Running and Writing
Posted: August 6th, 2011, 4:58 pm
Looking for a little inspiration? Something to get those words flowing? Unblock that block? Try running. Or walking. Or do anything that gets the heart rate up, the blood flowing, and the muscles working.
But what does working up a sweat have to do with art? Twenty-five years ago I wrote an article titled “Pumping Irony” (yes, I thought the title was rather clever) for a running magazine that set out to explore this very question. In that article, I proposed that something like running — or walking, for that matter — could be a productive part of the creative process.
I bring this up now because I just came across an essay by Joyce Carol Oates titled “Running and Writing.” It’s in a collection of her reflections on writing titled The Faith of a Writer. This is a terrific collection, by the way, especially if you’re curious as to what goes on in the mind of someone who seems to crank out a new novel every other week or so. Her piece about running first appeared in the New York Times in 1999, so I was delighted to see I’d scooped Oates by 15 years. I also found myself thinking: She has time to run, too?
But then of course this was her point, that her running is part of her writing. “Stories come to us as wraiths,” she writes, “requiring precise embodiments. Running seems to allow me, ideally, an expanded consciousness in which I can envision what I’m writing as a film or a dream.”
Oates gets at something that had come up 25 years earlier when I was talking with various creative types who ran. It’s about the shift in consciousness that takes place during repetitive (if not boring) exercise. As the late novelist Robert Parker (the Spenser series of detective novels) told me at the time, “I always run in the afternoon, after I’ve written all morning. I can’t say I get ideas while I’m running, but if I’ve been working on some problem all morning, sometimes while I’m running the problem will suddenly solve itself.”
Or as poet and marathoner Marvin Bell put it back then, “Everything goes better with oxygen.”
According to current models of the brain, the left side of the brain (in right-handed people) is the logical, linear, verbal half. The right side is better at non-logical, nonlinear thought. We use the left side most intensely when we’re hard at work and focused on tasks like writing a story or poem, or doing a math problem, for that matter. But there comes a point when this part of the brain might simply run out of steam — “pattern exhaustion” as it’s sometimes called. If you’ve sat at your desk staring at a blank page hour after hour trying to think what goes on it next, you probably know the feeling. (One has to wonder if Oates ever has….)
During a run, or a walk, you give the left brain a “time out” from intense focus, which gives the right brain a chance to what it does best and maybe come up with an insight or two, that blessed aha!, when all the pieces suddenly fit together.
This left-brain/right-brain scheme sounds a little simplistic, I know, and in fact the whole brain is always involved. Yet recent research into the source of the “insight experience” does locate increased activity in the brain, just before that blessed aha! in a small fold of tissue on the surface of the right hemisphere. One hesitates to suppose that the Muse is in fact a little bundle of neurons — it takes some of the romance out of it all — but the findings are suggestive. This area of the brain seems to be involved in, for one thing, the processing of metaphors, a function that requires reaching out for remote connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. Et voila! Inspiration! Or so we might hope….
Savvy creative types deliberately structure a time-out into their routines to give the right brain a chance to do what it does best, trusting that it’s all part of the process. Einstein, for example, was a devoted practitioner of the long walk, during which he said he did some of his most productive thinking. So were Thoreau, Dickens, Darwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, and plenty of others, including Oates and her runs….
Other studies suggest it takes about 30 minutes of walking or jogging or whatever for the right brain to fully kick in and start processing those metaphors at full speed. The other good thing about running or walking and writing is that during those 30 minutes or more, not only are you processing those metaphors, you’re cutting your risk of heart disease, stroke, some types of cancer, and even depression, so you might live longer and process still more metaphors in those added years. Better yet, there’s good evidence that regular exercise also helps stave off dementia associated with aging, and perhaps even delays the onset of Alzheimer’s, so you can remember to process those metaphors.
Of course, a “time out” doesn’t have to be running or walking. Indeed, in my latest book, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, just released by Skyhorse Publishing, we devote an entire chapter to the creative process. The book is a series of discussions about writing and the writing life with about 30 classmates from the Writers’ Workshop in the mid-70s. In our chapter on the creative process, several of us discuss how we write, and when, and what we do when blocked. Some of us walk. Some of us run. One of us rides a bike. Novelist Sandra Cisneros prefers naps. “I call it horizontal meditation,” she says. “I just lie down and it solves everything. It can be something simple, like the title to a story, or maybe it’s something more significant. I have a big bed in my office. And if you can, sleep with a little dog, so much the better because they’re full of spirit…. Take a nap with as many little dogs as possible.”
