WRITING IS EXERCISE

Every morning, I get up at 4:45 am to exercise. No, really. I take the dog out to pee. I make a cup of coffee, and I sit down at my writing desk to exercise for the next hour.

That’s right. WRITING IS EXERCISE!

Just as with sports like baseball, tennis, or swimming, repetition of an activity makes you better. With each session, your skills sharpen, your reflexes quicken, and your endurance increases. You get better because you’re improving your body.

Every writing session, I’m learning something new about myself as a writer as I learn more about my writing. Years have been spent, sweating over verb usage, POV, punctuation, and endless trips online for synonyms, spell checks, and word origins.

The result is that my writing muscles grow stronger with every session. I’m a much stronger storyteller than I was five years ago. I can dash out a flash fiction in a morning, a short story in a week, and a novel….well that still takes time. A novel is a marathon. However, I don’t get winded during those 90k runs anymore. I set the pace and keep on trucking.

Lastly, to stretch the writing as exercise metaphor a bit further, after each writing session, I feel better. I might be tired. But it’s a good tired. And like physical exercise, if I miss a session, I feel guilty. If I decide to sleep in instead of get up to write, I’m grumpy all day. Only sitting down to write again brings me that writer’s high back.

So, I invite all writers out there to join me tomorrow morning for an hour of exercise. Try it for a week. Let me know how you feel.