Tag: writing rituals

Rituals and Writing Prompts to Celebrate Ostara and Inspire Your Spring

Jaclyn20 Comments

The spring equinox, also known as Ostara, is a special time of year when the day and night are in equal balance. You can use these rituals and writing prompts to celebrate Ostara and inspire your Spring. The energy of this time can help you strengthen your writing practice, develop your creativity, and plant the seeds you will harvest in your writing. Embrace your potential as a writer and get inspired by the light and new growth the earth is offering. 

Creative Writing Prompts for Spring Equinox Ostara for Writers Rituals and Prompts for Ostara The spring equinox, also known as Ostara, is a special time of year when the day and night are in equal balance. You can use the energy of this time to strengthen your writing practice, develop your creativity, and plant the seeds you will harvest in your writing. It’s a wonderful time to embrace your potential as a writer and get inspired by the light and new growth the earth is offering.

What is Ostara?

Ostara is the pagan celebration of the spring equinox, the time when there is equal amount of daylight and night. It is the beginning of spring and usually falls around March 21st in the northern hemisphere and September 21st in the southern hemisphere. Astronomically, it can shift a few days from year to year. Ostara is considered the first day of spring and the last day of winter. It is the day that the earth begins to wake after the long winter. 

It’s a time of rebirth and a time of perfect balance. It’s a time to plant seeds and cultivate hope for the future. It’s a celebration of fertility and fecundity and creativity, which makes it an excellent time of year to harness the power of creation and imbue your writing practice with some magic. Things change on Ostara because it’s when the daylight begins to outweigh the darkness. Starting on Ostara, we get more hours of light than we do darkness, and it signifies the time of year when the light has overcome the dark. 

Ostara is the dawn of the Wheel of the Year. Ostara is named for the Germanic goddess of Spring, Eostre, which is also where the word Easter comes from. (Easter, by the way, is celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Basically, it is the celebration of the first full moon of the Wheel of the Year.) Eostre, in turn, may be derived from the Proto-German Austro, meaning dawn. Though Easter and Ostara do not often correspond in terms of dates, there are many shared correspondences. Both holidays celebrate spring, rebirth, eggs, and hares. 

Ostara Correspondences

One of the most notable Ostara correspondences is the rabbit or the hare. The females of the March hare species can get pregnant with a second litter while they are already pregnant with a first, which is part of why they are a symbol of fertility and fecundity. Eggs are also a symbol of Ostara, and it’s easy to see why, given their connection with spring and new life. 

Ostara is also associated with spring flowers: daffodils, crocuses and pussy willows, all the flowers that are the first to come up in the spring. The colors of these flowers also correspond to Ostara: green, yellow, and purple. Also, pastels are always great for this holiday. The spring equinox is also a time to celebrate the trees coming back to life, so all kinds of seeds and seedlings are appropriate, as are venerating birch trees, alders, and ash trees. Crystals that are particularly relevant for Ostara are rose quartz, moonstone, and aquamarine, which are all associated with growth and new growth. 

Lemony and herbal teas and scents are also good representations of spring and freshness. Floral scents are also good: Rose, lavender, jasmine, and any kind of flower-scented incense or candles will help freshen up your space and make things feel renewed and abundant. 

​​How to Celebrate Ostara as a Writer

Ostara can be an magical time for any artist, and for writers especially. It’s a great time to set new intentions, let yourself be reborn, find more balance, and try something new. If you celebrated Imbolc, maybe you set new intentions and resolutions already. Here are some more ideas for developing your writing practice at this time. 

