Writers need the same training and fitness as any Olympic athlete.
No they don’t. Olympic ping-pong, maybe. And I’m probably insulting ping-pong players. They might be superb athletes. I don’t know.
But writers should at least be in shape to write. I hear a lot of writers say it’s hard to write. They worry about age, their back hurts. They sit and nothing happens. In some cases, the problem is obvious. If you have trouble getting up and down stairs, you’re going to have trouble with the physical part of writing.
And writing is physical. You sit in one place for hours, striking keys. You feel guilty if you get up. You feel guilty if you don’t produce a certain amount of words. You feel guilty if you eat a sandwich, or look at your phone.
There’s a lot of guilt in writing.
There’s also a lot of pain in your backside, your back, your neck. A quick fix? Stand, don’t sit. I put a small, extremely cheap coffee table on my desk, and this is where I do my typing. Standing and typing takes some getting used to. Standing and typing takes a lot of getting used to, but after a few days you’ll never go back.
There are fancy desk risers you can buy, or standing desk converters. All are adjustable, some electric. This is really the way to go. But I’m cheap. My wife tells me to buy a good desk riser and write it off. Write it off of what?
By standing you cure back pain, but now there is another issue. Standing is physical. Standing all day requires good legs, and there’s only one way to exercise your legs. There’s more than one way, but the easiest? Walking. Or running. If you can walk you can run, my doctor told me. Easy for him to say. He ran marathons. But he was right, and after a long time, and many baby steps, I went from a few hundred yards to jogging three miles a day. It has made all the difference.
Think you’re too old? Joyce Carol Oates is a runner, and she’s ninety. Or close, and cranks out a book every year.
And that’s another thing. What’s this obsession with age? What is age anyway? It’s meaningless. If you can do something, you’re never too old to do it. So stop complaining and start standing. And writing. I personally write like a twenty-five year old.
I also act like a twenty-five year old, but that’s another story.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com