Why So Many Writers Are Athletes
For someone who is not a professional swimmer, I spend an awful lot of time under water. I consider it an act of mobile meditation: Sensory input is muffled, so the chaos of the surface world eventually recedes. What’s left is activity—familiar, comforting, and hypnotic, almost second nature. My brain, normally trying to create order out of chaos, is free to fumble for deeper meaning. This is especially useful as a writer: I believe I generate my best material while swimming.
But, as I discovered several years ago when I was working on a book about swimming, one can’t actually write about the experience in the moment. Sometimes, I found myself rushing from the pool to the locker room. With water puddling at my feet, I’d struggle with damp fingers to unlock my phone and tap out the lines that had appeared in my head while I was gliding through the lanes. I have notebooks splotched with water stains and running ink, testaments to this repeated effort to capture quicksilver.
In the years since writing that book, I’ve come to realize that swimming, and exertion more generally, is intimately tied to how I approach the creative act. This makes sense: I’ve reported on exercise and athletes for years, and I’m familiar with the science that examines how movement changes our brains. Moving while reading, listening, or writing activates a unique mode of learning (a similar distinction can be found in handwriting versus typing). And exercise specifically boosts neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline; it immediately improves our ability to pay attention. Movement also shakes loose new connections: It’s been associated with both better creative cognition and an increase in the originality and fluency of ideas.
Still, I didn’t think about the ways this holds true for other writers until a recent conversation I had with the novelist Jade Chang; she pointed me to the acknowledgments in her new novel, What a Time to Be Alive, in which she thanks her Pilates studio. Was this tongue-in-cheek? Partially, Chang told me, but movement was crucial to her process. “Exhausting the body was good prep for spending hours being so cerebral and still,” she said. The intensity of the workout was necessary to take her out of her head, so that she could write from a different place—“an embodied place, because writing is not just intellectual; it’s emotional connection, sensual connection,” she explained. “We exist in the world.”
In other words, we’re built to move. I started asking other writers I knew whether exercise felt similarly entwined with their work. Recently, the writer and comedian Chris Duffy and I went surfing together, and we chatted in the lulls between swells. “Sitting in the ocean waiting for a wave is the exact same skill as sitting at my computer with the white noise on, waiting for a joke to come,” he said. The same held true when he was putting together his recently published book, Humor Me. (The white-noise sound he writes to? The ocean.)
Movement keeps us grounded in the sensory details of the landscapes we inhabit, and asks us to pay close attention to what it really feels like to do the thing. The writer Ivy Pochoda, who is a former professional squash champion, told me that the euphoria of playing made it into her recent novel, Ecstasy, which is about dance and focuses heavily on the idea of stepping outside of yourself. “When you’re in the zone playing, you almost have an out-of-body experience,” Pochoda said on the phone from the airport, on her way to watch her daughter play in a squash tournament. “It’s like that thing David Foster Wallace wrote about playing tennis—that you’re more coordinated than God.”
The body is an important part of the learning process: Research shows that “moving your foot and understanding the word ‘kick’ are governed by similar areas of the motor cortex,” the cognitive scientist Sian Beilock writes. “It’s hard to separate the reading mind from the doing one.” In that vein, the journalist Harrison Hill told me that when he was in the thick of writing his upcoming book, The Oracle’s Daughter, about an American cult, he’d go on long runs and listen to interviews with sources so he could “go to the page without rifling through notes or scrubbing back through the audio.” When it came time to write, he felt he already held the stories in his bones. They were now his to tell.
[Read: Eight books that will inspire you to move your body]
Joyce Carol Oates once described running as an act in which “the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.” Not long ago, I spent an afternoon browsing at a used bookstore in Berkeley, California, where I live. As I wove through the stacks of aging books, I thought about the tradition of writers relying on physical activity. Goethe, I’d learned, was one of them; as he got older, he came to dislike sitting at a desk and had to walk around while writing. Nietzsche said the same, criticizing Flaubert and the sedentary life—das sitzfleisch, literally “sitting meat”—as anathema to creative thought.
Writers have long been chasing that dopamine hit. Virginia Woolf tramped along the Cornish coast; Oliver Sacks was known to swim; Haruki Murakami is an accomplished runner. These patterns aren’t unique to idiosyncratic writers: Movement loosens something within all of us. Physical practice is not just a break from sitting at a desk—it is explicit and essential, an extra twist to open the tap, allowing for a freer flow from the faucet of thought.
In “Street Haunting,” Woolf’s evocative essay about a wintry walk across London, the restless, lonely writer leaves home, ostensibly to buy a pencil. But her journey is long and meandering. In the middle of a crowd, Woolf begins observing faces and professions, picking out individuals. “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others,” she writes. She imagines the thoughts of a street singer, or a laundress; then she begins following the tracks she dreams up for them, hoping to “leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks” where she might locate their true selves. And as she puts her finger out to take the pulse of life, her own thoughts follow. At the end, Woolf admits that the pencil was an excuse to roam. The walk frees her; it makes her work possible.
Of course, not every writer links their art to movement so explicitly. But even those who aren’t totally committed to exercise notice its value and the way it shows up in finished work. The journalist Heather Radke, for instance, is working on a book about American girlhood; she told me that Louisa May Alcott “took a run” every day while she was writing Little Women. Radke said she’s “always jealous of the writers who were also athletes in the past.” When I go back to Alcott’s novel, I fall headlong into a vivid passage in which Laurie advises Jo to race him down a hill so that she won’t feel so wretched about the idea of Meg getting married. He watches with satisfaction as she comes “panting up with flying hair, bright eyes, ruddy cheeks, and no signs of dissatisfaction in her face.” Jo has a ready remark: “I wish I was a horse, then I could run for miles in this splendid air, and not lose my breath.”
Jo, being a writer as well as a runaway from the strictures of womanhood, is a bit of an avatar for Alcott. Life, as I see it, is a series of galloping rhythms. To know that this coming-of-age classic was conjured from bouts of exercise is delightful, and somehow it comes as no surprise at all.
Most days, my own feet are at the edge of the ocean by first light. As dawn reaches its pink fingers across the sky, I paddle my surfboard out into the Pacific. Sometimes, there is nothing but noticing in my head: the light; the seals, bobbing and watchful; the next set out on the horizon. Other times, a problem bubbles up as I arrive—my movements on the wave twitchy and inelegant, mirroring my state of mind—only to recede as my body finds its cadence, in concert with the water. If all goes well, I’m back at my desk with wet hair by the time my family comes downstairs. The weighted-blanket feeling of muscles used well allows me to sit comfortably in stillness. My mind is clear; I turn on the tap.
I didn’t thank my swimming pool in my book’s acknowledgments, but I know now that I should have. If I don’t swim, if I don’t surf, if I don’t flow, the words won’t, either. There’s a permeability between the practices of writing and moving; one discipline informs the other. In that meeting, everything expands.
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