  1. Balance your writing practice. How can you create more balance in your practice? Are you pushing yourself too much in terms of marketing and not spending enough time on your writing? Are you concentrating on plot and not enough on character? Are you focusing on word count and ignoring your playful, creative self? Think about how you can find more balance in your writing practice and endeavor to use this time of balance and new beginnings to reset and begin new practices around your writing process.
  2. Start something new. As the buds begin to bloom on the plants, think about where you can also begin new growth. This is an awesome time to start a new project. A new draft, a new book, a new genre, a new job, a new writing ritual. What project have you been waiting to begin? What changes have you been wanting to make? The time is now! 
  3. Be playful and childlike. There is a childlike freshness to this time of year, and you can embrace that in your writing practice as well. This is an excellent time to take yourself less seriously, to inject some play into your writing practice. 
  4. Let yourself be reborn. You may have ideas about what kind of writer you are, and sometimes these ideas need to shift and change. Are there ideas about your writing or about yourself as an artist that you need to let go of? Maybe you think you are not creative enough, not fast enough, not prolific enough. Now is a time to let yourself be born into the writer you were meant to be. What can you do to begin to embrace your potential and new growth as an artist?
  5. Be intentional about the seeds you are planting. Take some time to think about what you want to see grow and blossom in your writing practice. Make a plan to take concrete steps to develop that. Maybe you want to develop a daily habit, be more inspired, read more. This is a great time to plant those seeds so that you can harvest what you have sown later in the year. 
  6. Do some planning. It can be invigorating and exciting to make a plan to start something new. This is a great time to use the energy of new beginnings to start planning and goal setting in new ways.
  7. Embrace your creativity. Ostara is all about fertility and creativity. It is the perfect time of year to tap into your creative juices and the fruitfulness of your writing practice. Here is a ritual you can do to enhance your writing practice and really open up your imagination. 

Creative Writing Prompts for Ostara

Use these creative writing prompts to support your creativity and writing fertility.

  1. What’s new this spring?
  2. Write about something just beginning to emerge.
  3. Do an erasure in which you delete exactly half of the words in order to make a new poem or story. 
  4. Write about an egg that hatches into something unexpected.
  5. Write about the world restarting, being reborn completely anew. 
  6. Go outside, and let the way the earth is changing inspire you. It’s a great time of year to take your writing outside and look for the small details. They are growing into something beautiful. 
  7. Write about the dawn of something new.
  8. Write about someone who is green.
  9. Write about someone who finds a strangely decorated egg. 
  10. Write about overabundance, the problems that can happen when you have too much of a good thing. 
  11. There is a folktale about Eostre changing a bird into a hare, which is why the Easter bunny is said to bring eggs. Write about an unbelievable transformation that radically alters the way the character gives birth or brings life into the world. 
  12. Write a story that takes place completely at dawn.
  13. Write a story about reconnecting with your inner child.
  14. Write an aubade, a morning love song about the ways that lovers have to separate as the sun comes up. 
  15. Sit with your back against a tree (bonus points for birch, ash, or alder!) and listen. Write the story of the tree. What does it see? How does it experience the world differently? What kinds of stories can it tell?
  16. Write about someone emerging from a long period of darkness. 
  17. Write about a death that is actually a rebirth.
  18. Write a piece inspired by Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits by the Magnetic Fields.
  19. Write about finding a frozen creature and nursing it back to health.
  20. Write a piece about someone who dies every evening and is reborn every morning. 
  21. Write a piece that centers around seeds being planted. 
  22. Write a story in which someone brings in a new dawn. 
  23. Write about someone who begins completely anew and reinvents themselves from scratch. 
  24. Write a story in which someone whose wings are frozen finds a new life because they cannot fly. 
  25. Pick one of the greens in the Sherwin Williams color families and create a piece based on the name of the color. 
  26. Go outside and write a haiku (or set of haikus) based on the new growth and signs of spring that you find.
  27. Spend time with a child and write about the world through their eyes. 
  28. Wake up early and observe the dawn. Free-write everything you see, hear, and experience in the first hour of the day.
  29. This image by Annie Spratt from Unsplash

30. This image from Ashley Bean from Unsplash

31. This image from Tangerine Newt on Unsplash.

32. This image by Sydney Rae from Unsplash.

33. This image by Chris Jarvis on Unsplash.

34. This image by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash.

For More

If you are looking for more writing prompts, you can find them here. If you want more creativity in your writing routine, check out this post about creating your own writing ritual, or this post for a ready-made creativity ritual. 

