It leads to thinking

 I’m interested in how people start writing, which is largely the story of how people start thinking.

The American poet William Stafford got up at 4 a.m., went to his place and began by making a few notes on the events of the previous day. Those sparse notes were a prompt — something that primed the pump or got the machinery going. Pretty soon, he had abandoned the diary and was writing poetry.

Other writers do the same thing in different ways. Here’s Ronald Blythe:

 

Crack of dawn. Remove harvest spiders from bath and sink by the renowned postcard and glass method. From glacial porcelain to dewy earth in a second, what arachnidal bliss. Howls from a starving Max who hasn’t seen a square meal for at least six hours. Switch off the headlines for the great creating silence of the day. Walk through the sopping grass eating cornflakes and Thinking.

 

Explanatory notes: Max is one Blythe’s cats. Harvest spiders are the spiders that come indoors in autumn. If you don’t know how to evict spiders by trapping them under a glass jar and then sliding a piece of stiff cardboard below, you might be a spider swatter or stomper, but I hope not.

Blythe calls the routines of the day humdrum. If he starts with the smallest routines of the day, pretty soon he’s thinking and then he’s writing.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 334.