Routine Matters More Than Ritual
By: Heather M. Edwards
Tags: Self Improvement, Personal Development, Writing, Productivity, Creativity

The Shining. All rights © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Good routines are portable. And good routines are pliable. By all means, sanctify your spaces. If you are able to craft a workspace that inspires you then enjoy that coveted place to begin the hard work. But let your ritual adorn your routine instead of dictating it.

If you work best with classical music while sitting at your west-facing desk with a paperweight-heavy Himalayan pink sea salt candle deionizing your air, it’s wonderful that you’ve discovered that and cultivated an inspired atmosphere for your creativity.

But if you absolutely cannot work without your lucky pen, your ergonomic desk chair, and your favorite notebook what happens when you go out of town? Or family obligations arise? Or work conflicts? What happens when your writing makes you so successful that you need to travel for speaking engagements and book tours? That’s the goal, isn’t it? So how do you maintain that routine in hotel rooms? On layovers? In different time zones with jet lag compromising every lobe of your wobbly brain?

Ritual is how you decorate your space. Routine is how you use your time. Wherever you are. While there is some overlap there, and ritual can be emotively beautiful, you can’t be beholden to it. If you are it has become superstition instead of the steady grind.

Find what works for you. And stick with each iteration, each experiment to really exhaust its possibilities before discarding it like a diet that didn’t immediately drop you to your desired weight. Give routines time to succeed. But remember that there are almost as many productivity programs and ideas as there are people. What skyrocketed someone with no writing experience to the top of the NYT Bestseller list might not work for you.

But I’m certain it is not the ritual that makes the writer but the routine. There is a subtle distinction that I appreciate after twenty years of being a “writer” who barely wrote a thing for those two decades.

Author Roger Zelazny made a bargain with himself to write two sentences six times every day. Even if he didn’t “catch fire”. I immediately dismissed that as impossible and pointless for me. Then I read about him. In addition to novellas, anthologies, novelettes, short stories, and series he wrote damn near a novel a year for more than three decades.

I doubt he relied on inspiration alone.

“ … the best way to achieve a goal is to focus less on the outcome and more on the process, and that that applies across all cultures,” — Melanie Rudd of the University of Houston.

Once during college, I literally stayed up until 5 something in the morning to write an invective against the Girl Scouts and specifically against the mandate of selling Girl Scout cookies for my Economics department newsletter.

Inspiration struck and for once I saw it through to completion. Even though I was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep. Lightning had electrified the apartment and the computer was on fire with a clear and cohesive narrative. Our editor/dean of undergraduates really liked it. Other student contributors started to write in a similarly casual first-person narrative that showcased their working knowledge of the economics concepts we were learning. I was pleased.

Ten years later I brought my Ipad with me when my family took an unexpected but beautiful trip back to Germany where we had lived until I was little. On the flight over I randomly wrote an appraisal of The Weeknd’s video for Earned It. Even though no one was paying me for my writing at that time I reminded myself that paid writers would likely be utilizing a transatlantic flight to get writing done. A family vacation was no excuse to not write. And it should also be an inspiration to write about the adventure itself. Incidentally, my Ipad swallowed that article and spit it into an abyss somewhere I can’t find. But I remember being pleased that my review of his video (and the song itself) reflected the ethereal and sensual nonchalance of the aesthetic and something or other about his diaphanous voice.

Routine is how you use your time. Ritual is how you decorate your space.

If I only wrote within my ritual, these moments of inspiration would have faded out like music when you walk away from a house party. Notes would never become songs if I only wrote within inspired moments or ritualized spaces.

You don’t have to do anything. But I have found that consistency is key. All the writers who write about writing describe this too — cultivating your zone takes consistency more than inspiration.

Inspiration is fleeting, unsustainable and, most importantly, unpredictable. You can’t rely on it since you never know when it will strike or how long it will last.

When I was 13 I randomly won a hundred dollars from the local radio station. A hundred whole dollars! I bought a stereo system with TWO tape decks so I could record, aaand … a CD player. Please excuse me for bragging but if you were a middle-schooler in the early 90s you know what a colossal lifestyle change that was.

That was a stroke of random luck. I did not grow up to rely on radio station contests for income.

Celebrate inspiration when it graces you with its presence. But treat it like luck. And never depend on it.

Medical doctor and bestselling novelist Khaled Hosseini talked about how his runaway hit The Kiterunner eventually started writing itself during his 4–6 am writing routine. Then he went to work and doctor-ed every day.

His routine became his zone.

I often go back to quotes from best-selling authors Gillian Flynn and Stephen King when I hit a wall.

Gillian Flynn said, “I could not have written a novel if I hadn’t been a journalist first, because it taught me that there’s no muse that’s going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I’m definitely not precious.”

And Stephen King, who’s written more words than most of us have ever spoken in our entire lives famously said, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

This is not to say that flow is constant. It’s not. But what makes writers write is consistency. There is no substitute for your hands on the keyboard. Maybe you’re fortunate enough to craft an inspired space that stimulates ideas and connects neural pathways but if you depend on it, if your hands can’t find the keyboard without your rituals, your servant has become your master.

Don’t get so superstitious about how you create that you stop actually creating.