Somerset Maugham, the prolific English author, was diligent about writing between 1,000 and 1,500 words daily. But before sitting down to his typewriter each morning, he took a bath, soaking in the tub for as long as it took to formulate his first two sentences in his mind.

Franz Kafka, who had a day job at an insurance company, did his writing after hours. His routine began with 10 minutes of nude calisthenics, followed by an hour’s walk. Not until 10:30 at night did he sit down to write, doing so, as he explained in a letter to his fiancée, until his “strength, inclination, and luck” ran out at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.

Maya Angelou described her working pattern in a 1983 interview: “I keep a hotel room in which I do my work — a tiny, mean room with just a bed and … a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon.”

These examples come from a book I’ve been reading by Mason Currey entitled “Daily Rituals,” which compiles the routines of more than 160 writers and other creative individuals. The accounts range from the commonplace — V.S. Pritchett’s first act in his study each day was to light a pipe — to the offbeat: Georges Simenon weighed himself before beginning each of his 450-plus novels and wore the same clothes until the book was finished. Some authors were virtual writing machines: Anthony Trollope wrote from 5:30 to 8:30 each morning, timing himself to produce 250 words every quarter-hour. Anytime he completed a novel before that day’s three hours were over, he promptly took another sheet of paper and began the next one.

As Currey acknowledges in the book’s introduction, he assembled these sketches of writers’ routines because they’re fun to read about — not as a guide for would-be writers to emulate. The fascination lies in their sheer variety. Which in turn highlights a key truth: There is no formula for creativity. No single approach works for all writers, or even for the same writer at different times.

Yet somewhere between Currey’s delightful compendium and today’s productivity blogosphere, curiosity curdled into commandment. What was once biographical trivia has become self-help gospel: You must have a ritual or your creativity will never show up for work.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff makes this case in a Big Think essay arguing that the human brain is “wired” to respond to rituals. Structured habits, she writes, reduce uncertainty and help the mind slip into a creative mode. Amitava Kumar, surveying what he calls “The Long Tradition of Writers Needing Ritual,” maintains that daily routines are indispensable to creative work. So adamant is he on this point that at one point he insists: “All that matters is the routine.”

It’s not hard to find such claims in the booming literature on creativity and productivity. Perhaps the most influential statement of this view comes from Twyla Tharp, the renowned American choreographer. “I begin each day of my life with a ritual,” she writes in her book “The Creative Habit.” That ritual is no superstition, she contends. It is a necessity — a way of telling the body and mind that creative work is about to begin.

And what, precisely, is Tharp’s crucial ritual? She wakes up early, puts on workout clothes, walks out of her Manhattan home, and hails a taxi to the gym. That’s it. “The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual.”

But with all due respect, this is not a ritual in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s what you do if you want to go to the gym in the morning. Getting dressed and leaving the house is not a ceremony; it is a prerequisite.

Tharp anticipates the skepticism. She acknowledges that “some people” might roll their eyes at the idea of glorifying so ordinary an act as getting up in the morning. She disagrees, she says, because there are days when, “like everyone,” she would rather stay in bed. “But the quasi-religious power I attach to this ritual keeps me from rolling over and going back to sleep.”

Her concession underscores the problem. What Tharp describes is not a ceremonial procedure that unlocks her creativity. It is simply an ingrained habit to keep from procrastinating. If calling it a ritual with special significance is what gets her up in the morning, great. But it isn’t the key that unlocks her creativity, any more than Kafka’s calisthenics-in-the-buff was the secret sauce that produced “The Metamorphosis.”

Consider a sports analogy. Some baseball hitters go through elaborate routines at the plate before each pitch: adjusting their gloves, touching their helmet, tapping the plate, scuffing the dirt. But plenty of hitters don’t delay at all: They step up to the plate and swing. The ritual, for those who use it, may steady the nerves or provide the reassurance of a lucky charm. But it isn’t what gets players on base.

Writing is no different. Familiar routines may help some writers begin. But they aren’t what gets the column written, the chapter finished, or the book done. What does is something far less romantic.

In my nearly four decades as a newspaper opinion writer, the only “ritual” that has ever mattered is the deadline. Left to my own devices, I would tinker endlessly — revising this paragraph, wrestling with that sentence, tweaking a more effective simile, crafting a better ending. But there is no getting around the hard fact of a deadline. As an older Globe journalist put it to me years ago, a piece of writing is never finished; it is surrendered.

Deadlines have no mystique. They don’t care about mood or inspiration or “quasi-religious power.” Whether or not you’re ready to write, the deadline is coming. That pressure can be uncomfortable — even, on occasion, panic-inducing. But it has one overwhelming advantage: It works.

Granted, I write for a daily newspaper — but even novelists and poets who work on their own schedule will often impose artificial deadlines on themselves. The accountability may come from an editor, an agent, or a date circled on the calendar. What matters isn’t the source of the pressure. It’s that the pressure exists.

So by all means, light the pipe, take the bath, or hail the taxi if it helps you get the writing started. But don’t pretend it’s doing the heavy lifting. It isn’t true that “all that matters is the routine.” All that matters is sitting down and doing the work — because ready or not, the clock is ticking.