On Ritual: ASF Contributors on Their Writing Routines (Today: Josh Weil)

Today, we wrap up our six-day series on writers and their rituals—or lack of them—by presenting

On Ritual
Josh Weil, “The First Bad Thing,” Fall 2009

These past few months I’ve been shaken out of my rituals, and, to be honest, I’m starting to panic. Flat-out panic, I tell you: I haven’t written a lick. How can I without my predawn waking, my lying on the cot in the cabin staring at the world outside the window just beginning to get blue? Each morning, I put on my writing clothes: old jeans, an even older shirt soft with age except where it’s stiff with iron-on patches, comfy socks, slippers held together with duct tape. I climb down the ladder from the attic. While the coffee maker gurgles, I set a kettle to boil. I stretch my back out. When the kettle’s mouth blows steam, I fill one thermos with coffee, another with hot water, set them side by side on my desk. Then I carry a slice of toast out onto the porch. I watch the land take shape. I think about what I’m going to write about. Inside, I sit at the old end table I use for a desk and fill the heavy white diner mug my brother gave me long ago, and hold it in my hands, warming them. I think of a distraction—anything in life outside of my writing—and breathe out long, blowing it away from my mind. I breathe in thinking about what I’m going to write. I repeat, and repeat, the mug warm in my hands, until I’ve gotten my mind where it needs to be. Rituals? Right now, newly moved to an apartment in Baltimore, waking to the sounds of sirens and creak of people walking in the apartment above my head, I’d be lost without them. I’ll hold each ritual in my mind, and I’ll sit still with them, and hope that they will warm me the way my mug—still with me, thank God—does my hands.”

In the end, each of our six writers has shown us there’s no simple solution to creating a work of complex and thoughtful art, though each artist handles prep time and style uniquely and intimately.

We at ASF recognize their day-after-day determination to breathe life into the page. Perhaps this is how we understand that we are looking less for the “how-to” than the “how cool!” in their prep time. And we hope their work is rewarded with enduring success.

That and we enjoyed their answers so much, we’re going to keep asking our contributors to fess up. . . Stay tuned.

If there’s an ASF author whose rituals you’d like to hear about, comment below. We’ll report back soon.