The Power of Ritual
by Claudia Mills
Of
the almost fifty books I have written for children, Zero Tolerance is the most timely. It is the only book I’ve written
that was inspired by an actual news story: a few years ago a local middle
school expelled an honor student for bringing an apple-cutting knife to school
by mistake. Zero tolerance polices are in the news now on a regular basis, as
proponents and detractors debate how best to keep schools and students safe.
So
in writing Zero Tolerance I ended up
with a book about a “hot” topic, the only time in my career I’ve ever done so.
(Usually I write about small, timeless problems, like trying to talk your
parents into letting you have a pet hamster, or trying to win a schoolwide
reading contest). But I wrote the book, as I write all my books, in an extremely
old-fashioned, habit-bound, and ritualistic way.
Decades
into my writing career, I still write my books by hand. I write on a clipboard—a
very old, dented clipboard that doesn’t even have its clip any more. If my
house in Boulder, Colorado, was threatened by a forest fire, this clipboard would be one of the first
things I’d try to save. I’m not sure I could write a book without it.
I
always use the same kind of paper: pads of narrow-ruled white paper (where I
panic if the pads I order online have lines that are slightly too light or too
dark). I always use the same kind of pen: a Pilot Razor-Point fine-tipped black
marker pen. (More panic a few years ago when Office Depot and Office Max
stopped carrying these pens in their stores, and great rejoicing when I discovered
I could still get them through amazon.com). I write lying down, on a couch or
in bed. I always drink the same beverage as I write: Swiss Miss hot chocolate.
I always drink it in the same mug.
In
her wonderful book The Creative Habit,
choreographer Twyla Tharpe talks about the importance of “rituals of
preparation.” Doing the same thing in the same way “habitualizes it” and makes
it that much easier to do, and harder to skip. “First steps are hard,” Twyla
writes. So “it’s vital to establish some rituals—automatic but decisive
patterns of behavior—at the beginning of the creative process, when you are
most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong
way.
”
As
I wrote Zero Tolerance, I was in
largely uncharted territory for myself, writing a book with subject matter that
presented new challenges, unsure myself what would happen in the course of the
story: Would Sierra be expelled or not? By the end of the book, would she even
care? For the most part, I wrote blind, groping my way toward the finish,
knowing how much I’d need to go back and revise when that first draft was done.
But
at least I had the comfort of knowing that I’d be doing my groping on my
well-worn clipboard, scribbling on a pad of narrow-ruled paper with a Pilot
Razor Point pen, while drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate in a flowered mug. And,
as Twyla Tharpe tells us, that makes all the difference.
Larry+Harwood+(2).jpg)
