Ursula K. LeGuin famously kept a rigorous schedule, but it expanded beyond just writing. In her schedule, she designated time for input (reading, listening to music) and caring for herself (cleaning her house, making meals and eating them). Then, my favorite part: “After 8:00 pm–I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.” It’s essential to get out and live the writing for a while. I call this collecting poems: “Today I am collecting poems by sifting through piles of trinkets at the secondhand craft store.” “Today I am collecting poems by getting my annual Influenza vaccination.”

Then there’s how much to write everyday. Stephen King writes six pages a day. Brandon Sanderson ten. John Steinbeck wrote one. Joan Didion spent her days thinking through ideas only to write three or four sentences. For some writers, it’s about the time spent writing, rather than the word count. 

I presently have a goal to write 3,000 words a week. Some weeks it feels impossible. Other weeks, I manage to write 1,000 words in 15 minutes. These are meant to be generative words so that in a few months I have 50,000 words of a manuscript. Not perfect words, so what matters most is that they get written. How? Crying helps (serious suggestion). The act of writing, for me especially nonfiction writing, can be very emotionally draining and laborious work. After a while, I begin to neglect the me-now and need to release the emotion I’m writing so I can feel what’s actually around me. So, yes, crying needs to be part of my ritual so that I can put the writing away for a while and come back to it fresh. 

A few days prior to the release of this Leaflet, I was fortunate to have dinner with poet Heid E. Erdrich, during which she asked how my writing begins. For me, handwriting drafts is the first step. I keep meticulous writing journals, collecting every scrap of thought in my scraggly script, where I can touch them. 

Others at the table agreed hand-written notes are first steps for them too, and the conversation shifted to our fears that handwriting is becoming a lost art. Writing is a practice that has evolved from being one-handed to two. For some, this means loss. For others, this means progress. Regardless of the tools, the goal still is making art. Tool-selection is an essential element for a ritual. Try many, and change them out whenever a block begins to appear. 

Erdrich has been asking her question in search of patterns and truths about the nature of creativity. Last year she broke both her elbows and both her wrists, restricting her ability to handwrite and type. She had to adjust, which meant using voice-to-text software for the first time. 

“I still had deadlines to meet,” she said with laughter. 

Healing from her injuries brought the challenge of re-training her bones to write again, a process I imagine must have been painful. She described, briefly, some of the exercises she did daily, and as she did I found the light-bulb moment I’ve been waiting for. 

A ritual is not about having the right parts. It’s an exercise. 

Physical exercises are meant to suit the needs of a body, and those needs change depending on age, injury, weight, on whatever goal needs to be met. Writing exercises, or rituals, should be treated with the same fluidity–evaluated with the changing of the seasons, fit for the project, in alignment with the health of the writer. 

In an interview with The Paris Review, Alice Munro says: “You protect yourself by thinking if you have all these rituals and routines then nothing can get you.” And I’m guilty of it–the kind of thinking that makes me believe having the perfect ritual will make me the perfect writer. But ritual does not make me invincible. So why have one? 

For me, it’s about making writing as much a part of daily life as is feeding and moving my body. 

But I must remember to adjust. Be forgiving. If I fall out of the practice of my ritual for a day, a week, or even a year, this doesn’t mean I’ve failed. I’m allowing myself to try new things, but a ritual is not a requirement. If it’s not serving me, it’s not for me. 

And that time I spent researching snail bites? I wrote a poem about snails two weeks later–a poem I never would have found without that research. 

I asked The Turning Leaf Journal staff about their rituals–writing, or otherwise–and here’s what they shared:

K.M. Hanslik
One of my favorite writing rituals is to sit down with a hot cup of tea or coffee, especially on a rainy or gloomy day, with a laptop and notepad (I keep notes throughout the day of ideas I’ve had so I can flesh them out later). Sometimes I listen to instrumental music; sometimes I use ear plugs to block noise. You may find me lighting incense or sage to provide a nice relaxing background aroma. I often refer to specific pieces of media (a book chapter, video clip, visual art) to serve as a springboard for me: anything that’s inspired an idea is a good point for me to reference when I need to find that “spark” to re-engage my inspiration. 

Maddison O’Donnell
I have more novel writing rituals than I do anything else. Beyond lighting a candle and making a cup of tea before setting fingers to keyboard, I like to assign a blank journal specifically to that project for notes, thoughts, clippings, etc. In a digital space, my equivalent ritual is something I call a “dump document” (hardly an endearing name, but it gets the job done). It’s a blank document I save to my desktop, into which I throw ideas, words, lines of dialogue, character names, plot points, and such for insertion into the project later. I like to think of both rituals like upending a jigsaw puzzle box: the pieces tend to go flying, and you might find some buried beneath the rug, but if you can gather them onto the tabletop eventually, you can begin to make something out of them, piece-by-piece.

Libby Kasseulke
I am a creature of chaos, unfortunately. Rituals imply care and attention and a sort of slowness I often don’t allow myself. Over this semester of my MFA program, we’ve been reading The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, and one thing she recommends is morning pages, which is essentially the practice of writing three pages by hand each morning as soon as you wake up. In full transparency, they’ve been hard. It takes time and dedication and discipline; it takes a willingness to look at yourself and your thoughts each day. But they have brought, in a way, a calming sense of routine that I think I’ve been craving for a long time. Which must be at the core of a ritual: a sense of readiness, a sense of calm. All of it I’m still practicing.

Allison Mei-Li
One of my favorite things about being a writer is how it changes your brain. You move through life a little differently—being more open to slowing down, noticing, taking the scenic route. I find this reflected in my morning ritual, where I’ve come to love the slow process of a pour-over. 

Here’s my ritual: 
1. Grind a small amount of beans (I have both a hand-grinder and electric grinder)
2. Heat water in a kettle to 205 degrees
3. Weigh the coffee grinds on a scale so that it equals 15 g
4. Put the grinds in a coffee funnel that fits the size of a coffee mug
5. Pour the hot water over the funnel. Twirl the tea kettle as I do this.
6. Enjoy a perfect cup of coffee 

Yes, it takes much longer and involves more steps than a simple drip coffee machine or keurig, but there is something soothing about being this involved!   

If there’s a take-away from all this, it’s this: ritual is an opening. Whether a writer is just beginning to discover themself as one or they’ve been writing for decades, there is always a new portal to go through. If you’ve been waiting for an invitation, this is it.

As for me, I’ve walked through many portals opened by others before me. I will continue to visit them, but I am excited and curious to open portals of my own–portals that will bring me closer to the center of creativity than I’ve ever gone before.

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