The Thing Standing Between Procrastination and Daily Progress Is Ritual
One hour of writing, three days a week, amounts to more than it sounds
I’ve never been much of a “ritual” person when it comes to writing. If I need to, I can write anywhere, anytime, about anything. After all, if I were too precious about the conditions around writing, I wouldn’t have made much money from doing it.
But in our new pandemic life, when in theory it should be much easier to find time to write the things that are purely creative and without obligation or deadline, I found that it was not. Sure, I could do the things that were required for my job, or for contracts and paychecks I had committed to. But writing my monthly newsletter or working on my book proposal — saying the stuff I ostensibly really wanted to say—still felt like a chore to find time for.
Months ago a friend told me about something that had been working for her: London Writers’ Salon. Every weekday, several hundred people log onto Zoom at 8 a.m. for one hour of writing. The routine, which is run by two or three cheery facilitators, is admirably efficient. The first five minutes are a check-in, where everyone has the option to drop in the Zoom chat what they’re working on, and someone reads a quote for inspiration. Then 50 minutes of writing with…
