A writer’s life is not designed to reassure your mother. The least you can do for yourself is take care of your body.
Art is presented as something that happens from the neck up. But creativity is not an isolated mental process. Your body is involved. You’re working when you’re writing, and work means sweat. The muscle effort isn’t as obvious as for an athlete. However, the concentration on your task is so total that your muscles must obey as well as your mind. The better your physical condition the easier it is to write. That doesn’t mean if you’re a great athlete you’ll be a great writer. What it means is that if you have the natural talent for writing, whatever discipline you expend on your body will affect your artistic output. You’ll work better.
Writing is your Centre Court, your World Series. How curious that no one has paid much attention to the physical conditioning of artists in general, and writers in particular.
Much of what I have to tell you about your body is common sense. You need to eat properly and get enough sleep. If you’re working at an outside job to support yourself while writing, something’s got to give. Don’t let it be sleep. Give up your social life. If you aren’t prepared to put your writing first, you aren’t really a writer. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to organize your priorities. Sleeping is more important than partying. For you to be successful, sacrifices must be made. It’s better that they are made by others but failing that, you’ll have to make them yourself.
Once you’re on a regular sleep pattern you will discover that at some times of the day you are more creative than at other times. For me, this occurs about two hours after I’m awake. Everyone is different. The ideal for a writer is being able to organize your day around your best work time. However, if you’re stuck in a nine-to-five job, you can’t do that, so you have to learn how to crank yourself back up when you get to the typewriter.
One way to push up your output is through food. You can devour a lot of diet books and cookbooks. Forget them. Listen to your body. Your body will tell you when you need to eat and what you should eat. The problem is that we’ve arranged our day according to the dictates of labor or social life. Few of us eat when we need to. We wait for a designated lunch hour or we hang on until eight o’clock when we meet the Joneses at a restaurant. Learn to be unsocial. When you’re hungry, eat, and always eat a big breakfast. If you’re on the job, carry some apricots, nuts, or other non-junk foods. Snack a little. When you finish at your money job, come home and exercise if possible. Then eat something that’s a good mix of carbohydrates and protein. Even if you have a dinner date, eat a meal when you need it. If your body says six o’clock, then six it is—to hell with fashion. When you get to the restaurant, just eat a light salad. If your friends don’t like it, get new friends. You must be in good condition in order to create. If you were in training for the Olympics they’d understand. You are. Never let anyone or any social attitude stand in the way of your productivity.
If you’re using sugar as a pickup, your body is giving you a signal. If you crave sugar, go to your doctor and get a glucose tolerance test. It’s a real bore but the test doesn’t hurt—it’s simply time-consuming. You might be diabetic or hypoglycemic. If you are, this sugar imbalance will make you less productive.
Anyone reading this can get loony from sugar. Even if you aren’t diabetic or hypoglycemic you can do damage to yourself. It’s difficult to cut out every bit of refined sugar from your diet and I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting you watch it. For maximum efficiency of the whole body, the amount of glucose in the blood must balance with the amount of blood oxygen. Your brain registers this balance or imbalance immediately. As the most sensitive organ in your body, your brain reacts to the sugar long before your muscles do. How you feel—up, down, calm, or climbing the walls—depends in large measure upon what you’re eating. Remember what happens to you when you drink too many cups of coffee? A constant overconsumption of sugar makes caffeine seem almost benign.
If you’re a person without an inborn glucose problem, you can manufacture one. You’re working hard on a novel. You aren’t taking the time to prepare good meals. You don’t have time anyway because of your job and if you’ve got children you’re fighting for every second. It’s late at night. You’re tired but you want to keep working. You hit the chocolate chip cookies. Within minutes you feel a surge of energy and you work your tail off. Soon, maybe within a half hour, you feel exhausted, depressed, and irritable. More chocolate chip cookies. What’s happening to you is this: Up until the sudden influx of refined sugar your adrenal glands were keeping your body chemistry running with the precision of a Mercedes. You got tired because you’d used up whatever you’d eaten for dinner. You became less imaginative and eventually your muscles became tired too. Remember that the brain gets priority inside your body and the brain will rob muscles of energy in order to function. That’s when your muscles get tired—that and when you use them in heavy activity, of course.
