Writing - A Way of life

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This book is designed to stimulate and sustain your creative flow. It will help you through those difficult patches when inspiration seems to have deserted you, and the whole process feels like horribly hard work. It will help you celebrate and utilise to the full those exciting times when your creativity seems to take on a life of its own and you feel as though you are running to keep up with it. It will enable you to tap into that inner wealth you may have forgotten you had. If you can just remember to have this book to hand and turn to it when needed, you need never be stuck again.

First, the more practical matters. This opening chapter looks at how our work habits can be improved in order to free and maintain that natural creative flow. Management of our time and our resources – including that most important of writers’ tools, the human body – is considered as part of this process. Antidotes are suggested for some of the unnatural mental and physical practices we impose on ourselves in order to write. If you feel tempted to skip this section in order to get down to writing straight away, then please remember to return to it later. This is very important. Many writers have found solutions to long-standing problems by taking some of the simple steps suggested here.

WRITING IS A PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

A writer is like an athlete; a competitor or skilled performer in physical exercises, to quote the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

Because we spend so many hours seated at our desks, it is easy to forget this – until our body protests. Our neck shoulders and head ache, our eyes refuse to focus, our wrists succumb to repetitive strain injury, and then we remember that our mind operates through a physical organ in a physical body with needs of its own.

These aspects of a writer’s physical make-up need particular attention:

- the brain
- the eyes
- digestion
- joints, muscles, heart and lungs.

Keep your brain alert

Like all our bodily organs our brain needs nourishment, a rich blood supply, plenty of oxygen and adequate rest in order to function well. Hours of sitting hunched in a stuffy room, skipping meals or eating junk food will put it at a disadvantage.

The simple acts of opening a window, circling your arms and breathing deeply will boost mental processes tremendously. If you find it hard to remember to do these things, write a note to yourself and place it where it will catch your eye from time to time.

Brain food

Our brains thrive on foods rich in iron, phosphorous and the B vitamins (particularly B6, which is said to help with ‘writer’s block’). Liver, fish, pulses, grains, wholemeal bread and green vegetables are all excellent writers’ foods. My current favourite ‘boosts’ are extract of malt, or thick wholemeal toast with tahini, banana and honey. Oh no? OK – what ’s yours?

Brain fatigue

We need rest, not only to combat tiredness but to enable the body to replenish its cells – which, of course, include our brain cells. For this reason, burning the midnight oil (a common symptom of ‘writing fever’) may reduce our mental and physical efficiency over time – something we may find it all to easy to forget or ignore. Many writers have found it beneficial to replace their late night writing habit with an early morning start when the world is just as quiet and their brain is rested.

Efficiency is also improved by a regular change of task – on average, every hour and a half. (See glossary: Circadian rhythms). Use a timer with an audible signal as a reminder to take regular breaks. Ideally, leave the work room and do something physical. Have a list of suggested activities to hand – anything from a short-duration household task to a brisk walk around the block. Physical movement will invigorate your body. Also it can, in itself, trigger a flow of words and ideas (see Use physical activity to stimulate your creativity below).

Brain waves

Your list could include some of the audio-visual products which use pulses of light and/or sound to alter brainwave patterns. A 15-minute session with one of these can calm an agitated brain, or revitalise a flagging one.

Highly recommended are the products available from LifeTools, and the light and sound machines from Photosonix and Novapro (see Useful addresses).

Further information can be found via the Internet (see Personal Growth products and websites) NB Pulsing lights should not be used by people suffering from epilepsy.

Further suggestions for activity breaks appear in the sections which follow.

Checklist
To function well your brain needs:

- nourishment
- oxygen
- rest and relaxation
- a well-exercised body
- regular breaks.

Keep your eyes healthy

Computer users

If you use a word-processor, you probably spend many hours staring at the screen. An anti-glare screen, either built in or added on, is essential. If over-exposure causes sore or itchy eyes, try bathing them with a cooled herbal infusion of eye-bright and camomile. Your local pharmacy will also carry a number of good remedies for this condition. (Also see all writers below.)

Such exposure can leave eyes deficient in Vitamins A and B2, so supplements of these vitamins are advisable. Vitamins C and E also promote eye health.

Alleviate eye and neck strain by having the monitor exactly at eyelevel. If necessary, place some blocks underneath it to achieve this. Positioning your feet at the correct height is also important. Ideally both the knee and the ankle joints should be relaxed and should form right-angles.

All writers

Most methods of getting words onto paper involve your eyes in long periods of repetitive activity. They will function better if you take regular time out to exercise them. Add this ‘eye-gymnastics’ routine to your activities list. It need only take a minute once you have mastered it.

