In the Mood

by Elizabeth

I love to read books by Indian authors. Just finished one by a new guy, Farahad Zama (The Marriage Bureau for Rich People, a fun read!), and have gulped down Divakaruni, Pradhan, many others. One thing I've learned reading them is that in India, in the middle of a heat wave, people enjoy a cooling drink: a steaming cup of tea. The idea is that by heating the insides, it helps cool you off. I'll buy it.

So now, in the middle of the hot Texas summer, I've got a cup of English Breakfast doctored up with milk and fake sugar, just the way I like it. A hot drink, and it's like it loosens its way down my throat, into my core, and then on to the extremities, and my fingers can fly.

I've mentioned before that I like to write in coffee houses, restaurants, even in grocery stores that feature tables for weary or hungry shoppers. (My favorite, Central Market, even has a fireplace roaring away on cold winter days!) It's free office space, but there is also something about a hot drink at my elbow that gets my creative juices flowing, gets my pen moving, gets my words on the page. I guess you could say that a hot drink (or a cold Diet Coke with fresh lime if it's lunch time and my venue of choice is Taco Cabana) puts me in the mood.

I'd stop short of calling it a ritual, though it might be to my advantage if I went the extra step and made it so. Rituals are such for a reason; they help people create a muscle memory, and they contribute to the feeling of community. Both are necessary for writer. We need to flex that writing muscle, over and over. That's even more so once we leave the what-if-land of the still-to-be-published and enter the world of a contract and the second book has a deadline. As for community--isn't that why I'm here right now? And you?

If my task is writing--and it is--then ritualizing and recognizing the power of a hot drink to my production is a valuable consideration.

My cup is drained, the world is still hot, but I wrote. I wrote this. I did my work, and all that's left is to wonder about you: what is your ritual, or what ritual do you think will help you?

What Works

School started last week and, after depositing my kids in their classrooms, sharp new pencils and backpacks stowed safely, the week stretched before me--a full thirty-five hours to write uninterrupted if I could just ignore the phone, the laundry, the lure of the supermarket.* Not that I was kidding myself; I knew I was never going to spend that much time writing, or even rewriting. But I did have high hopes for getting in a good couple hours each day, establishing my new fall routine.

I didn't write a word.

And why? Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I'll tell you why: because I kept trying to work in a way that just doesn't work for me.

I've got two finished manuscripts under my belt, and I'm a few thousand words in on my WIP, and of those hundreds of thousands of words, probably fewer than ten thousand were written directly to my computer, or even in my home. I have to leave my house, lugging a spiral notebook and a clutch of pens to some coffee joint, buy myself office space in the form of a two dollar cup of coffee, and then stare into space until the first sentence forms and gives me the impetus to pick up the pen and begin.

That's how I write. It's how I've written for the past four years, since my daughter was in pre-K and I eyed the bagel shop across the street from her school and committed to getting serious, and finally writing instead of thinking about it. I know this about myself: if I get to the bakery, if I buy the coffee, if I plunk my rear end into a chair, I'll stab out words. Maybe not the famed two thousand words a day we all dream of, but what I think of as a section. Sometimes that's a whole chapter, sometimes it's not, but it always begins with a sentence and ends with a sigh, usually accompanied by the triumphant fling of the pen onto the notebook, a satisfying clatter that has come to mean accomplishment to me.

And then my day is made. Doesn't matter what comes next, it's a good day: I wrote. I can clean my house, exercise, read, go to a movie, volunteer at school, indulge myself in half a dozen markets--whatever comes next, I've done my work.

So why the heck didn't I do that even once last week?

The only answer I have is that I tried to do it differently.

"I'll write at home," I thought.

"I should be able to write from home," I said.

"I can do this," I shouted to the empty room.

But I didn't.

What's wrong with doing what works? Ten bucks a week is pretty cheap real estate, and it comes with free coffee. It's the opposite of shame, having a successful method, so why am I reluctant to pull on my yoga pants and just do what works?

Yesterday and today I did. While the kids ate their waffles, I threw on street clothes so I'd have no excuse to return home. Headed directly from school drop-off to the closest coffee shop, and sure enough, two good sections emerged. Which pretty much always happens when I sit down in the right place, ready to work.


This is what I have to remember: Do what works. And then repeat and repeat and repeat and guess what? One day you've completed a manuscript. The rewrites I'm able to do at home, yes, on my desktop in my green swivel chair--in fact, the transformation from notebook to computer is my second draft. But the work of writing, for me, is out, away, over a cup of coffee I did not brew.

As writers, we know what works. It must sound so self-indulgent to non-writers, the fact that we don't always just do that. I can't say I understand how I regularly manage to forget what works, or why I try to convince myself to do something else, but my new goal is simply this: do what works. And repeat.



* You know how most women love the mall? That's how I feel about grocery stores. We have an awesome store here in Texas called Central Market; it's so amazing I literally take out-of-state visitors there to show it off--including an agent I once ferried to a conference. Plus there are a number of small ethnic grocery stores nearby. And of course a day without Target is like a day without...Target. It's a sickness, really.