Writing “Needs”
You sit down to write wearing ____ with ____ in view, ____ on your music player and a bowl/plate of ____ to one side just in case you feel a bit hungry while you’re writing.
Does this sound at all like you?
And we wonder where the stereotypical writer with a glass of bourbon (a bottle if he’s been published a few times) to one side and a cigarette (unlit if the muse has taken over for a brief, blissful moment) in his mouth.
Many writers, to write, feel the need to have their favourite pen in hand or absolutely have to have that bowl of M&Ms nearby for that chocolate/sugar fix when the going gets tough.
My thing used to be that I wrote longhand and I needed to write with the same pen through the whole thing until the pen ran out of ink. If I lost this pen (which only happened a couple times before I realized how stupidly uncomfortable it made me), I would not write until I found the pen again.
I think my family should have feared more for my sanity than their reputations when they figured out I’m a writer. (Frankly, their reputation had been screwed quite thoroughly long before I took pen to paper.)
Most of us have our habits, whether they’re like my old pen habit (oh, did I mention I had to write stories, no matter how many pens ran out, in the same colour ink from beginning to end?), the spaces we need to write, the music, the noise, or whatever else.
If you need things that don’t involve things like ritual sacrifice, then habits are fine. We all have them.
What are your writing habits? What do you ‘need’ to write? What makes your writing experience feel ‘not quite right’ without it?
February 18th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I can’t work without background music.
When I write fiction, I pick out a “theme song” for each character, a song which matches the mood for the character’s role, characteristics, and personality. It can sometimes take a couple of weeks before I settle on the right background music for the more complex characters.
Whenever I sit down to write, I put on the theme song for whichever character happens to be the major player in the day’s writing and play it over and over until I’ve finished the scene.
Once I’ve made the emotional connection between song and character, the music elicits a conditioned response in me, what Carl Jung called “synchronicity,” so that I don’t have to engage in any warm-up exercises before I get into the character’s head. Once the music starts and I sit down, I’m already in there.
Also, I have to have a fresh mug of Darjeeling.
February 19th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Oh, that’s something I completely forgot about. I have ‘character songs’ as well as ‘mood songs’. It certainly beats warm up exercises when you don’t have a lot of time.
Should I know what Darjeeling is?
February 20th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Darjeeling = tea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darjeeling_tea
February 20th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Ooo, thank you for the link. I’m a chamomile tea kind of gal, myself.