Insecure Writer’s Support Group: Writing Rituals

It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The IWSG question for the month: Do you have any rituals that you use when you need help getting into the ZONE? My answer is that I have two types of rituals to get me into my “twilight zone”. One is for my general writing activity and the other is specifically for when I write a new fiction story.

For my general writing session, my ritual is taking a meditative walk of a sort. Before I work on any kind of writing task, whether it’s the writing process itself or writing-related activities such as searching the publishers’ markets to submit stories to, walk through my house for a minute or two praying and meditating over the upcoming session of work. This helps me to clear my mind and focus on the upcoming work and so I can see what it is that I need to work most on.

A lot of times, when I sit down at my desk immediately to start or resume a project, I am not sure where to begin and my mind wanders too far which is not helpful to the writing process. This causes me to feel sluggish. But when I walk and just let my mind go into kind of a Zen mind state, if you will, or pray over the writing session the sluggishness goes away and the creative and enthusiastic energies fire up in me. After about one to two minutes of meditative walking, I’m ready to work. On those really bad days where I’m just not with it, I’ll take as much as five minutes with this meditative walk. That’s the ritual for my general writing sessions which can include any writing-related activity.

For my fiction writing itself, especially when I’m about to start a new story, sometimes I’ll pray to the Muse (whoever or whatever you interpret that to be) or I’ll look through my journal for notes that I’ve labeled as “Story Ideas” and make a list of them. The items on this list will either be in the form of potential story titles or short phrases that describe the idea. For example, for a story that is part of my collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”, I may have listed it as it’s title in its most straight forward pre-publication form which in this case would have been “The Teen Vampire’s Coming Out” (the published title is simply “Coming Out”). Or I may have listed it as a simple phrase such as this: teenager discovers that vampire traits begin showing up in him. And so when I have items listed in either of these two manners, I’ll then glance over them, select one or two and then brainstorm over them. Whichever one I feel enthused about most I’ll start writing the full draft for. So that’s a little bit more of a procedural ritual for each time I begin a new story than the ritual I use for a general writing session.

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:  Feather Stone, Beverly Stowe McClure, Mary Aalgaard, Kim Lajevardi, and Chemist Ken! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!

Do you have any writing rituals that you perform to get you in the writing or creative mood? If so, what are they?

Until next time . . .