Hello, readers — one last installment about process, for now. (Also, I know these words will serve as a good reminder to me as I dive into more writing revisions ahead!)
Sometimes one of the weirdest things to me about writing (and reading) is how stationary it is. I don’t consider myself a very sedentary person, on the whole, but here I am dedicating chunks of my life to this thing that involves sitting on my butt, in the same spot, for hours on end. (Cue various Internet memes about “reading is just staring at slices of dead wood while hallucinating,” etc.)
This can feel like one of the hardest parts of the writing process: sitting down, butt in chair, settling into the stillness that deep thinking can require. There’s a reason writers have their own rituals for getting started each day. (Rituals: also so fascinating!) The task requires its own discipline. Even its own forms of surrender.
Yet writing is such a dynamic thing, too, as is reading. Words move us. We find good books stirring, enlivening, transporting. They are among the most active things I know.
Writing requires many forms of balance — among them, the balance between stillness and movement. Between the impulse to set things down on the page, as they are or as they seem to be, and the ongoing resistance of said things to be placed anywhere at all.
Part 3: Movement is Writing
Words are slippery things. And so are human minds, much of the time.
When I sit and read, I fall physically still, my constant foot-tapping and fidgetiness notwithstanding. Yet of course so much within me is moving, before it spins back towards some sort of profound inner stillness, the sort of stillness I sometimes associate with deeply good writing. It is a stillness that is not truly still, but that thrums and stirs with its own hidden life.
When I write, I am also still. Yet of course I want to reach that state so commonly known as flow, of sloshing sweeping movement, which is not always forward but sometimes side to side, or up and over and through.
Sometimes getting there requires me to be still a little bit longer, longer than I want to be, longer than I think I am capable of. I must breathe my way through. I like sitting beside windows for this reason, or at coffee shops, watching people stride by outside on the street. I find just enough external movement to guide my thoughts along as I type. (Plus people-watching is endlessly enjoyable.)
But, other times, I need more oxygen to shock my thoughts into new directions. Stillness is necessary for reflection, but it can also turn into stasis.
Movement is also a part of my writing process, which is itself a practice: the practice of living a larger thinking-and-expressing life. Movement is deeply present in my earlier two reflections in this series. I crave the movement of getting outdoors, the movement of transporting myself through other people’s books, closer to fresh ideas and all their energy.
Sometimes, a writing practice means abiding yet longer in the stillness. (Sigh.) Other times, it means stirring the blood and the inner energy by doing something else.
Getting up. Going on a walk. Even changing from one room to the other, one chair to the other, one view to the other.
Petting the dog. Getting a snack. (But snacks can be procrastination, too. Alas, an inherent risk.) Chugging down some more water.
Using my hands. Pouring myself into other forms of creation. Trying a new recipe after a day of work, focusing on the vegetable-chopping and the pot-boiling, savoring the satisfaction of actually completing something delicious in one go (!).
Working out. Doing yoga. Rummaging through all the fitness videos I’ve learned to love on YouTube. Inhaling. Exhaling. Counteracting all my sitting and all my borderline-unnatural modern-day overly-serious stillness. Discovering discipline here, too, if only the discipline of being present, of doing other things for my mind and my body.
This is what movement does: it reminds me that I am a body, that I live in the world, that the juices of a human life are far richer than whatever scribblings I’m working on. Even while those life-juices can find their way back to the page, too.
Having been working on a book that’s, in large part, about how we exist in our bodies and in the world and alongside of each other, this is always an essential reminder.
I’ve always loved reading about other writers’ processes, their philosophies of work, the various things they have learned to include in their day that aren’t strictly “writing” — but that also really are. Reading. Keeping a regular “correspondence.” Conversation. Walks and times outdoors. Food. Solitude as well as good company. Prayer. Weird hobbies. Animals! And so forth.
Our ideas are sustained in so many ways. And, since books contain ideas, this also feels like the most natural thing in the world.
I’ve been watching the movement of the late-summer hummingbirds outdoors while writing this, and now I’m about to remind myself to keep trusting the process as I dive back into new and ongoing material. What acts of movement sustain you in your own creative processes, or in your own practice of living?