Coffee, Booze, Undressing, Deprivation: How Writers Get in the Mood to Write

Before he began to write, John Cheever put on a three-piece suit and took the elevator from his Manhattan apartment down to the basement, where he took off his jacket and tie, and then began. Hemingway famously needed a drink to loosen him up. Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver has said, “the school bus was my muse.” I’ve had times where I needed a shower, a wintry run, or a nap, to clear the slate of my head in order to get my thoughts organized.

When I was writing my second book, Made for You and Me, I needed food. I had a nursing baby, a new apartment, my husband was in grad school, and we were cleaning up our lives from the 2008 financial crisis.

I had sold that book after a series of audio diaries about our experience with the Great Recession went viral after airing on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Once I got the book contract, I realized there was so much more to say about America, about dreams deferred, about becoming a mom, and, also, about finding balance in an unsteady new world.

I had a babysitter who would arrive in the late mornings back then, while my son took his 11 a.m. nap. As soon as she was in the door, I raced across town to my office.

But, first, I stopped at a local café and bought myself the largest brownie in the case and a decaf coffee, black. I didn’t touch either until I got to my office and had taken off my coat, removed my shoes and pulled on the big Smartwool socks I wore as slippers. Then, my computer on, the document up, I’d toggle to the last sentence I had written the day before, take a deep breath, bite into my brownie, take a sip of coffee and write my first word ALL AT THE SAME MOMENT.

Don’t ask me how. But I will tell you that as an exhausted nursing mom who needed a nap more than what Hamlet would have called, “words, words, words,” that sweet Pavlovian rush was just the ticket to get me started.

I thought maybe every writer does this. Until I talked to Ann Patchett. She told me that she makes a real point of no kind of reward, no tricks, no comfort item at her side. She said, “No, alas, I don’t do that. I make a real point of NOT doing that.” Perhaps when you have written Bel Canto, arguably one of the best books by an American writer, you don’t need any figurative or real Teddy bear to hold onto.

But I wasn’t sure. There had to be other writers like me who needed some incentive, some oral fixation to sweeten or salt the tongue, some signal to their brains that, “It’s time to go for it!”

I decided I would canvas my writer friends.  First, I wrote to a dear friend, Christina Baker Kline, known for many splendid novels, among them the huge bestseller, Orphan Train, which is so addictive it’s almost like eating a brownie.

She is the mother of three sons and she told me that she used to drive to a nondescript Panera Bread two towns away from her home in Montclair, New Jersey, where she would order “buckets of coffee” and a “pathetic salad” and write until her hand ached from writing. (Eventually, though, she had eight legal pads all filled. This took years.) Then, as her reward, she would go browse next door at TJ Maxx before going home to her children and babysitter.

I met Barbara Kingsolver long ago and have been lucky enough to continue an epistolary friendship of letters back and forth, on and off, since then. Knowing what she has said about the school bus and thinking about how so many of us are juggling other jobs, relationships and responsibilities, I asked her to tell me more about how she managed kids and writing and whether she needed any chocolate brownie or crazy salad to get started.

She told me that she has taught herself not to be too precious about writing, as she had young children when she first got going and had to write around their lives:

To be honest, I’ve never needed much in the way of ritual, I think because I sold my first novel the same day I had my first baby—literally, the same day—so in my first decades as a professional writer I was also raising children and had to beg, borrow, finagle and pay for time at my desk. Holding paragraphs in my head for long stretches, aching for the chance to write them down. Working motherhood cultivates time management skills….No woolgathering, just go!

That reminded me a bit of my friend, Andre Dubus, III, who wrote House of Sand and Fog in fifteen-minute breaks from working a carpentry job, when his kids were small. I tell my writing students this story as a “See, grab any time you have!” Andre just did it, I tell them, little by little, no dilly dallying. Now he drinks very dark coffee to get started and takes breaks from fiction to write essays.

