Writing as exercise

Okay, I will be honest here, writing does not replace exercise in the traditional sense, but it can serve as a great mental acuity exercise. At times, that takes the form of conceptual writing, taking some abstract idea and attempting to form it into a coherent structure of words that have some purpose.

At other times, there is a structured story to tell, as in the sports writing I do, but the exercise comes in the form of taking that structured concept and inserting your own sense of personality into the story. And then there are those situations where a story has been created, as in fiction, and the purpose is to continue this story planted somewhere inside the imagination of a writer.

The fortunate writer finds methods to access all these forms of exercise and more. I equate the concept to youth sports specialization versus non-specialization. Let me go deeper into that thought for a moment.

There are many, many former athletes, coaches, administrators, and even fans who lament the lack of overall athleticism by many of today's athletes. The dreams of making it big as a professional athlete has created a void where parents pick the sport in which the prefer to invest their money, and then have the child focus on that sport. Year round. In season elite programs; summer camps; winter camps; every possible opportunity to learn to be the best at that sport. But take that kid, say he is a basketball player, an elite basketball player, put him on a football field and suddenly all those skills which set him or her apart as elite in basketball evaporate quicker than the sweat pouring off of his head.

Now imagine we confine ourselves as writers to just one type of writing, what would that look like? Pretty much like the kid who can dunk at five-feet-ten inches but cannot seem to throw or catch a football effectively. Clunky.

Sometimes when we experiment or write in one of those other styles with which we feel discomfort, we look just as clunky. But something strange happens as we experiment more; continued improvement to the point that we feel less clunky.

So tonight I began to work on my next project as I wait for the completion of beta reads and my first formal review for Grand Illusion.

This latest chapter from the short story 'City of Hope' came from a simple sentence:

Weary is the man whose path is unknown for he must travel in the darkness of life.

The words came to me when I was writing a football story and I really liked how they sounded. The chapter title to which this is the opening sentence is simply Weary. A concept had been born. That sentence evolved into a longer miniature story and now I have a direction for this short story which I did not previously have in mind. It was the generic growth of a story through a process of mental exercise.

Maybe this becomes something great, maybe not. But in the end, as writers, we have to dare to be ourselves, as different or similar as that may be to others, for that is the gift and curse of the muse.