Writing as physical workout

In the war the men who sat behind desks and worked out the rations, decided they needed more than the soldiers at the front. Deskwork, brains whirring, required more energy than manning frontlines, they persuaded themselves.

It IS odd how physically demanding writing can be. After my recent lengthy bout of it I was coming round to thinking the symptoms were fatal. Exhaustion just seeps into the bones, weight drains away, energy gets sucked up. As I recover, I remember that it is just part of the writer’s condition. Years ago, when I was younger and spryer, I remember finishing a novel and the next day both legs gave way. Why the legs and not the hands I don’t know. I couldn’t walk, just had to lie still for two days till those legs started to function again.

Yet not writing is also baleful. Up here (I say up, because we’re at 7800 feet) on the land in Santa Fe I’m finding the middle road, writing for just one or two hours a day, happy with 600 words or so each time. So long as the story keeps moving forward, I stay inhabiting it. This is a book about a figure who communes with nature, so this is a grand place to be (the coyote pictured here just one of our recent visitors). It’s set in central Turkey, Athens, and Virginia. I’ve delayed starting because I felt I needed to revisit those places – then it occurred to me that imagination layered on top of previous experience does the job well enough. Part of the fun of writing now is that it is fiction, a wild yet interior journey. I grow to suspect that my global adventuring belongs to an earlier period of my life, perhaps a necessary part of accruing experience, banking it to draw on for later writing exploits.

And outside of those hours of writing and dreaming the story into being, I’m out working the land. Trimming branches from trees and using them to form dams for erosion control, that kind of thing. It’s teaching my body that it’s alive, tuning it back in to the world, limbering up.