Do You Write Standing Up?

Writers love rituals.

Almost every writer I know or have heard about has little rites or exercises he or she uses as prompts. These little tics and eccentricities help open writers' inner doors to nudge them out of the world of obviousness and into that amorphous place ideas come from.

They can be silly or sacred, but they are very personal — and they are the lubricant that greases the gears and gets them turning.

For example, when I start a new fundraising package I try to pull up an old, similar project. I don’t get ideas from it, but it helps get past that blank paper paralysis that every writer knows and dreads.

The rituals of great writers are often talked about and, I bet, even more often imitated.

Author John Cheever, I read once, got up every morning and put on a coat and tie before walking downstairs to his writing room. For him, it was very much a job that he needed to approach in a professional way.

Ernest Hemingway and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote standing up.

Marcel Proust, George Orwell, Mark Twain, Woody Allen and others prefer(ed) the opposites and do (or did) their writing lying in bed.

When you consider how long their novels could be, it’s intriguing to consider that literary foes Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal both wrote in longhand.

Using these little rituals to lead you into your creative zone is certainly not restricted to literary greats.

Copywriting legend David Ogilvy claimed he would drink “half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone.”

Our company’s co-founding genius Jerry Huntsinger reportedly walked around his office dictating into a recording machine. Erle Stanley Gardner did the same thing, except he had a long-suffering secretary who followed him as he strolled around his estate, dutifully taking down his every word.