Yesterday Claire and I visited Waterstones to return the books I’d bought her for her birthday, and to replace them with books she didn’t already have. I came across a book on rituals, and discovered that Victor Hugo had a writing ritual which involved him stripping naked and telling his valet to hide his clothes until he’d finished writing. I got the impression that this was to ensure that he keep writing until an agreed time. According to Penguin, it was so that he couldn’t leave the house to visit the brothels, as was his normal habit.
The Penguin website article describes other strange writing rituals. The German poet Friedrich Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk drawer and sniffed their foul odour for inspiration. Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code donned gravity boots and dangled upside down from a frame to think through his plots. Maya Angelou would rent a nearby hotel room to write in, rather than her home. Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road on one 120 foot roll of typing paper cello-taped together so that he didn’t need to reload the typewriter. He wrote furiously for three weeks fuelled by benzedrine and coffee. Edith Sitwell started her writing day by lying in an open coffin.
I know the importance of rituals to top golfers. If something works, and gets you in the right frame of mind to execute your task effectively, then I’m all for it. But I can’t say that anything I’ve come across here sounds like it would work for me. Do any writers out there have a writing ritual that might work for me. Use the contact page to tell me about it.
I haven’t used AI to create an image for my post for a while, so I asked it to paint Victor Hugo writing in the nude. Then I tried Victor Hugo writing whilst naked. It seems that AI has its limitations. I didn’t buy the book on rituals, but I did buy Gwynne’s Latin. More about why in my next post.