The Definitive Guide to Writing Rituals

Jaclyn15 Comments

What is a writing ritual and what are the benefits? How do you create a writing ritual that boosts your creativity or your productivity? How do you find that special set of actions that will inspire you and help you beat writer’s block? This post is a deep dive into the idea of writing rituals: what they are good for, how to create your own, some examples of writing rituals to try, and how to choose the best ritual for you.

writing rituals: the definitive guide

Writing Rituals

I don’t know about you friends, but sometimes it can be hard to get in the mood. 

Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about writing. 

It can be difficult with so many of life’s distractions to find the time and the space to write. There’s dishes and the post office and three-year-olds trying to show you what they made. There’s Facebook and Netflix and nature just outside beckoning you to take a walk. How do you find the room in your day to write? The answer is you don’t. You don’t find room. You make the room. 

You hear this advice all over the writing world. When I first heard it, I thought it was harsh. It seemed to imply that I needed to cut other things out of my life so that I could write. Spend less time with the kids. Sleep less. Don’t do anything for fun. Just sit at the keyboard and bleed, was what I heard every time someone lectured me about making the time and space to write.

But I am realizing I have been thinking about it all wrong. Making the time to write doesn’t have to be so harsh. What if making the time to write just means creating a special time, a special place where you can really just focus on your creativity? A special experience outside our mundane expectations where you can let yourself get lost in the words. You make the time and the space to write by creating a ritual around it. 

There is a long tradition of writers needing rituals. We’ve all heard the stories of idiosyncratic writing rituals of famous writers. Fredrich Schiller reportedly needed the smell of rotting apples to write. Colette would pick fleas from her bulldog until the muse arrived. Dan Brown hangs upside down and Victor Hugo could only write nude. Creativity requires a bit of magic, a bit of being outside of ourselves and being open to a wider, larger perspective. So how do we become more creative? More productive? How do we beat writer’s block and connect with our muse? We create the right conditions.

What is a writing ritual?

A writing ritual is a particular set of actions that you do over and over again in order to better your writing. It’s something that you do time and again to make the sacred space for creation. A signal that you are leaving all your worries and cares about the mundane behind and giving this time over to connection and grounding in your practice. It doesn’t have to be magical or woo-woo. It just has to be something that works for you. That special sauce of things you know you can do that will help you get in the mood.

Why do a writing ritual?

What are the benefits of creating a daily writing ritual that works for you? There are actually quite a few. You can think of it on a magical level, as if you are calling your muse, or you can think of it as something scientifically proven to help you get into the flow. Either way, there are clear benefits to having intention in the actions and atmosphere around your writing. Here are some reasons to create a ritual to help your writing process:

  1. Creates a separate space and time that’s devoted to writing. Creating a writing ritual allows you to transform yourself or your space into something special where you can let go of other distractions and concentrate more fully.
  2. Primes your brain for writing. The little things we do can send signals to your brain that it is time to write, and therefore help you begin sooner. As Stephen King puts it, “The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.”
  3. Lowers the bar to get started. Psychologically, creating a writing ritual helps you lower the bar to start. It’s easier to light a candle than it is to write the first line of your novel. But all you have to do is take that one first step, and then the next step and the next. Creating a writing ritual allows you to control that first step, perhaps even the first few steps, to make them small enough that you never have an excuse not to start.
  4. Allows you to connect more to the process and the muse. There is quite a bit of talk of pre-writing rituals—about what to do to get started. But I think it is equally important to take stock of our actions while we are writing. Creating a ritual around your writing can help you stay more in the present moment and broaden your senses to things you don’t ordinarily stop to pay attention to.
  5. Increases motivation by creating time to take stock. In the same way that your actions before and during writing are important, so are the actions you take right after you finish. How do you leave your writing or story in such a way that you are eager to come back to it?

