“Without coffee, I can’t write,” said Michael Pollan, author of bestseller How To Change Your Mind, on a recent Joe Rogan podcast. He was talking about how writing is a practice steeped in rituals and how his three-month fast from coffee seriously impacted his ability to write. I feel the same way about cannabis.
Once Pollan started drinking coffee again, a familiar zest infused his writing practice. He mentioned that he sometimes drinks up to eight cups of coffee a day when he’s working on a book. Rogan talked about Stephen King, and how King wrote Cujo wasted on coke and booze, so much so, after he’d finished it, he didn’t remember one word he’d written.
Eventually, King had to quit the coke and the booze ‘cause it was killing him but he was following a practice familiar to many writers. There’s that famous long list of drugs and booze Hunter S. Thompson ingested before he sat down to write.
Thompson is not a great example, as the quality of his prose dipped with age but no one can deny his commitment to craft. He was all in. This is key. This is everything.
Different artists have different ways of getting there but to get to the good stuff, have to be ALL IN. In other words, have to be willing to do whatever it takes to “get there.” This is essentially what the ritual is, the practice that helps you “get there.” But where is “there”? And where is the line between ritual, practice and habit?
THE RITUAL OF WRITING
The writing practice goes something like this. You stare at the blank page. You have no idea what to write. You fluctuate between feeling like a fraud, a fool, a failure and a mythical visionary, and you can feel all those feelings in the time it takes you to name and save a Word Doc on your laptop. This seesaw of emotions hums alongside every keystroke.
The trick is to feel it and write anyway, or even better, harness it and let that self-doubt push you to ask deeper questions about who you are and why you write. This is how you get to the good stuff. The infrastructure you build around this practice of questioning is the ritual, as it’s what lets you move forward when the weight of self-doubt threatens to crush you.
In his writer’s bible, Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke outlines this part of the process when he writes:
“There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write… then build your life according to this necessity.”
In this passage, Rilke advises the young poet, above else, to “go into yourself.” As part of this process, he encourages the poet to seek out the “sorrows and desires, passing thoughts… and … beauty” to be found in “everyday life,” and to approach this practice with “humble sincerity.”
By “turning inward,” Rilke is urging the young poet to see the possibility of transcendence in the most mundane aspects of life, even if he was locked up “in some prison.” This “turning inward” or practice of attention and observation is the reason why it’s often noted writers look like they’re doing nothing when they’re working. Rilke cites it as the basis of all creative work, writing: “Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.”
RITUAL V. PRACTICE
However, this is also where things get sticky. Or rather, why a lot of writers get stuck in the “gestation” and miss out on the “bringing forth.” Because what we’re really doing here is finding a way to access the subconscious, the part of the brain outside our natural awareness.
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