Welcome back to Worm School! This summer, I’m making a plan for finally finishing my overdue book project—and the advice I’m giving myself / the habits I’m adopting in my writing cave should, I hope, prove useful for anyone trying to make progress on an ambitious creative project.
Before we get to today’s lesson, some announcements:
Worm School will last three more weeks, with the eighth and final lesson coming out on Monday, July 22nd.
Free subscribers will receive one additional lesson, in two weeks. If you’d like to read the full series and also join the weekday Worm Zoom sessions, I’m offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions through 7/3.
Worm Zoom will continue weekday mornings until the end of August; then I’ll decide if it’s worth extending again. Thanks to everyone who’s been participating so far! I’m finding it a really useful accountability practice. (Paid subscribers can join us here.)
Meanwhile, there will be no new newsletter issues in August. The normal newsletter format/schedule will resume on September 9th and continue every other Monday after that.
OK, on to today’s lesson!
Week Five: Lean Into Ritual
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Last week’s lesson was all about finding energy in your creative life—a worthy goal for sure. But I also want to acknowledge that some projects are just inescapably energy-demanding: They require sustained attention and sustained labor, and may only feel energizing in brief moments.
When that’s the case, I always wonder: How can you make the experience feel a little less effortful and/or how can you learn to tolerate the discomfort a little longer?
One answer to both questions is to lean into ritual. In a creative practice, ritual can be a way of:
Transitioning from one state to another state
Getting into the right headspace for the kind of work you’re trying to do
Shutting out distractions
Silencing your inner critic
Tolerating the discomfort of trying to do something difficult or elusive
Making hard things a little less hard
In short, it’s a way of saying I’m doing this now—and when you repeat a ritual day after day, it makes I’m doing this now a habit and helps build momentum on your project.
Remember Maggi Hambling: “It is not difficult to make a work of art, the difficulty lies in being in the right state to do it.” Ritual is a semi-reliable way of getting into the right state semi-regularly.
I’m betting that most of you reading already have some rituals around your creative practice. But I’m also betting that some of your rituals are not entirely conscious and may not be serving you too well.
For instance, your ritual might be that you sit at your desk and do a quick scan of email, social media, and the news before getting down to work. Maaayybe that’s getting you into the right headspace for being creative—but probably not, and you’d probably be wise to substitute a more effective pattern of behavior.
Playing around with our rituals—being intentional about what kind of mental space we’re trying to create—can be really effective, and also kind of fun. As you think about tweaking yours, here are five criteria to consider:
Transitional
Remember, you’re marking a transition from one state to another—so what kind of activity makes sense for the headspace you want to slip into?
For instance, if you’re transitioning from just waking up to getting down to work, doing something energizing makes sense: making coffee, exercising, getting some fresh air. Here’s an almost eighty-year-old P. G. Wodehouse describing his pre-writing ritual, circa 1960:
I still touch my toes fifty times every morning. The daily dozen. I’ve done those exercises since 1919, when I read an article about them by Walter Camp in Collier’s. You sort of twist your body about while standing up. They seem to be good, but I suppose one of these days I’ll just come apart.
Many times, you may be transitioning from having a lot going on to trying to focus on one thing. What ritual might make sense for marking this transition? You could try putting on a particular item of clothing, adjusting the lighting, playing a certain piece of music (or white noise), putting your phone away in a drawer.
I finally just bought one of these KSafes (pictured) and my new AM writing ritual is to: get up and fetch coffee from the kitchen; start the morning Worm Zoom and enter my goal for the session on the tracking spreadsheet; and, finally, put my phone in jail for two hours and get to work. Truthfully, I’m not normally very distracted by my phone first thing in the morning—but the ritual of putting the phone in the safe is part of how I’m signaling to myself that it’s focused writing time.
Frictionless
Don’t get carried away! Your ritual should not be something elaborate, demanding, or distracting. Lighting a candle is great; lighting a candle, saying a prayer, doing some breathing exercises, and writing in your journal for ten minutes is probably too much. I would say the ritual should take four minutes, tops (the length of time it takes to brew a pot of French press coffee). But I could be wrong. David Lynch meditates twice daily for twenty minutes each time and swears that this is the wellspring of all his creativity.
In any case, try to implement a ritual that can be done anywhere, that doesn’t rely too much on a particular prop—which, come to think of it, may be a drawback to my new KSafe routine…
Pleasurable
I already wrote about how making art seems to require a mix of discipline and anti-discipline. Since you’re probably having to exert some willpower to focus on your work, try to balance that out with a feeling of luxury or decadence. Patricia Highsmith is our lodestar here. This is how the biographer Andrew Wilson described her writing ritual:
Her favourite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible. Her position, she noted, would be almost foetal and, indeed, her intention was to create, she said, “a womb of her own.”
Truman Capote said, “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched out on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.” Radclyffe Hall could never work in anything but old, comfortable clothes: “I usually work in an old tweed skirt and my velvet smoking jacket, a man’s smoking jacket by choice because of the loose and comfortable sleeves.” Proust began his writing day by ringing for his longtime housekeeper to deliver his coffee in a silver coffeepot, along with a croissant from his favorite bakery. These are good models to emulate!
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Eccentric
You might think Highsmith and Proust are outliers, that their habits are unusually eccentric. Not really! This is what my two books are about: all the weird, highly specific, somewhat neurotic habits artists through the ages have leaned on to get their work done.
I think there’s something about the ritual being a bit outlandish or unusual that makes it more effective. For example, if you drink coffee throughout the day, drinking a cup of coffee before you get down to work is not really marking the transition in any particularly impactful way. But if you count out precisely 60 coffee beans for your morning cup (as Beethoven supposedly did) or keep a drawer full of rotting apples in your workroom (as Friedrich Schiller supposedly did; he said he needed the decaying smell in order to feel the urge to write)—well, this is a much stronger signal to your brain that it’s time to shift into work mode.
Project-Specific
This last one is optional, and inspired by something the novelist Nicholson Baker told me when I talked to him on the phone for my first book:
What I’ve found with daily routines, and maybe other people have said this, is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You know, you could say to yourself, “From now on I’m only gonna write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.” And if that feels novel and fresh, it’ll have a placebo effect and it’ll help you work. Maybe that’s not completely true. But there’s something to just the excitement of coming up with a slightly different routine, I find I have to do it for each book, have something different about it.
You might be asking, wait, what’s the difference between a ritual and a routine? There is definitely a difference, and for the purposes of this lesson I don’t really feel like getting into it. The point is that you’re tricking yourself: You’re creating an association between a particular behavior (or series of behaviors) and a particular quality of attention. In doing so, you’re building momentum and endurance, and you’re making effortful work feel a little less effortful.
What rituals do you all lean on to get your work done? I’d love to get a big, weird list going in the comments section—please add yours below!
I consider myself invisible to my work until I put earrings on. Big project? Glasses & sometimes lipstick. The costume is essential.
To signal to my brain that I'm going to be writing or doing creative work, I go out to my studio. I realize I'm fortunate to have such a spot. I always call out "HI!" when I get there... simply because I'm always happy to see it and be inside it. I look around, taking in all the evidence of previous work, and I smell the studio air smell (which - ya - I don't know what that is). I used to put my phone away in a special box I decorated for that purpose, but I haven't done that in a long time. You've reminded me that I really need to start doing that again. Thanks Mason.