Parts of a Writing Ritual

Part 1. Separation: Setting the tone

To start your ritual, you want to set the tone and mark it as a special time and place. This should be an action that helps lower the bar to starting, something that is easy for you to do and tells your brain “Ok, it’s time to write!” Here are three ways that you might begin to prepare yourself to write and separate yourself from your daily distractions.

  1. Open and welcome. This is a chance for you to light the spark. Choose one small thing to be your opening signal, the signal to yourself and your muse (or perhaps your family) that the sacred time has begun. It’s good if this first step takes very little time, in fact, just a moment is best. Think of this as the moment that everything begins. Here are some ways to begin marking the moment: Ring a bell. Dim the lights. Light a candle. Say a special phrase that inspires you. Maybe your way of opening and welcoming is to gather with a group. Join a Discord group or plan to sit down and work with a friend. Community can be a powerful motivator.
  2. Transform yourself. You can transform your state of mind, by meditating, taking a walk, going outside, doing yoga, having coffee, etc. What puts you in the right mindset? Or you can transform your outer appearance. Maybe you throw on your most comfy sweater to settle in, or your most sassy lipstick. It could be as simple as taking a shower, or saying a prayer. Or it could be as ornate as getting all dressed into your “author” costume. Say affirmations to get yourself in the right mindset. Maybe you even free write for a few minutes. Get all those other pesky ideas out of your head so you can concentrate on the creativity in front of you. Have a glass of wine, even. Whatever you need to do to get yourself in the right frame of mind to write.
  3. Create a sacred space. What could you do to make the space special, to make it different than your living room or kitchen table? Or the place where you do your schoolwork? Sometimes it only takes a very small thing to transport you to a sacred space. Lay out a cloth. Put on white noise or ambient sound. Change the way the space smells with essential oils or candle melts.

Part 2. Liminal Space: Doing the Work

You’ve welcomed the muse. You primed your pavlovian writer-dog. You’ve set the stage for writing. It’s time to do the work of the ritual. Make it happen! The universe is supporting you. All the conditions are right. Then make it so. This is the part where you write! You have transformed your space to make it sacred, made yourself sacred. Now manifest it. Get writing!

  1. Set intentions. What are you going to make manifest while you are writing? Is your intention just to write the most authentic piece you can? The most beautiful? Maybe you want to finish the next chapter, or write a certain number of words. Maybe you are editing, and your intention is to transfigure the rough draft you have into something beautiful. Maybe your intention is to spend some time looking within, or to connect with someone or some truth. What’s your purpose for this session? Write it down. Say it out loud. Keep it in mind. Hold it close.
  2. Be mindful of your time and your actions. Set a goal—an amount of time, an amount of words, finishing a chapter. You might do writing sprints, taking mindful breaks. Or write until you reach your daily goal. You might set a meditation bell timer to ring every fifteen minutes to remind you to stay on track. How can you keep yourself focused on the work at hand?
  3. Engage your senses. Play music that inspires you. Light incense. Lay out crystals that help empower you. Use your favorite pen. Pour a cup of your favorite tea. This is about keeping yourself in the experience. The more you engage your senses, the more present you will be in the moment, and that’s exactly how you get into that beautiful state of flow. 

Part 3. Reassimilation: Coming Back

Honestly, I think this is one of the most important parts, but also one of the most overlooked. You need some way to bring the power of what you’ve created and the sacred time and space you created back into your everyday life.

Though ritual creates a special space, the idea is that the work we do in the ritual continues to impact our daily lives. Maybe we leave the writing at the desk, but the growth we’ve experienced because we have created, the ways we have been changed by our characters, by the worlds we build, the lessons we force our characters to learn because we also have to learn them ourselves: these are the things we need to bring back with us as we re-enter the world of laundry, mac and cheese, and finally cleaning the oven.

This makes the symbolic return to the world pivotal  part of the ritual. This is the step that carries us through until the next time we get to visit the sacred space. Here are some ways you might honor that closing time.