But when you started to sink over the page, you ate those cookies. Refined sugar, sucrose, is the next step to becoming glucose. Sucrose passes right into your intestines, where it becomes predigested glucose. When this is absorbed into your bloodstream, there’s trouble. The natural glucose level has already been established in your blood. You are now pushing over that natural level. Even though you temporarily felt great after those cookies, you put your body in a crisis. When this surge of energy was over, it was succeeded by the bottom dropping out of your blood glucose level. That’s the pits. You can actually produce hallucinations by screwing around with your glucose level. The temptation to administer more sugar to your system is strong but to get the boost you want, you must keep administering the substance over and over again. In effect, you keep your body in a state of crisis. Add alcohol or drugs to that and you’ve got real trouble.
This doesn’t mean you can’t eat ice cream or enjoy your birthday cake. It means watch yourself. If you’re loading up on the refined sugar, you need to drop back. If you can’t, then go to the doctor. A blood sugar problem can lead to other diseases. Catch it now.
If you want to lose weight, don’t do it while you’re working on a major project. Writing a first draft of a novel puts your body under stress. Why compound the stress? Start your diet a week after you finish that first draft. If you want to lose weight I can tell you how to do it. My plan won’t make any diet book. In fact it obviates diet books, but it works. The no-fail method is: You put everything on your plate that you normally eat; then take your knife and remove half of everything. This keeps you from gorging. Those fad diets deny you nutrients which you replenish the second you go off the diet. Back come the pounds. I call this my half-assed diet, since you’ll lose half your ass. Better yet, it will stay off.
When I’m working on a major project I need to be at my fighting weight. This is five pounds less than my normal weight. It takes a lean hound for a long race, and novels and screenplays are long races. I feel better a bit underweight; I concentrate better and for some reason I am able to stand the back strain—a professional hazard—more easily. Your rhomboidei, the muscles up around your neck, tend to hurt when you work at a typewriter for hours. The small of your back can hurt too. Being a little underweight won’t stop the pain but for me it minimizes it.
You can write a chapter on one hard-boiled egg and a cup of tea. That’s efficiency. Figure on taking a break every two hours to drink milk, tea, or just to stretch your body. You’ll get tense and you need to do what you can to give your muscles a break. One thing you can do is to lie flat on your back on the floor and bring one knee up to your chest, count to seven, then release it. Repeat the procedure for the other knee. There are many stretching exercises that will help you considerably. Rather than try to explain them on the page, I suggest you attend an aerobics class. Even if you don’t want to hop in place while wearing pink tights and purple leg warmers, go to one good aerobics class. The stretching exercises will be so clear to you that you can go home and repeat them as needed.
Every four or five hours, depending on your stomach, eat a true meal. Relax for half an hour after the meal and then go back to work. You’ll get much more work out of yourself if you do this. Those pages will pile up next to your typewriter. Seeing that accomplishment pushes you to write more.
Exercise will make you more productive. You’ve probably got a favorite sport. Do it. The problem with many sports is that they are time-consuming. Team sports become nearly impossible once you’re out of college. That leaves tennis, squash, golf, horseback riding, jogging, fencing, handball, swimming, or even walking. If you’re on a deadline, going over to the stables is impossible. It takes half an hour to clean and tack up the horse, more if he’s muddy. You ride for an hour and then you’ve got half an hour to cool off the animal, wash him if it’s hot, and clean your tack. I mention this because I love riding but when I’m on a killer deadline I must abandon it. No matter what your favorite sport, learn to exercise at home.
I’ve got a ten-station Universal weight system in my basement. I bought it over a decade ago. I like pumping iron. I can bench press 207, which is the max on my Universal system. I may get old but I won’t get weak! The reason I love weight lifting is that I can leave the typewriter, go to the basement and work out for an hour, feel fabulous and come back to the typewriter ready for more hours of high-level work. Immediately after a workout I can write double time for about an hour. I don’t know if this will be the same for you. But whatever you do—aerobics, rowing, handball—try to get to the typewriter right afterward to see if the activity has increased your creativity. You might be one of those people who needs to exercise after the day’s work is done. When I’m on a more relaxed deadline I go riding. It’s my reward for the day’s work.