Joe here: I don’t know about you, but I’m still working off those Holiday calories. This seemed like a great time to share this post from the archives about the importance of exercise for our creative writing. Enjoy the post and good luck with those New Year’s resolutions!

Confession time.  How much exercise have you done today? How about yesterday?  Over the course of the past week?

And why am I talking about exercise on a website that helps people write better?

improve your writing

Because getting your body up and moving is good for your plotlines.

Want to Write Better? Move Into Creativity

Bottom line first: physical activity is good for your brain, and what's good for your brain is great for your writing (unless you're not a human but one of those AI wanna-be novelists). So choose your juice: running, swimming, cycling, weightlifting, pilates, yoga, or the occasional triathlon. Just make sure you get cardio in there. That's the perfect antidote to sitting at your desk moving no muscle—er, sorry, tendon—other than your fingers on the keyboard.

Write Better Morning or Night

We writers are notorious exercise abstainers. No, not all of us (and certainly not YOU), but enough of us to warrant this blog post. After all, who wouldn’t rather spend a glorious sunlit morning crafting the world’s next literary magnum opus rather than sweating it out the way all those high-powered, over-achieving, billionaire powerhouses do (supposedly) every day at 5am sharp?

You couldn’t pay me enough to spend my morning in the gym, overachiever status be damned. Yoga and feeding the hummingbirds, yes, every time. But there’s a reason for that—that's what resonates for me. Every body is different; we each have our own unique biorhythms, and my body is not an early exercising bird. At least not physically—mentally, I can be up at 5 or 6 and write for three or four hours straight.

However, come late afternoon or evening, I hit the pavement. I’m a runner. I run for thirty minutes in the park across the street, blissfully plugged into my headphones. There’s nothing in the world that can top that feeling.

Except chocolate, but that's another post for another time.

The Writer’s High

For us scribes, the runner’s high has a sister benefit: the writer’s high. If you run, you know what I’m talking about. It’s that state of pure ecstasy you reach when you hit your stride, when your muscles no longer ache, and you feel like you could run forever. And if you didn't have that manuscript to finish, you probably would.

When you run, you’re unplugged from everything except the fresh air around you. You’re unplugged from all those interruptors that are so detrimental to literary creation: email, social media, traffic, conference calls and client deadlines, grocery lists and family obligations.

It's that unbridled, energized freedom and energy that running gives you that generate creativity. I’ve untied many a pesky literary knot and brewed up lots of fresh new ideas for my stories while running. I've come up with plotlines, titles, dialogue, even marketing strategies—ideas and angles that might not have occurred to me if I had stayed home.

It gets the emotional (read: creative) juices gushing. Stirs up new images, associations, metaphors. You don't have to take up running, per se—but do work in a good workout, make it a regular part of your writing routine, and you'll see how fast that blinking cursor will disappear.

What do you do to get your creative juices flowing? Let us know in the comments section.

PRACTICE

What are you still doing in that chair?  Get out there!  Then, come back with your juices jazzing through your body and mind, and write a kick-ass story.  Post it right here—and let us know in the comments how exercise helps you write better.

Birgitte Rasine

Birgitte Rasine is an author, publisher, and entrepreneur. Her published works include Tsunami: Images of Resilience, The Visionary, The Serpent and the Jaguar, Verse in Arabic, and various short stories including the inspiring The Seventh Crane. She has just finished her first novel for young readers. She also runs LUCITA, a design and communications firm with her own publishing imprint, LUCITA Publishing. You can follow Birgitte on Twitter (@birgitte_rasine), Facebook, Google Plus or Pinterest. Definitely sign up for her entertaining eLetter "The Muse"! Or you can just become blissfully lost in her online ocean, er, web site.

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