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Charles Dickens moved the ornaments on his desk into a specific order before starting to write. Isabelle Allende lights "candles for the spirits and the muses," has fresh flowers and incense, and meditates to open herself to her writing. Stephen Pressfield wears his lucky work boots, drapes his lucky sweatshirt nearby, and positions his lucky cannon on a thesaurus pointed at his chair so "it can fire inspiration into me."

Few writing rituals make sense to anyone but the writer who employs them. Some are even contradictory: Stephen King writes to loud rock and roll; May Sarton preferred eighteenth-century music only. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll and Gunter Grass all wrote standing up; Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton and William Stryron all wrote lying down.

Despite a prevailing cultural bias against rituals as mere superstitions, writers have long known the power of ritual to reduce anxiety, increase confidence and initiate and sustain their writing. As novelist John Edgar Wideman observed, "The variations are infinite, but each writer knows his or her version of the preparatory ritual must be exactly duplicated if writing is to begin, prosper."

Now, thanks to new research in neuroscience, we know why writing rituals are so effective. Neuroscience has abandoned the theory that once we reach adulthood, our brains can no longer grow, change or heal significantly. The new paradigm of neuroplasticity that recognizes the brain's ability to transform itself is concisely stated in Hebb's Law "Neurons that fire together, wire together."

In other words, if the neurons for smelling lemons are activated at the same time as the neurons you use when you're writing, those two groups of neurons start to form a connection--they "wire together." Repetition reinforces this connection so that eventually firing one set of neurons causes the other set to fire as well. The more you repeat the behaviors together and the more exclusive the behaviors are--you smell lemons only when writing--the more powerful the neural connection becomes. Eventually just smelling lemons will trigger the neurons used for writing and you'll "feel" like writing.

German playwright Friedrich Schiller applied this principle long before Hebb proposed his neuroplasticity concept. Schiller stored rotten apples in a drawer to keep his imagination alert. He used the association so much, he claimed he couldn't write without the odor. It may have a secondary benefit of holding at bay anyone who would otherwise interrupt Herr Schiller's genius.

Rituals can focus on objects, what the writer is wearing, what tools the writer is using, or the environment the writer works in, but the rituals that employ a strong sensory component are particularly effective. Remember Proust and his madeleine?

You don't need to endure nasty smells like Schiller or spend a lot of money like Joaquin Miller, who had sprinklers installed above his house because he could only compose poetry to the sound of rain on the roof.

Simply select a sensory experience you'd like to associate with your writing and engage in that experience every time you write and preferably only when you write. You might want to eat licorice or lemon drops, drink a particular flavor of tea, or burn a scented candle or incense. You could drape your computer in red velvet or run your fingertips over a small shell or stone. You could select the soundtrack for your novel, giving each major character her or his own theme song to play when writing about that character. You could create a collage of photos related to your current writing project and set the collage next to your computer whenever you're working on that project.

The connection will feel forced at first--give it time. Your brain will create new neural connections and you'll develop your own quirky, but reliable, ritual to put you in that writing state of mind.

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Rosanne Bane, Creativity Coach and Teaching Artist, is author of Dancing in the Dragon's Den: Rekindling the Fire in Your Creative Shadow and the upcoming Around the Writer's Block: Simple Ways to Apply Neuroscience to Unblock Your Writer's Brain. Rosanne teaches creative process classes at the Loft Literary Center. Visit www.RosanneBane.com or BaneOfYourResistance.wordpress.com, a place to share insight and information about the many forms of writer's resistance (procrastination, looking for answers in the fridge, staying too busy to write, etc.) so you can stop resisting and really enjoy your writing.