The White Star Line wineglass

Writers are superstitious creatures; do not mess with our rituals.

I can’t remember what we were celebrating, but it may have been Thanksgiving. We were attempting to find enough wine glasses in my mishmash collection for everyone in the room to have a glass. There is one glass left over from my first marriage, the tattered remnants of the small set my husband and I received when we got married, a promotional glass from some winery somewhere, an oversized one from a Disney World reception…

My son pulled out a wine glass from the back of the china cabinet, and I stopped him immediately. “Oh no, not that one.”

He stared at it, surprised. “Why not this one?

“I’ll tell you a story sometime,” I said. “But that one doesn’t get used, ever.“

He made me explain, and then I got the look of, “crazy writer-mom strikes again.”

If you Google writer rituals, what you’ll get is a lot of helpful how-to’s detailing how you write a book. I’ve only ever found one bit of writing that talks about what you do when you finish a book. In Stephen King’s Misery, his main character has a ritual whenever he finishes a book. He drinks Dom Perignon and he smokes a cigarette, the only cigarette he allows himself after having quit. And being an incredibly wealthy, successful author, of course, he finishes his book holed up at a resort in Colorado, which is how he gets into trouble in the first place.

Lots of writers have rituals. Maya Angelou could only work in hotel or motel rooms, stripped of all their decor and television. Truman Capote allegedly refused to begin or end any piece of writing on a Friday. Gertrude Stein needed to see a cow in her field of vision in order to write well. There’s a long line of bizarre behaviors writers have needed to start, to finish, or just to put pen to paper.

But they’re famous, and rich, so they got away with such things. (Toni Morrison gets a free pass on her need to write at the moment the sun was coming up, because when she was a single mom, that was literally the only time she had to write in peace, and the habit stuck). The rest of us basically have to put pen to paper on a daily basis in between the 900 other things that we’re juggling in our careers and lives because we get paid by…