But what does working up a sweat have to do with art? Twenty-five years ago I wrote an article titled “Pumping Irony” (yes, I thought the title was rather clever) for a running magazine that set out to explore this very question. In that article, I proposed that something like running — or walking, for that matter — could be a productive part of the creative process.
I bring this up now because I just came across an essay by Joyce Carol Oates titled “Running and Writing.” It’s in a collection of her reflections on writing titled The Faith of a Writer. This is a terrific collection, by the way, especially if you’re curious as to what goes on in the mind of someone who seems to crank out a new novel every other week or so. Her piece about running first appeared in the New York Times in 1999, so I was delighted to see I’d scooped Oates by 15 years. I also found myself thinking: She has time to run, too?
But then of course this was her point, that her running is part of her writing. “Stories come to us as wraiths,” she writes, “requiring precise embodiments. Running seems to allow me, ideally, an expanded consciousness in which I can envision what I’m writing as a film or a dream.”
Oates gets at something that had come up 25 years earlier when I was talking with various creative types who ran. It’s about the shift in consciousness that takes place during repetitive (if not boring) exercise. As the late novelist Robert Parker (the Spenser series of detective novels) told me at the time, “I always run in the afternoon, after I’ve written all morning. I can’t say I get ideas while I’m running, but if I’ve been working on some problem all morning, sometimes while I’m running the problem will suddenly solve itself.”
Or as poet and marathoner Marvin Bell put it back then, “Everything goes better with oxygen.”
According to current models of the brain, the left side of the brain (in right-handed people) is the logical, linear, verbal half. The right side is better at non-logical, nonlinear thought. We use the left side most intensely when we’re hard at work and focused on tasks like writing a story or poem, or doing a math problem, for that matter. But there comes a point when this part of the brain might simply run out of steam — “pattern exhaustion” as it’s sometimes called. If you’ve sat at your desk staring at a blank page hour after hour trying to think what goes on it next, you probably know the feeling. (One has to wonder if Oates ever has….)
During a run, or a walk, you give the left brain a “time out” from intense focus, which gives the right brain a chance to what it does best and maybe come up with an insight or two, that blessed aha!, when all the pieces suddenly fit together.
This left-brain/right-brain scheme sounds a little simplistic, I know, and in fact the whole brain is always involved. Yet recent research into the source of the “insight experience” does locate increased activity in the brain, just before that blessed aha! in a small fold of tissue on the surface of the right hemisphere. One hesitates to suppose that the Muse is in fact a little bundle of neurons — it takes some of the romance out of it all — but the findings are suggestive. This area of the brain seems to be involved in, for one thing, the processing of metaphors, a function that requires reaching out for remote connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. Et voila! Inspiration! Or so we might hope….
Savvy creative types deliberately structure a time-out into their routines to give the right brain a chance to do what it does best, trusting that it’s all part of the process. Einstein, for example, was a devoted practitioner of the long walk, during which he said he did some of his most productive thinking. So were Thoreau, Dickens, Darwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, and plenty of others, including Oates and her runs….
Other studies suggest it takes about 30 minutes of walking or jogging or whatever for the right brain to fully kick in and start processing those metaphors at full speed. The other good thing about running or walking and writing is that during those 30 minutes or more, not only are you processing those metaphors, you’re cutting your risk of heart disease, stroke, some types of cancer, and even depression, so you might live longer and process still more metaphors in those added years. Better yet, there’s good evidence that regular exercise also helps stave off dementia associated with aging, and perhaps even delays the onset of Alzheimer’s, so you can remember to process those metaphors.
Of course, a “time out” doesn’t have to be running or walking. Indeed, in my latest book, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, just released by Skyhorse Publishing, we devote an entire chapter to the creative process. The book is a series of discussions about writing and the writing life with about 30 classmates from the Writers’ Workshop in the mid-70s. In our chapter on the creative process, several of us discuss how we write, and when, and what we do when blocked. Some of us walk. Some of us run. One of us rides a bike. Novelist Sandra Cisneros prefers naps. “I call it horizontal meditation,” she says. “I just lie down and it solves everything. It can be something simple, like the title to a story, or maybe it’s something more significant. I have a big bed in my office. And if you can, sleep with a little dog, so much the better because they’re full of spirit…. Take a nap with as many little dogs as possible.”
I opted for putting on a CD with a good beat and getting my boogie on a few times a week. 
Unfortunately I haven't noticed any big flashes of insight during those sessions.