Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

A thousand pardons, but with 30 of us here, give or take (usually take), posting away every day, some topical overlap is inevitable.

Late last spring, when I got the invitation to come on board, I jotted down a half-dozen ideas, one of which struck me as being so seemingly unrelated to writing — on the surface, at least — that I wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else getting to it first.

And I didn’t, not for two or three entire months, when Sephera covered it.

So I opted to back it off awhile, then come at it from as different a perspective as possible … and, as serendipity would have it, there can be no better time than right now, as the early January air crackles with the sound of New Year’s resolutions being broken.

We’re all familiar with the standard answers given whenever someone asks for advice on how to get started writing. Coincidentally, they’ve come up in some of the previous few days’ posts. They’re jukebox answers, really. The person has dropped a quarter into us and the old reliables are cued up to come out: Write every day. Read as much as you can. Write about what you know … or, as George made a case for the other day, what you don’t know. And so on.

To which I would add: If you’re not active in a regular fitness regimen, you might want to consider getting started.

For me, it was, and then again it wasn’t, ever thus.

First the wasn’t: Early in my own efforts at making novelistic headway, I read a book called Usher’s Passing, by Robert R. McCammon. I still vividly remember the Prologue’s depiction of Edgar Allan Poe: working at a table in a tavern while stricken with some malady or other, running with clammy sweat and feverishly scribbling away on pages stained with splotched ink and whatever wine didn’t make it to his gullet.

I so wanted to be that guy. Wanted to be able to write in that condition; thought it might even help. I wanted to be able, like Mozart — the Mozart of Amadeus, at least — to have the capacity to lie on my deathbed and dictate my greatest work to someone who merely had to sit there and keep up while taking it down.

And let’s not even get into when I discovered Charles Bukowski.

It was all purely romanticized cow-pies. That never worked for me. With just one experimental exception, I was never happy with anything I wrote during a state of impairment, whether trying to soldier on through the flu, or deep in the influence of the fermented fruits of this crop or that. Oh, it might’ve seemed fine at the time. It might’ve seemed brilliant at the time. Look at it later, though, and the letdown was like dreams we have that appear to be divine inspiration while we’re still mostly asleep, then sag into so much incomprehensible nonsense when we sic the left brain on them.

And yet … and yet … at the same time, a diametrically opposed outlook was forming.

It may well be an aberrant viewpoint, too, but from the time I got serious about writing — believing I might be able to do something with it beyond a win, place, or show in high school and college contests — I’ve regarded pushing myself physically as being an intrinsic component of the process. One key inspiration for this, or maybe by then it was just validation, came from, oddly enough, Henry Rollins, frontman for Black Flag and the Rollins Band, spoken-word performer, writer, publisher, sometime actor, and so on … and who continues to look like one of the more intimidating drill instructors you could imagine.

In an interview I saw, he was asked why, early in his music career (or maybe even before), he became such an avid weightlifter. His answer: He wanted to build a machine that could withstand the abuse he knew he was going to be heaping upon it.

That has resonated with me ever since.

Not that there’s any real-world comparison between (A) lugging amps and speaker cabinets to and from crappy vans, putting on a ferocious show, then moving on to the next town, and, umm…

…(B) sitting at a desk typing for hours.

It’s just that it feels that way sometimes.

The connection, I realize now, was made about as early as it could’ve been. In the acknowledgements for my novel Oasis, I wrote, “Most first novels are the deskbound equivalent of struggling through a triathlon…” Which is really the way I saw it, with three distinct races sutured together: writing/revising, researching, and finding other people who would share the conviction that I’d done something worthwhile. Other writers may have their own metaphors: climbing a mountain, hacking through a jungle, whatever.

The common denominator is that they all reflect an arduous process that you’re going to have to tough out, alone, no matter how much of a support system you may have backing you up.

My mistake, however, was in thinking that the second novel was supposed to feel like something other than an altogether new triathlon. Or the third novel. Or the fourth. Or the in-progress eleventh.

Throughout any of them, I couldn’t have explained why, exactly — and, really, wasn’t much interested in analyzing why — I just felt that the books, and the shorter works sprinkled between them, sometimes alongside them, were things for which I needed to stay conditioned. In fact, during a string of earlier novels, my mental state was far more prone to tilting out of whack than my physical state. Part of this salvation was the simple momentum of habit. I started running in high school and never stopped.

But in recent years, when reading more about the mind-body connection, I decided it was time to step it up, do more, address the things that I was neglecting. I’d mostly been limiting myself to one area of activity, when a well-rounded fitness regimen incorporates three: flexibility, strength/resistance training, and cardiovascular endurance.

To the running, then, I gradually added yoga, weightlifting circuits, sessions on three different cardio machines, calisthenics, and a more extensive series of pre- and post-workout stretches than I’d been doing before. In a six-day workout week, most days are different, and no two adjacent days alike. In all, first-thing-in-the-morning yoga included, it adds up to about 75 or 80 minutes per day.

But I’m convinced that the time pays for itself, and leads to better work than I’d be producing without it.

It takes commitment, of course … the kind of commitment that statistics say most people lack. I’m dismayingly good at recalling stats and quantified trends without having a clue where they were cited, so here’s another: The average person, when embarking on some new discipline, has enough gas to make it the first 17 days or so. Then the backsliding begins.

That at least seems to reinforce an observation from fitness center employees: that their busiest time of year is the first three weeks of January. Once the post-holiday guilt and/or the New Year’s resolve run their course, things are back to normal.

But here’s something else to consider in that light: Most people who say they’re going to write a book never start. And most of those who start never finish.

If you’ve ever done either, you’ve already pulled up somewhere near the front of the pack, demonstrating a level of determination that most people are unwilling to act upon. That’s as good a foundation to build on as any.

As long as you have that in your favor, could you — health permitting — take whatever you’ve accomplished further by tying it to a resolve to challenge your physicality in new ways? I don’t know. It’s hardly a prerequisite. Stephen Hawking, for one, has managed to put out some pretty well-received books without doing much more than lifting a couple of fingers. But anything’s worth a try, and this route is healthier than most.

Next month’s post — because this one is running long enough as it is — I’ll wrap things up with some of the specific benefits that I, and other people, have found that a fitness regimen brings to creative work. If nothing else, you’ll want to see the photo clipping that I use for negative inspiration, a case of the “good example or horrible warning” dichotomy wrapped up in a single candid image.

So, back in 31 … unless that runaway truck with my name on it makes all of the foregoing one big fat moot point.