Do You Rule Your Habits or Do They Rule You?

We’re deep into NaNo Prep Season , and we’ve dubbed this week “Time Hunt Week”! We’ll be sharing resources throughout the week to help you find the time to establish writing routines in November. Today, NaNoWriMo Executive Director Grant Faulkner shares an excerpt on forming habits from his book, Pep Talks for Writers :

“I don’t like writing. I like having written,” Dorothy Parker famously said. Writing can be daunting, frustrating, and even frightening—yet then, somehow, magically fulfilling. That’s why having a writing routine can be such a powerful writing aid. If there’s a single defining trait among most successful writers—and especially writers who reach 50K words in November—it’s that they show up to write regularly, no matter if they write at midnight or dawn, or at a desk or in a car.

“A goal without a plan is a dream,” said Antoine Saint Exupery. And a routine is a plan. A plan of dedication. A routine helps obliterate any obstacle hindering you from writing, whether it’s a psychological block or a tantalizing party invitation.

But it’s even more than that. When you write during a certain time each day, and in an environment designated solely for rumination, you experience creative benefits. The regularity of time and place serves as an invitation for your mind to walk through the doorways of your imagination and fully concentrate on your story. Routines help to trigger cognitive cues that are associated with your story, cloaking you in the ideas, images, and feelings that are swirling in your subconscious. If you anoint a specific time and place for writing, it’s easier to transcend the intrusive fretfulness of life and rise above its cacophony. Regularity and repetition are like guides who lead you deeper into the realm of your imagination.

In fact, another name for “muse” might be “routine.” When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly. That’s because you’re carried forward by the reassuring momentum of your progress, absorbed in a type of mesmerism.

“A routine provides a safe and stable place for your imagination to roam, dance, do somersaults, and jump off of cliffs.“

Stephen King is perhaps the perfect case study of such a writer. He compares his writing room to his bedroom, a private place of dreams. “Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.”

But, wait, aren’t artists supposed to be freewheeling, undisciplined creatures more inclined to follow the fancies of their imagination than the rigid regularities of a schedule? Doesn’t routine subvert and suffocate creativity? Quite the opposite. A routine provides a safe and stable place for your imagination to roam, dance, do somersaults, and jump off of cliffs. Think of your routine like a giant bouncy house.

Also, routines don’t have to be overly routinized. I have a tradition of buying a new hat for each new novel I write—a hat that fits the theme if possible—just to change my writing energy a bit. When I put on the hat, I get into the character of the novel and signal to my brain that I’m ready to write. For one macabre tale, I wore a “coffin hat” (a short version of a top hat). For another one, I wore a derby. This year’s NaNoWriMo novel is calling for brightly-colored visor.

Make your routine like a hat you put on each day.

Grant Faulkner is the executive director of NaNoWriMo. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College in English and his M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He has published stories and essays in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, The Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Gargoyle, and The Berkeley Fiction Review, among dozens of others. He’s also the founder and editor of the lit journal 100 Word Story, and has published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures.

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from Stuart Rankin on Flickr.