Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 8

So, you’ve been writing for a week. That’s great, but I hope it’s not all you’ve been doing.

It’s easy to get caught up in the writing, especially when it’s flowing. I know it is because I’ve felt that same “chair stick” when everything is just going. But there’s a difference between sticking to it and writing so much you stick to your chair.

We can’t all be Proust and spend all day in bed writing. It’s important to balance writing with taking care of yourself. That means you can’t use NaNoWriMo as an excuse not to exercise. In fact, in November, it’s even more important to ensure you get exercise because it’s easy to put it off and because your brain is the engine that drives your writing and creativity, and your brain isn’t healthy unless it’s in a healthy body.

You may wonder how squeezing in an hour away from writing is going to make you get more writing done. First, answer this: can you go further in a car that can only do thirty for eight hours or one that can go seventy, but stops for two of those eight hours? (If you don’t want to do the math, the faster car goes twice as far in the same amount of time.)

By neglecting physical fitness, you’re neglecting mental fitness and effectively limiting the speed at which you can think and write.

Second, we’ve all had “shower ideas.” The ones where you’re in the bathroom brushing your teeth or taking a shower or simply doing something that is completely disconnected from writing. You’re minding your own business, and then an improvement to something you already wrote pops into your head. Or maybe it’s you suddenly seeing a plot hole. Or a plot twist. Nabokov even wrote about that in the poem that makes up the first part of Pale Fire:

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:
I’m puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind
Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He’s in his study writing with a pen.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

The time that you’re away from the desk isn’t wasted. It’s a chance for your brain to think things over at its own pace and in its own space instead of being pushed around by you. That’s when it runs the wires behind the walls and makes connections. That’s when it runs the pipes under the floor that makes the water flow. Exercising gives the brain that time to roam, and stronger legs to do it with.

What kind of exercise should you do? Well, I hope you’re already doing it and I’m just here to remind you to keep it up. If not, what you do has to be something you’ll actually do. Many, many authors and other creative types have gone on long walks.

It’s as unique to you as your own writing is, so I’m not qualified to give you medical advice. Personally, I go on 30-40 mile bike rides on Rouvy or I lift weights at the gym, but those are things I’ve been doing for years. While I’m on the bike watching the pretty scenery go by (one of the reasons I like Rouvy is that I can be biking around the sunny lavender fields of France while it’s the middle of a rainy night in Cleveland) or walking around the gym in between sets, my brain gets to wander. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, but it’s never time wasted: it’s time invested with interest.

I won’t recommend anything I wouldn’t do myself, so just to show you it’s possible (and necessary) to fit exercise in with writing, in my November posts I’ll include how much exercise I did.

The best advice often outlives those who give it, and this one has been around for 2000 years: mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. That goes for November, too.