Patti Smith’s Creative Coffee. By Orna Ross.
Posted on March 27, 2013 by admin
Creativity is a habit and cultivating good creative work means cultivating good creative habits. But what about the bad ones? Don’t you need the sex ‘n’ 
drugs to make the rock ‘n’ roll?
No, says one of the greatest rockers of them all, Patti Smith, in Interview Magazine. “I’ve seen a lot of people go down because they attach a harmful substance to their creative process. A lot of it is purely habitual. They don’t need it, but they think they do, so it becomes entrenched.
“Coffee was part of my process. I used to drink like 14 cups a day… Now, if I want to go to a cafe and write and to drink coffee for two hours, I just order them. I don’t drink them.
“What I do is order an americano and a pot of water and I keep diluting it — because it’s not the coffee, it’s the habit.
“A lot is just aesthetic. It’s the feeling of how cool I feel with my coffee…”
What habits feed your aesthetic, your process?
When I sit down to write, I rub the head of a carved white buffalo and press the back of my crow toy so that it caws. That caw is the starting flag that signals, “Let the games begin!”
What a great ritual, Sally! Mine is F-R-E-E-Writing with strong coffee — that’s why I liked this quote by the great Patti.