Petrarchive – Writing rituals

>Personally I find things come to me on my breaks during my construction job. That seems to be when I'm feeling the most inspired.

"In October 1963, Bukowski recounted in a letter to John William Corrington how someone once asked him, “What do you do? How do you write, create?” To which, he replied: “You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”

>>13206
great insight from a man who wrote nothing worth reading

>>13207
dude bukowski lmao

usually you would come up with something more cogent or clever.

I also depend on a particular substance to write. In the past it was alcohol and now it is cannabis. Without either I am nothing, my fingers are sluggish and I stare at the paper/screen like a donkey. I understand Hemmingway completely

>>13204 (OP)
Not much ritual, but I always keep a pen and paper on me and try to take notes whenever a phrase comes to mind or I notice something striking, which requires (or at least benefits from) taking on a certain kind of perceptiveness to the world. I find it helps to think a lot on what I want to write about, or really what I want to accomplish with it, how it should feel, etc., so the essentials of the piece or idea are bouncing around my head all the time and I can connect what's around me to them. Sometimes I might write down a phrase I have connected to an idea, but it's only months after that it'll come together into something complete, where I've assembled all the pieces mentally (or on scrap paper) to put it together. Sometimes it's outline-esque, or a list of things to include or accomplish in stages. Then it's like a jigsaw on the table in front of me.

In the past I've tended not to write full drafts until I've reached a sort of "a-ha" threshold, but sometimes a draft simply reveals that I don't have all the pieces, and the gaps stand out. Those drafts I tend to toss away rather than explicitly refine.

All of the above is mostly with respect to short fiction, like sub-1000 words. I don't write poems that long, but I similarly jot things down or bash out a poem if something comes to mind while I'm out. And I've also been keeping an overarching idea in my head lately to centre my poetry a bit, which has been helping; even if I'm writing about somewhat disparate things in each poem, it gives an aim or direction of how to approach them emotionally (in this case).


The closest I come to ritual is keeping a diary. I write daily, but without much aim. I write what I do and what comes to mind. Some entries are short, some are long, but they're generally written over the course of a day since I write it on my computer and I'm there most of the time unless I'm out. I think keeping a regular diary was the biggest thing that pushed me towards "writing" more seriously, since it became a regular written form of introspection. At some point I was writing and what I wanted to write was more than just a diary entry.

I sit up in my bed, grab my phone off the side table, browse Reddit, Petrarchan, and Hacker News until I find something that pisses me off, then I shitpost about it.

>>13204 (OP)
I have had considerable success lately thinking of writing as a form of directed daydream. You write to store the details of your daydream, in order to have a richer day dream. Only the top 1% of daydreamer talent can dream up scenarios that other people will find enjoyable, so your daydream is for yourself, and there is freedom in that.
Also, I was really inspired by the fact that Backscratcher Sensei was able to take three jackoff fantasies about a middle schooler, a childhood friend, and a track team girl and turn them into a world class isekai series. It really was just about building your kink into world building all along after all.
Also why the fuck does nothing on this site work properly. Can't click post numbers to reply with a quote backlink, can't ctrl + v images into the file field, FUCK.

1. Being extremely bored.
2. Random inspiration.
3. Being completely alone in home.
4. Discipline.

Sometimes i just need 1 of these 4 to write.

Mostly I just get some random jot of inspiration, either from something observed or a seemingly random thought, and immediately try to expand upon it. I've noticed if I falter in the immediate expansion, I tend to lose steam and let that certain idea fall by the wayside.

How do you guys return to drafts? I feel like this is something I've yet to conquer. That is, unless I immediately complete a piece in a flash, I'll turn my attention elsewhere and find that first one to be boring or subpar or stupid, even if the initial idea is okay. I just cannot get myself to revise things. Should I just force myself to.

>>13295
You could try changing your format. I started writing shorter fiction on a loose schedule and it helped me stay focused on individual pieces. They were short, so revising wasn't too tedious, and I was using them as fodder for a monthly literary open mic, so there was finality in reading them to a crowd (but you can get that other ways). I spent a lot more time thinking out my ideas in advance of trying to write when I started doing this (see >>13221), which meant that revision became more a matter of refinement.

When I was writing stuff on a whim, often the ideas weren't very fleshed out (if they existed at all), and it always seemed more interesting to simply move on. And I could tell myself that the things I was writing could be assembled later into a larger work (which I never did), when really that was an excuse to avoid the work it takes to complete a thought.