This week, Luiza Sauma looks at the parallels between writing and running – and suggests that getting off the sofa and out the door could do wonders for your writing...
Writing is a lot like running.
Both take enormous amounts of will power and stamina. Both are rather solitary. The more you do them, the better you become. Running and writing are activities that many of us dread, but once we’ve got going, they can fill us with joy, excitement and lust for life.
I only discovered these parallels recently, when I took up jogging and (quite out of character, this) became a bit obsessed with it. A few years ago, if you’d told me that I would one day join the legion of Saturday morning runners in my local park, I would have sucked on my fag and laughed in your face.
But within weeks I had the new shoes, the iPod armband and the smug, red face. Better yet: I’m writing more than ever. It can’t be a coincidence.
I’m not the first person to notice that running can make you a better writer. The most famous runner-writer is Haruki Murakami, who often talks about his exhausting schedule of writing masterful novels and running 10,000km before dawn. He even wrote a book on the topic, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
Many people, when asked to imagine the quintessential “writer”, would probably come up with a self-indulgent, dreamy sort of person, lying in bed and scribbling some thoughts once in a while, in between taking drags from an opium pipe. But enough about Coleridge – these days writers have moved far beyond the trustafarian stereotype. (Trustafarians did exist in the 17th century; they just hadn’t discovered Bob Marley yet.)
If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard an aspiring artiste tell me – or at least insinuate – that drugs, insanity, booze and promiscuity made them more creative, I’d have at least a couple of quid.
Writing is gruelling, emotional work. As screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan puts it, “Being a writer is like having homework for the rest of your life.” It’s not easy and it never will be. Consequently, writers can and should aim to be healthy, in both mind and body.
For all the Hemingways, Kerouacs and Fitzgeralds of the world, who merrily drank, smoked and shagged their way through (mostly) stellar writing careers, there is the rest of the writing community, which generally sees writing for what it is: a marathon. Moreover, what happened to those three writers? They all died early in ignoble circumstances: drunk, often broke and certainly mad.
And then there’s Joyce Carol Oats, who plans her stories while jogging round a park. In 1999 she wrote an insightful and rather touching piece for the New York Times, in which she drew parallels between her love of running and the long-walking habits of Wordsworth, Dickens and Whitman.
It began: “Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.”
She also points out that “writers are crazy”, which is more or less true. Writers think too much and expend too much brainpower on fine details – essential for writing, but not so good for general wellbeing.
Running frees your mind. It’s the anti-depressant that keeps on giving. It’s time to redress the mind/body balance: go for a run, and then write.
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If you want to get fit, join the Lifestyle Challenge, Brett Stephen Smith’s IdeasTap-funded healthy living competition, with a £600 prize.
Image: Typewriter by nicoleleec, available under a CC BY 2.0 license.