  1. Give thanks. Once you’ve done the work, it’s important to recognize what has transpired and to give thanks for it. Find ways to be grateful for the work you’ve done. Wherever you think your creativity comes from, any beauty that we can create is a gift, and sometimes all we need is to recognize that we are creating and give thanks for that. Find your favorite line and share it with someone. Thank yourself, or your muse, or the universe or your creator or whatever source you feel your inspiration comes from. 
  2. Recognize your progress. Sometimes progress with writing can be slow. It can help keep the motivation up to celebrate every win, to recognize that every word you wrote was a step in the direction of your dreams, or of your work getting out in the world. You might keep a short journal of how you felt each day. Or back up your draft and make it so! Check your goals from this writing session off your list. You might even give yourself a reward of chocolate or stickers.
  3. Plan to be back. Blow out the candles and promise to return. Set a goal or intention for the next session. Do one very small thing to let the universe (And yourself!) know that you are finished, but only for now. 

How to Create a Writing Ritual

I am not suggesting that you do all of these things every time you write, of course. Some of these will work for you and some will be a waste of time. Think of this list as a menu. Choose one bit from each “course” to try. 

See how the music affects you. See if you are drawn to certain smells. And then choose the ones that seem to make an impact on you and the way you feel about your writing. 

It’s important to make sure that your writing ritual supports your writing and does not take away from it. The elements of the ritual shouldn’t take so long that it eats into your writing time. You want these to be things that support your writing, not procrastination, and it’s important to keep that in mind. 

The point is not for it to be something stereotypically “magical.” It just needs to be transformative to you. You are creating this experience for yourself. You are conjuring this other world and these other people in your writing. You are creating the magic. What makes sense to you?

Daily Writing Ritual Examples

This post is all about creating the perfect combination of actions to get you in touch with your creativity as quickly as possible. My advice is to choose one from each of the above parts of a ritual that feels like it speaks to you and give it a try. That being said, here are a few examples of writing rituals that might help spark your creativity or give you more focus:

  1. Light a candle. Do pomodoro sprints for a preset amount of time. Track your progress and thank your muse and/or yourself for showing up. 
  2. Put on your favorite writing outfit or article of clothing. Set your goals for this writing session. When you’re finished, read through what you have written and choose your best line. Express gratitude for that line.
  3. Lay out a cloth. Play some music that inspires you while you write. Set an intention for the next writing session, committing to show up for yourself. 

How to Choose a Writing Ritual

Here is the thing about us writers: none of us is quite the same, which is why we all have something peculiar to say. This also means that finding yourself as a writer is in large part a journey of finding your process. 

Writers give all kinds of advice: You must write every day. You must write by hand. You must write first thing in the morning. You must write drunk and edit sober. I call bullshit on this kind of advice. Some of us are binge writers, and write best one day a month. Some of us have overzealous inner editors when we are too loud when we’re by hand. And I, for one, felt like I never wanted to write at all when I tried writing first thing in the morning.

Your writing ritual is going to be the same. You have to find what works for you. This may sound counterintuitive, but I think we should treat our creativity, our inspiration, our magic, and our connections to our muses like science. Try different things. See what works. Record how you feel, or how much comes out. 

So here is my advice: try anything that speaks to you and record how it affects your work. Maybe you want to put on your sassy writing lipstick before each writing session for a week. Record how it goes. Then try a ritual with lighting a candle and some music. How does that go? Use what works for you. But in order to find out what works for you, you have to do some trial and error, so definitely find some way to keep track.

So much focus on craft (both the craft of writing and the craft of magic) is about doing things the “right way” and places value on what’s received. But connection with the past isn’t the only reason to do a ritual. People pass on this kind of wisdom because they find it works for them. Try things that have worked for others, but also try things that feel right to you. 

You know what resonates with you. Are you a person inspired by goal-setting and planning? Choose a ritual that speaks to that. Do you know that you respond to sensory experiences? Maybe a candle and music is right for you. The best person to craft a ritual for you is yourself.

Remember, Edith Sitwell used to lie in a coffin to get ready to write, so you do you. 

Do you already have a writing ritual? What other things help you reach that state of flow? What do you do to inspire your creativity?