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Do you have a writing ritual?

It doesn’t have to be ornate or blustery.

Do you make sure you have your favorite ink pen? Do you turn on music?

Maybe you have to be sitting at your keyboard at just the right angle.

Maybe you clean your area, first.

Have a seasonal drink, iced tea, coffee, apricot brandy at your side?

Do the household animals have to be outside? On your lap?

Phone turned off? Headphones and mic to dictate? Favorite browser for research?

Favorite word processor? A “wrist snappin' red rubber band.”  

I like a cold drink, my favorite pen, (missing well over a month) Office 360 Word, (used to be yWriter but the new updates have made Word a true adventure) no music, (it is distracting) and I have to be sitting at my laptop at just the right angle.

Five Famous Authors And Their Strange Writing Rituals

Some of history’s most celebrated authors swore by unusual and bizarre rituals. It’s possible we owe many great pieces of literature to the fact that they were so meticulous in maintaining these strange habits.

Truman Capote

The creative genius behind In Cold Blood, Capote was a superstitious man. His writing rituals often involved avoiding particular things. Namely, hotel rooms with phone numbers including “13,” starting or ending a piece of work on a Friday, and tossing more than three cigarette butts in one ashtray.

Ernest Hemingway

In stark contrast to James Joyce, Hemingway was a firm believer in standing while writing.While working on The Old Man and The Sea,he followed a strict regimen: “done by noon, drunk by three.” This entailed waking up at dawn, writing furiously while standing at the typewriter, and eventually making his way to the local bar to get inebriated.

Join us on Sunday, July 19 at The Writer's Chatroom at 7PM EDT and tell us about your Writing Rituals.

I am a social media addict. There is a section toward the back end of Facebook where you can check how much time you spend online each day. I won’t share my count because, frankly, I am embarrassed about it.

Ask anybody and they will probably agree that a part of a successful marketing campaign includes Social Media. Am I using my time at Facebook effectively? I think it depends on my goal.

Facebook has countless Groups for writers of almost any kind you can imagine. Some of them, for example, a Group called Authors where Noizchild and I are a part of the moderating team. As I am composing this post, Authors has 45,640 Members. Join a few groups. Even if you don’t indulge in Full on Shameless Self Promotion, you can help other group members from time to time by commenting in the feed.

Facebook has Pages. Take a few hours if you haven’t already and make a Facebook Page as an Author or in the name of your Blog or for your Books. Don’t forget to post regularly, even if it is just a quick image upload.

Start your own Group. It will take a while to set up, then you have to figure out how you are going to find members. I advise you to resist the urge to snatch people out of a sound sleep and make them join your group. They get rightfully angry about this.

The Writer’s Chatroom has a Facebook Page and a Group.

I just gave you some of the easiest ways to use Facebook. It is a start but to make it really work to find traffic for your blogs, podcasts, virtual tours and readers, you may need a Planned Approach.