- Hold an upright pencil about 10 cms from the bridge of your nose. Focus on something distant, then focus on the pencil. Repeat several times.

- Move the pencil up, down, from side to side and make slow circles with it. Follow these movements with your eyes. Repeat several times.

- Without the pencil, repeat the above movements several times very slowly.

- Finally, rub your palms together briskly, then cup them over your eyes.

Cold tea-bags, cucumber slices or diluted lavender oil on a damp cloth are all very soothing when laid on closed eyelids. You can also bathe your eyes with a cooled herbal infusion of eye-bright and camomile (as advised for PC users).

Eat well

A tight schedule might tempt you to skip meals, eat junk food, or eat absent-mindedly while still writing. These are false economies which you will pay for in brain and body fatigue – and probably digestive disorders, later. Keeping going with stimulants such as alcohol, coffee and tobacco will also have a punishing and detrimental effect on your system.

You owe yourself proper meal breaks – relaxing times spent away from your desk, rewarding mind and body for the hard work they have done. How would you feel about a boss who insisted you work through your lunch hour? Don’t do it to yourself!

Exercise your joints, muscles, heart and lungs

How would you feel if ordered to sit in one spot for several hours moving only your fingers? Writers regularly submit their bodies to such torture. The long-term results will be stiff joints, atrophied muscles and a variety of other ills which could adversely affect your life – not to mention your creative output.

To redress the balance, add a choice of physical work-outs to your break-time activities list. Work with a yoga or pilates DVD for example, to ensure that your whole body is exercised and flexibility and strength are maintained. You also need an aerobic activity, to exercise heart and lungs and send blood and oxygen to all vital organs, including the brain. Jog, cycle, walk your dogs, dance to Gabrielle Roth, work out with your favourite celeb – whatever you enjoy the most.

Tae Bo is a particularly good work-out for writers as it thoroughly exercises the heart, lungs, arms and upper body and brings an invigorating flow of blood to the brain.

The need for desk workers to take regular exercise breaks has long been realised by companies such as RSIGuard and WorkPace, who have produced software which interrupts your computer use at chosen intervals and takes you through a workout, including eye exercises. The websites of such companies are well worth a visit and many offer 30-day free trials of their software. Despite my initial irritation at being interrupted every hour, I have found my health has benefited hugely since I installed one of these programs.

You might also like to try the seven exercises to do at your desk, described in this Guardian article:

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/wellbeing/story/ 0,,1878085,00html

I have found them very useful.

Checklist

Your physical health and, as a result your writing, will benefit from:

 

- good eye care
- eating well
- sleeping well
- breathing deeply
- taking regular breaks
- exercising.

Use physical activity to stimulate your creativity

As mentioned earlier, physical activity can often release a flow of words and ideas. This could be connected with our early development, as we learn to use the rest of our bodies before we speak. I saw a striking example of this effect while working on a language-skills programme for children with special needs. The group included an extremely withdrawn eight-year old boy who had been silent throughout his three years at school. Having marched round the hall to music, the children wanted to ‘march’ lying down. As they did so, the boy in question began moving his arms and legs faster and faster against the floor. Suddenly out came a torrent of speech, which increased in speed and volume until he was shouting whole sentences. Somehow that particular sequence of movements had triggered his speech processes.

Using physical triggers to stimulate the thought processes

Practitioners of therapies like Gestalt and Bioenergetics utilise such physical triggers as enabling mechanisms. Writers can do the same. Crawling, kicking, jumping, punching cushions – ‘marching lying down’, can all help words to come. Close the curtains and try it – what can you lose!

Writers use a variety of physical triggers to get the creative juices flowing. Veteran sci-fi author Ray Bradbury used to swim. Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, would walk or skate. Poet and author Diana Gittins leaps into a boat and rows. Comedy writer Peter Vincent ‘gets up from his desk every hour or so to do yoga.’ (‘Or eat a biscuit,’ he adds after some reflection.)

Like many writers, Peter finds that when ideas start flowing he strides about consuming large quantities of food. He also experiences a strong link between his creative process and his physical well-being. He can suffer indigestion and abdominal pain for no apparent reason, make an alteration to the script he is working on and immediately feel fine again – literally a gut reaction.

Checklist

- How does writing affect your body/behaviour?
- What physical activities help you to think better?

Value your health and treat your body well. It is the vehicle of your talent.

Flex your writing muscles

‘Get in action,’ Natalie Goldberg advises.Work it out actively. Pen on paper. Otherwise all your thoughts are dreams. They go nowhere. Let the story move through your hand rather than your head.’
If writing is your main occupation, you probably write daily from necessity. If not it is good to keep the ‘writing muscles’ flexed in this way. With any discipline, leaving it for a day can lead to several days and so on – until suddenly weeks have passed and you are horribly out of practice. If the discipline in question is an important part of your life, you can also find yourself horribly ‘out of sorts’ if you don’t pursue it. Writing is no different in this respect. You must maintain the momentum for progress to be made and – if writing is your passion – for well-being to be maintained.

