5 Rituals to Get in the Right Headspace to Write

The author life can be an especially distracting one, particularly in those moments when we’re feeling less than motivated. When I’m staring down a blank page and feel like I’ve got nothing to say, it’s easy to start thinking of other items on my to-do lists: dusting down the mountain of ARCs leaning against the bookshelf, perhaps, or tackling the laundry pile that is quickly becoming sentient.

(7 Mindset Shifts for Writing Your Best Book.)

In those moments, I find certain rituals can be helpful in changing my frame of mind. There’s something about giving yourself a ritual or a routine that can mean the difference between a day’s worth of meaningful work and a day spent surfing the internet: By establishing a set of routines for yourself, you can kickstart your brain into recognizing that it’s time to dive into your work. Consider this guide a starting point for creating your own routines to help get you into the right headspace to write.

Do something to mark the start of your writing practice: something to signal to your mind that, hey, it’s time to start writing. For me, that signal involves lighting a candle: When I strike the match, I know that the clock has started on my working day.

I’m sure there’s evidence to back this up, but I find that there’s only so far I can go into my character’s head with a keyboard. For me, pulling out the fountain pen is the best way to approach a character from a different angle, and the start of a writing session—before you’re bogged down in the particulars of historical fact or points of logic—is the perfect time to connect with your protagonist’s voice.

(A Love Letter to the Fountain Pen.)

Automatic writing involves setting a pen on paper and letting the words flow without trying to shape or guide them: that is, trying to transcribe your character’s inner thoughts onto the page without agenda or judgment. Start your session with 15 minutes of automatic writing and see how it influences your character’s development.

When I write, I tend to listen to instrumental music or film scores—something from the historical period I’m writing about, generally, but always something instrumental. When I wrote The Woman Before Wallis, I listened to big band music and the Downton Abbey score; when I wrote The Last Grand Duchess, it was Martin Phipps’ soundtrack to War & Peace. For The Paris Deception, I chose Parisian café music, along with soundtracks from various Second World War movies: something to evoke the time and place in question, and pull me out of the here and now.

(20 Best Songs for Writers and About Writing.)

I’ve also given myself an entirely different “pump-up soundtrack” for those moments when, for some reason or another, my usual Spotify playlists just don’t seem to be cutting it. For me, it’s Daft Punk’s soundtrack to Tron: Legacy—something that sounds so completely different from anything else I’ve listened to over the course of the writing session, fast-paced and flowing. It’s a similar Pavlovian tactic to starting my writing sessions by lighting a candle: My brain knows now that when this music comes on, it’s time to get down to brass tacks.

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When writing a book with two protagonists, it can be difficult to switch between narrative voices, and giving myself a physical cue that I can associate with one character or another tends to help. With all of my novels, I’ve found it helpful to track down my protagonist’s perfume: Something about wearing their signature scent helps me tap into their mindset in a way that’s often unexpected.

When I wrote my third novel, The Paris Deception, I had two main characters, and while I knew that Sophie didn’t bother to wear perfume, I had quite a difficult time finding Fabienne’s signature scent. I easily went through 75 different perfume samples before I realized that, as a recent widow, she wouldn’t be wearing her own perfume: She would be wearing the last of her late husband’s cologne. That insight into who she was really came to define her throughout the course of the book, and every time I wrote a chapter from her perspective, I’d spray her perfume to come to a better understanding of who she was.

In my experience, nothing contributes to creative stagnancy quite like stillness. If I find the words aren’t flowing properly, the best thing to do, quite simply, is to flow: Give yourself half an hour of active movement, and see if it helps to spark anything. I find yoga, spinning, and swimming to be particularly helpful, but it can be as simple as going for a walk: Grab the dog, head out into nature, and let yourself be distracted by what’s around you. Exercise helps to loosen those knotted questions in your mind; sometimes, they’ll spark entirely new inspiration.