A Healthy Writer

After a few posts bitching about some very bad, awful, or silly writing advice, I found something that works and speaks to being a writer.

How to be healthy when what you do demands being sedentary for long stretches of time. For one, I think any advice that describes how to make a writing life work--whether it is how to think of yourself as an artist, or how to manage rejection, etc.--is useful. What I try to do with this blog is examine what it means to be a writer and live a writer's life. It isn't enough to learn the five killer plot twists every writer should master (in fact, avoid advice like this). Being a writer means being an artist and so living life with a mindset that reflects that fact.

Anyway, staying healthy and how to do that is great advice because the mind-body connection is real and when you get nutrition and exercise right, you keep both healthy. There are few artists of any fame who didn't have some healthful thing they did, whether it is long walks or exercise of some sort.

Plus, you need to get away from the work for a period of time to let your subconscious chew on things. I do believe that a lot of writing gets done in the back of the mind rather than the front. Even as we walk through the woods or around the block and focus on other things, the subconscious is still writing and producing and solving problems.