Another friend, Lewis Robinson, whose new novel The Islanders comes out this coming fall, wrote,

As far as rituals go, I like to start at either the top of the hour or half past for some reason. This must just be a delay tactic. I also like round numbers (a full hour or a full two hours to write; 500 or 1000 words). And sensory deprivation—I like writing in the dark, or inside a sleeping bag. (I’m not often able to achieve that, but I like it when I can.) I usually write better on an empty stomach, except for coffee, and coffee is a must.

Fellow Mainer and friend, Morgan Talty, author of the short story collection, Night on the Living Rez and the new novel, Fire Exit, told me that, for him, it was always coffee and cigarettes. He wrote to me,

I quit cigarettes about ten years ago so I wouldn’t die. But as a smoker, cigarettes were part of writing: Inseparable in the same way smokes are to coffee. But then I quit. Sure, I transitioned to vaping, and for a time I experienced separation: there was writing but no smoking. There was coffee but no cigarettes. Eventually I got used to the vape and the separable became inseparable, and so for nineish years I found my way back to the same space. However, things have changed. Jorden—my wife—and I had our first son, Charlie. I’ll spare the stern talking to’s I’ve rightfully had from Jorden about vaping in the house, and so for the last year and some months I found myself back once more where I was before: There was writing but no vaping; there was coffee but no smoke-vapor.

Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Master, Slave, Husband, Wife needs candy. She told me that she hated writing her footnotes so much, that she had to dole out a jelly bean for every footnote accomplished. (As an author of a book on science, Modified,  that took me almost six years and many many footnotes to accomplish, this is something I totally get.)

My ideal morning would go like this: I’d stay in bed with my first cup of coffee, no one needing anything from me, reading some other fiction by someone else for about thirty minutes, and then get up to write. In fact, I did write my first novel, Pete and Alice in Maine, just this way, during that lockdown Covid year when we were all home and there was time to have an actual morning. Also, I found that since I wasn’t making lunches and driving around all day, I had this wonderful second wind in the late afternoon.

It turns out I am not the only writer who likes to work this way. My friend, Dawn Tripp, the author of the  new novel, Jackie, also likes to begin by reading some of her favorite passages by her favorite writers. She told me,

I have a short shelf of books I’ve read dozens of times over the years, dog-eared pages with passages marked: Part II, Time Passes, in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; The first ten pages of The Lover by Marguerite Duras; several sequences in Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Dozens more. They’re like a playlist—those passages that all evoke how time and consciousness shift and change and flow. Every morning, I sit with my coffee, one of those books, my notebook and a Palomino Blackwing pencil, and I read until my mind is open and I am ready to write.

Note that special pencil? I have a few special pens to help me get in the mood.

These days, I am back to driving my kids hither and yon and my days are crammed, so I get out of the car after morning drop off and walk around to look at my garden. I try to act myself into an empty mindset, like the kind I might have  if I’d just awoken from a dreamily restful sleep, the day full of possibility.

Sometimes I need to sweep the floor, or drink another coffee, or go for a run (I like to do this, particularly in winter). Sometimes I need to do some yoga or even lie down in fetal position to regroup (weird, I know.) And I’ll say this: Even on my fifth book, I still feel a need for the “ready, set, go!” of the entire thing.

But that never stops me from showing up again and again. If you simply sit in front of the blank page, day after day after day, with a brownie in your hand, a bowl of Jelly Bellies on your desk, a favorite book you reach for, or just a Patchett-like fire in your belly (or perhaps some version of all of the above), I believe you will eventually have a manuscript, as words do add to words. It’s like magic.

And yes, you may emerge from all that writing slightly stiff from sitting, a few pounds heavier from all those brownies, or in the best shape of your life because you went running every two hours to work out your plot. But you will indeed emerge and, when it’s all over, the best person to reward you is you: That’s the hardest part. Go take a bath, buy yourself some flowers, make yourself a cake. You got this far. And soon you’ll need to start the rewrite.