Training Tips

One of the things I do to let off a bit of stress and keep myself healthy is run. I have often amused myself with analogies between running and writing. Both take dedication, both require you to push through 'barriers of pain' to reach the end goal.

After years of slogging away at around the same pace 'do or die' I have recently been changing my approach. I have started to incorporate some smaller, quicker runs as well as sprints. I have been amazed at how this has shortened overall times. The other thing, which has been something of a breakthrough, is incorporating nutrition around what I do.

For years I have been a big believer in a low carb diet, and I pretty much went off for extensive runs without eating much of anything - before or after. My theory was my body would 'burn fat'. Well, it probably did, but I always found it a struggle energy-wise, and experienced massive physical drops afterwards. Typically, I just kept doing it, soldiering on.

Then, after talking with some friends who do marathons and other runs, I tried incorporating some key nutrition around the runs. Taking a sports drink beforehand to provide some calories as well as magnesium for muscle function. Then immediately afterwards have a good meal or supplement with both protein and carbohydrate. Then eating again after two hours. I can not believe the difference!

My muscle recovery and energy recovery is so much faster, and my overall performance has taken a leap. My body just burns this! Metabolism kicking into high gear.

Basically, in the old training scheme I was breaking down muscle - but not giving my body anything to build back with. And I was not supplying the muscles with the sugars they needed for Glycogen recovery.

So - how does this relate to writing? Well - I think as writers we need to think about what we put into our writing 'bodies' and when we do it. I think we need to be inspired by story, we need to be exposed to language - good language! It's probably just as important as carbo-loading! Getting exposed to the right genre forms to excite your interest, to create a flow of ideas. Trying different things to use your writing 'muscles' in different ways. All can increase performance, but also help to stop the 'massive drop' you might get after a particularly intense writing period.

Have a favourite book or movie waiting as key nutrition when you get back from a critique group roasting. Allow yourself to excite your imagination - that is our stock and trade as SFF writers.

How do you keep your writing 'body' in good nick?

Smart Running

I would never call myself a runner - more like a plodder - but I do enjoy pushing myself across a distance. I recently went for a run with a friend of mine who does 42 km marathons. He really likes to mix up his training program. He does 3km sprints, then walks, or does a longer distance but for two kilometers he runs for 50 paces, then walks for 30 paces, that sort of thing. I just stick with the same distance, pushing myself on at the same rate.

'Hey you run too much in your grey zone,' he says, with the relics of his Dutch accent and grammar.

'What do you mean?'

'You need to mix things up. You will never improve if you keep running the same.'

The whole thing just got me thinking. What I get out of running is a kind of pay-off for my own bloody-mindedness. I love pushing myself, exercising my determination to push on through exhaustion. Yet I am so inflexible. I resist things, such as different approaches that would really improve me.

I've always had that determination to go it alone. I don't know if its the fact that my Dad was a rare breed of righteous policeman that would actually book other cops for speeding (and after the notorious Fitzgerald Inquiry was named as the only honest cop in Queensland, but that's another story - guess how many friends he had), and this has rubbed off. But I always wanted to do it myself.

At university I got incredibly angry when a friend of mine asked me to cheat in an exam. I have had much the same reaction at panels when established writers calmly state they deliberately copied the styles of other writers early in their careers, aping the structure of their prose to such a degree that they wrote it out as an exercise in absorbing it. That kind of thing horrified me. Creativity is SELF expression. I was always determined I would succeed with my 'natural' style, with my own voice, perfected through my own sweat (there I go again pushing myself the distance - alone). I wanted my ideas. My prose.

But have I been shooting myself in the foot?

I am a natural structuralist. I try to cram all my ideas in with plots and subplots. Sometimes I end up with so much complexity that the story openings get hopelessly bogged down in 'necessary' backstory. In my frustration, I have finally relented and for the first time am actually studying the openings of other books to see how other writers balanced their work, handled character etc.

This might seem so basic to everyone else, but for me its just such a different approach. Almost like - gulp - asking for help.

How much do other people study other writers?

In the development of your own style, did you make a conscious effort to absorb the styles of writers you wanted to emulate? Is this cheating or just good sense?