While possessing very left-wing views on most matters, when it comes to writing I’m a downright fascist.
500 words a day. No exceptions. Ok – when I’m editing a long work, maybe that day is an exception. But otherwise, whether I’m tired, uninspired, hungover, suffering haemorrhagic fever, trapped down a well, or caught in a temporal paradox, I damn well write.
500 a day, six days a week, 300 days a year – all nice, round numbers. That’s 150,000 words, or a novel plus ten short stories. Just two pages of writing a day and people will be calling you ‘prolific.’ Which is all very nice. But you’re not prolific. You’re just disciplined.
Of course, there are many who will say, while sucking on a doobie: “hey man: do what you got to do, write what you want to write. I’m okay – you’re okay.” To those people I say: shut up, hippies (I told you I was a fascist on this one).
Actually no, I don’t say that. But I do think this: it’s very easy, if you don’t have a daily word limit, to make excuses for not writing. As George Orwell said: “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Orwell is right about everything. I read writer’s forums and watch the twitter feeds of authors the world over, and good lord they are a bunch of carping whingers.
Aside from the steady stream of mostly sad proclamations to the glory of themselves, (‘I’m interesting!’, ‘I exist!’, ‘Love me!’) writers, it seems, can’t but help stack up the excuses for not writing. They bemoan their feelings of self-doubt, or lack of inspiration from the muse, or the suffering of some high drama such as a flat battery, a flavourless Chai latte (photographed, placed on Pinterest), or a delay of payment from their trust fund. Worse still, these excuses are readily accepted by others in the writing community with a pat on the head and a, do what you got to do.
Fuck inspiration. Fuck doubt. Fuck your latte.
Write.
The second 500 in the title refers to calories. 500 calories are burned in approximately a 40-minute run or an hour doing other stuff.
Here’s the thing about exercise: it will make you a better writer. Exercise helps brain function, including memory and thinking skills.
Regular aerobic exercise helps enlarge the size of the hippocampus. This is important, as beginning in our late 20s, most of us will lose about one percent annually of the volume of the hippocampus, a key portion of the brain related to memory and certain types of learning. Exercise forestalls this reduction, and often builds brain volume. In this regard, our brain is like any other muscle.
As Heidi Godman notes in Harvard Health, exercise can: “stimulate the release of growth factors—chemicals in the brain that affect the health of brain cells, the growth of new blood vessels in the brain, and even the abundance and survival of new brain cells.”
Exercise keeps the brain active longer as you get older, staving off the effects of dementia. Useful for writers, given nearly all of us are dirt poor and will need to keep writing forever just to cover food and rent.
In a fascinating study in 2007, researchers showed that, through experiments with mice, doing specific puzzles improved future performance for that specific puzzle type. However, this practice had no use for any other cognitive task. Daily exercise, on the other hand, built new neural networks in the brain of the mouse that were of use for any cognitive task.
Put another way: Sudoku puzzles are good practice for more Sudoku puzzles, while exercise helps performance for everything. Exercise, as such, makes you smarter.
As someone with a predilection for killing brain cells through ample doses of booze, exercise sounds like salvation.
This also, perhaps, gives us a partial explanation for why Haruki Murakami, now 66 years old remains mentally sharp as ever (and indeed, gets weirder and more inventive with each novel he writes). He runs a marathon every year.
Exercise helps set your brain for a day’s writing, and can often be the catalyst for new story ideas or resolving writer’s block.
Finally, exercise is good at alleviating depression, a condition which writers (and artists) in general, suffer in far higher numbers than the general population. There’s a price to pay for having an artistic temperament, and that’s a healthy dose of self-loathing. Yes, I noted above that writers are vain – but self-love and self-loathing are two sides of the same coin. A coin a lot of authors I know seem to flip at the start of each and every day.
So there you have it: bring a little fascism into your life. It’ll do wonders for your writing.