I’m a pretty simple guy. A poster, a bumper sticker, a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, or a single line of dialogue stick with me way longer than a wise book or a great class. I post my favorites where I frequently see them.
Here’s one I meditate on often:
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
I’ve included the “Make Art” flow chart I found on the Internet. (Created by artist John Osebold)
I like the chart. It applies to writing, too. Writing is weird, though. Often, if someone asks what you do and you reply, “I’m a writer,” they’ll say, “Are you published?” or “Where can I find your books?” as if those are the hurdles you have to clear to call yourself a writer.
We don’t do that for other activities, like if someone says, “I’m a runner,” they aren’t asked, “Have you won any medals?”
Running is an activity you do because it makes you feel good, or you like to be active, or it improves your mental health (or you’re a bit of a masochist). Whatever the reason, there isn’t a test you must pass to call yourself a runner.
I think writing is that way, too. All that’s necessary to be a writer is that you write.
I also think that writing and running are similar in that people often wish they were doing one or the other, and will even announce they are going to start the activity in the future when conditions are better, and then they don’t do it.
Most of my life, off and on, I’ve been a runner. Being on the trail is meditative. My running life and writing life have fed off each other. Over time, I’ve realized they have similarities.
Writing does for the head what jogging does for the body.
- Like jogging, writing requires dedication & a consistent schedule to be the most effective (three thirty-minute sessions a week will do more for you than one four-hour marathon on Saturday).
- Like jogging, writing must be fitted into a schedule that already looks full–the benefit is writers organize their time better (When I taught school, the best time for me to write was between 4 & 6 am).
- Like jogging, a writer must work their way into it, but with time and training, impressive efforts are possible (Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in one forty-eight-hour period, but he’d been training for years).
- Writing helps the writer lose brain fat and build the thinking muscle–the fat caused by consuming the junk food of television, and the predigested pap of People Magazine.
- Writing fights the buildup of cholesterol on the arteries of imagination.
- Writing improves the efficiency of the heart of the intellect.
- Writing clears out the lungs of thought.
- Writing keeps us young (imagination & creativity are the hallmarks of youth).
- Writing encourages us to give up mentally unhealthy habits (not thinking about what we hear, accepting written words as gospel, keeping us open-minded).
- Writing improves our sex lives–nah! probably not (though some people maintain that half of good sex is thinking about it, and who is a better, more practiced thinker than the writer?)
- Writing helps us live longer: by stretching our subjective lives, we both notice more about our own past and pay more attention to our present. You know how sometimes you can be reading in a book and realize that you have no idea what the last couple of pages said? Our lives can be like that too, although the “couple of pages” can be a couple of days or a couple of years. I think that lost time happens less frequently to writers. They are more aware more of the time.
Here’s the deal about running. You only have to go out the front door and start doing it. Unless you have a health issue, you’re ten seconds away from transitioning from someone who wants to work out to someone who actually works out.
Writing is even easier. If you’re reading this on a computer, your hands are already near the keyboard. Exit out from this blog and write a sentence.
There you go. You’re a writer.
James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. Recently he retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Choice awards. Years and years ago he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.
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