The Writer’s Workout
I’m at a poolside party. The guests’ conversation turns to fitness. The talk shifts fast into competitive comparisons. I run a 10K every day. Really? I run marathons. So do I—as part of my Iron Man training. And so on. Those of us nursing our cocktails as we scarf down plates of seven-layer bean dip, smile and nod and plead with the Universe to let this Angel of Embarrassment pass over us. No such luck.
Reckless on the surge of sugar in my drink, I say, “You want a workout? Try writing.”
Everyone laughs.
My intent wasn’t a joke. Done full-out, writing is demanding and physically draining. The reason why a fitness routine tires us out is obvious. But writing? That’s only moving imagined people through imagined spaces, right?
To write a book is to commit to this workout regularly for spans of years.
No. A writer fully engaged in their work have deployed their entire bodies. The brain, in writing, is a pinball machine. The writer feels, reasons, keeps spatial relationships intact, plans the next move, balances the music in language while maintaining continuity in meaning. We recreate movement and so muscles in our bodies flex and fire as though doing. Threaten a character and writers slip into their own fight, flight, or freeze response. We render reality on paper by living the details—fictional or otherwise—as real.
Emotions brought to the page convincingly must be felt as the writer turns them into language. To have a character act out of envy means the writer has had to feel envious. Often, the only way to accomplish that is to dredge up a memory of the writer’s own experience of envy.
Each pass of each revision means manifesting that emotion one more time by rehashing the memory. The process can be exhausting, but what is story without emotional gravity pulling the reader deeper into the page? This is the price of creating empathy.
Add to the above, the pure labor of writing itself. Keyboarding is work. Longhand more so. Keeping the posture straight challenges the spine and the core. If the writer has hit that place where only the story exists and there is no longer awareness of time or typing or words appearing before their eyes, the muscles grow stiff as the fully engaged writing systems don’t know how to stop until depleted of energy—sometimes in the middle of a sentence.
To write a book is to commit to this workout regularly for spans of years. Why do we do it? This digging deep and stretching wide? We write for the same reason others run their Iron Man races or clean their houses or till their gardens in the mid-day heat. We do what we do because it feels so damn good when we’re done. Until the next day.
Writing Exercise
Let’s do some confidence-building sentence reps. Take one of your favorite books. Find a paragraph that resonates for you. Copy that paragraph, preferably in longhand. Read it aloud several times, breathing as instructed by the punctuation. Pause at commas; stop at periods. Repeat until you can feel the rhythm of the language and how that rhythm informs what the paragraph is about. Now, sentence by sentence, rewrite the paragraph in your own words from memory. Look at both paragraphs, yours and the first one, side-by-side—not to compare but to see difference. Read your own aloud. Hear the rhythm in your language. Hear how your voice is your own. Rewrite if you want. Repeat the exercise with books from other writers. Your confidence in your voice will grow stronger and you will see clarity and definition increase in your style. (Your writer brain is already doing this without your conscious awareness. This is how we learn craft from reading.)
Photo by Alexandra Tran on Unsplash