[Justin Goodlow]

I recently read Mason Curry's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and it was pretty inspiring. For those of you who haven't heard of this work, it is a coffee table-type book that is a compilation of the author's accounts of various famous creative persons' (not just artists) daily routines that he either wrote himself or collected secondhand. There are a few poets listed; Yeats, Auden, Goethe, Schiller, and Angelou immediately come to mind. Some of the accounts are pretty detailed.


I envy those who can just sit down and write anytime during the day. Being as dissipated as I am, I've found I need set times to sit down and focus. On a normal weekday, I'll write without breaks from around 6:00-7:30 in the morning before breakfast. In the afternoons, I work on music for around the same time span. I suppose I have a morning ritual; I get up at 4:30, shower, meditate/do yoga for an hour, than brew a cup of Tulsi tea with lemon, ghee, and jaggery and sit down to write .

So I was wondering, do any of you have a routine or rituals for creative work? Any tips or tricks you would like to share?

Justin