Find the time

When we work from the creative rather than the logical mind, the process cannot be rushed. To derive maximum benefit from the exercises in this book, you need to allow enough time for the experiences to unfold.

However, if you find yourself juggling a heap of responsibilities and wondering how you can possibly clear a space for writing, a short regular slot each day is a good compromise solution. Even if you can only manage ten minutes, at the end of the week you will have 70 minutes-worth of writing under your belt. While not ideal, it keeps you writing. In fact a novel per year can be produced in this way.

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CASE STUDY

Karen, one of my students, set herself that very task. She has two young children and works part-time as a computer programmer. As a teenager, she wrote short stories and poetry. For years she had been trying to find time to do this again, but somehow it had never happened. After discussing this in class she agreed that ten minutes a day would be considerably better than nothing. She decided to spend ten minutes of each lunch-break writing (in her car to make sure she was not disturbed). She used an old A4 diary for the purpose and filled a page each day. By the end of six months she had written over 80,000 words, which she is currently crafting into a very promising novel.

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Go for it

One of the problems with only having ten minutes, is that it can take that long just to start thinking. The answer – don’t think. Set yourself a time of ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour – whatever you have available, and just write. Get in action. Keep your hand moving. Whatever comes; no thinking, crossing out, rewriting – just do it. Stick to the allotted time – no more, no less. A timer with an audible signal focuses the mind wonderfully. Some of what you write may be rubbish – fine! When you give yourself permission not to be perfect, things start to happen. You can find yourself swept up in the joy of what writer Chris Baty (founder of National Novel Writing Month) has termed ‘Exuberant Imperfection’. At the end of the week look back and highlight the things you might be able to use.

Another excellent way of both flexing your writing muscles and focusing the mind is to set yourself the task of writing a complete story in – say – 100 words; no more, no less. Try subscribing to Flash Fiction Online (see Appendix). I have found this a refreshing once-a-week change from my daily timed writing.

Chris Baty’s Write a Novel in a Month idea, and Nick Daws’ Write Any Book in 28 Days are greatly expanded versions of this go-for-it approach.

Get started

Write: ‘I remember when . . .’ or ‘I don’t remember when . . .’ ‘I want to tell you about . . .’ ‘I don’t want to tell you about . . .’ ‘I have to smile whenever I. . . ’

Write about a colour, a taste, a smell, an emotion. Write about a favourite outfit, an embarrassing experience, a holiday disaster, a beloved pet, a dream. Write about what it feels like to have no ideas.

Write: ‘If I were a piece of music I would be . . .’ or ‘The woman on the bus made me think of . . .’ or ‘The meal I would choose as my last would be . . .’

Open a book or turn on the radio and start with the first sentence you see/hear. If you get stuck, write your first sentence again and carry on.

If you would like to try a more technological approach, writesparks.com offers a quick-start generator which is fun to use, and particularly suited to timed writing. It even provides a space and a timer if you want to time-write on your PC rather than by hand. Also try writingbliss.com which, among a huge variety of writing activities, offers to e-mail you a daily writing task – for free!

If you want to apply timed writing to a larger project – say, completing the first draft of a novel, software available from WriteQuickly.com ‘guarantees a book in under 28 days, working for one hour per day’. Nick Daws’ CD ‘How to Write Any Book in 28 Days’ and Chris Baty’s book No Plot, No Problem make similar claims (see References, Further reading and Useful addresses and websites).

Find new ways

Whether you are doing timed writing, taking notes or firstdrafting, writing in a linear way from left to right is only one of many choices. Try writing round the edges, starting in the middle, writing in columns, spirals, flower-shapes – whatever takes your fancy. I find linear note-taking of little use for recovering information afterwards.

I prefer to ‘chunk’ my thoughts (see Figure 1) so that they leap off the page, demanding my attention. I draw a shape around each chunk as I write, to keep them separate. (The doodles come later when I am thinking.) I also like to organise my writer’s notebook in this way. When I scatter snatches of conversation, description, and general musings around the page, I find they come together in ways I might not have thought of if I had used linear jotting.

I find coloured paper and pens useful – and fun. They alleviate boredom, evoke a particular mood, and help me organise my thoughts.

Checklist

- Set a time and keep to it.
- Decide how you want to position the words on the page.
- Choose a starting sentence and return to it if stuck.
- Don’t stop until the time is up.
- Don’t think, cross out, rewrite – just do it.
- Try a workbook or some software for a change of approach.