Catching up on Courtney Maum’s Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers, of which I certainly am not (effective, that is), I tried to think about, regardless of their additive powers to my productivity, my writing ritual.

 Sarah Rose Etter (Tongue Party): I usually drink for about two weeks straight, and then right before I truly forget what it is to be a human being, I sober up, drink wheatgrass shots only for three days, and eventually the story comes to me as a sort of hallucination/miracle. That process has always worked for me. I believe it originated with the Mayans.

Mine most often involves going to my car and sitting around, staring out at the landscape and listening to terrible music. I let the car heat up until I can’t see straight anymore then I turn on the engine and air conditioning for a few minutes and whip out my laptop and piece together old pieces from my notebook with whatever my heat-addled brain is hallucinating. When I was writing my poems that went into my sample this year I sat out along the edge of the draw, either behind my house in the desert or outside my dad’s university where they had cultivated native wild grasses and small scraggly trees and I listened to country music and wrote about armadillos and Indian country. I think before that there was top forty and a statue of Ganesha perched on my desk, when I had a desk.

What are your writing rituals?