Routine and Ritual Keys to Writing

I’m often asked if I suffer writer’s block. I wish I could answer that I don’t, but the truth is I suffer writer’s block after nearly every session comes to an end. Like a stage actor who has forgotten his next line, I fear that my muses will go mute, and I’ll have nothing to write. Since my block is rooted in sitting, staring at an empty screen, I’ve discovered a few tricks to help me to overcome those blocks, both in routine and ritual.

Since I do my best creative writing in the morning, before my heads gets too cluttered with work related issues, I do most of my creative work on weekends. I try to limit each weekend session to four to six hours at most; if I go beyond that limit I tend to burn out.

Since five days between sessions is too long, which necessitates having to get reacquainted with plot and characters, I try to schedule sessions two or three evenings during the week after work. This can be problematic since I also write on my day job, and often the last thing I want to do when I get home after eight hours on my work PC is get behind the keyboard at home and be creative. However, if I’ve done my weekend work well and have gotten into a groove, I’ll purposely end my Sunday session in the middle of a piece of dialogue or action sequence so that I’m anxious for my next session to begin. When I sit down for that Monday or Tuesday evening session, I pick up right where I left off without missing a beat because I already know what my next word will be.

If I can stretch my creativity into my next weeknight session, great, but if I’m tired or have come to the end of a chapter or just can’t get the creative juices flowing, I’ll go back to edit and polish what I’ve written during my previous three or four sessions. Even a session dedicated to polishing helps to keep me involved in plot and close to characters — the key for me is to keep my sessions fairly short but scheduled closely together. If too much time elapses before my next session, I lose touch with what’s happening on the printed page as well as inside my characters’ heads.

The aforementioned deals with routine, but what about ritual? Ritual is what I go through before each session to help me get inside my character’s head. Like an actor who slips into character through the process of applying makeup, getting into costume or running through lines in his head, I put on a pot of coffee for a morning session and work a crossword puzzle while I sip my first cup. The crossword not only gets my creativity going, but it’s something Joe January, the protagonist in my current series of novels (January’s Paradigm, One Hot January and January’s Thaw) also enjoys. Since he enjoys smoking cigars, I’ll often light one up as well — it’s a sort of bonding ritual we go through. A morning cigar goes well with coffee, but in the evening it goes equally well with a glass of scotch or a shot of bourbon with a beer. Since January is a private investigator circa 1946, donning my own fedora immediately sets my mood for that period, and when I sit down to my PC, I envision myself in January’s office in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, and I begin to hear his narrative, his dialogue, in his Bronx dialect.

Of course there are those blocks that leave one completed paralyzed. That’s happened to me once, and to overcome it I went to New York City to frequent some of the same places January does in an effort to reconnect with him. The result of that experience not only got me back on track, but resulted in a piece of flash fiction — A Case of Writer’s Block:


I once had a life outside this park. Years ago, and it was a pretty good one, too. I’d been a private investigator and some of the cases I worked on would’ve made for good reading had they been fictional. As a matter of fact, the last case I’d been working on had started out to be a simple missing person—an attractive young woman from Gramercy Park had hired me to find her missing father. The case had turned out to be anything but simple.

It seems her father had, for six years, been on the lam from a very elite overseas group. When I finally caught up with him, he spun a wild yarn about a genetically engineered man from an alternate reality future in which the Nazis had won World War II. This six-fingered manufactured being believed that by allowing the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would join the Allies in time to defeat the Axis before it became too strong, and so he convinced the woman’s father to take part in a wild conspiracy to persuade Churchill to withhold from the U.S. the vital decrypt specifying the date and time of the Japanese attack on Pearl, thereby hoping to amend his present—my future.

Of course the story sounded crazy to me, and I hadn’t believed any of it, but I couldn’t disbelieve the two Germans after this woman’s father—I’d met them both—and so I had had to be careful.

That was 50 years ago and about all I remember until…

I first noticed the tall man passing through the gate at 86th Street. Obviously he was a tourist, with a Yankees cap pulled down over his eyes, wearing a University of Michigan t-shirt, and holding hands with a pretty and petite woman who had eyes only for him. He looked familiar—slender with broad shoulders and gray hair showing from beneath the edges of his cap. Because I have a good mind for names and faces, I knew I’d never seen him before. Still, I couldn’t help but feel we had unfinished business between us.

Our eyes briefly met as we passed, going in opposite directions, and I saw brief recognition in his eyes followed by a look of shame mingled with guilt. The woman holding his hand, oblivious to the look we exchanged, laughed—a rich, sultry sound, sexy—and whispered, “So do you love me just a little, J. Conrad Guest?” and the name registered, although I couldn’t say from where or when. That feeling of unfinished business grew stronger.

I followed the two of them across Central Park, not intending to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but hear bits and pieces of their conversation—two lovers on vacation from someplace in Michigan, and something about an unfinished novel and the writer’s block that seemed to have crippled the man’s creativity.

Just before they exited the park from its west side, the tall man glanced back at me. I considered pretending I hadn’t noticed, but somehow I knew I couldn’t pretend anything in front of him: he had known I was here from the moment he entered the park. Even from a distance I could see his nearly imperceptible nod. A smirk came to his mouth; a moment later he winked at me and turned to leave the park with the woman.

The exchange puzzled me, yet it seemed to comfort me as well. Somehow I knew this tall man who seemed familiar but whom I had never met, knew me intimately. I also knew that he wouldn’t forget me in this park, and that one day soon my life outside its walls—my future—would resume…