irritable vowel syndrome. The secret life of ‘exer-writers’

Does writing pair well with exercising? Do writers exercise at all? Isn’t a writer supposed to smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish, exercise — a waste of time, really! — be damned? The only problem the non-exercising writer is going to have is to do with her lower back. Margaret Atwood always slips it in her “Tips for Budding Writers” lists: Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes (“pens leak”), hold the reader’s attention, “do back exercises. Pain is distracting”.

My research, though, reveals that the ‘exer-writer’ does exist. The canonical book for exer-writers is Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . Murakami believes that writing a long novel is like survival training. “Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity,” he writes. He lived by that dictum, running ultra marathons and triathlons. He was like a machine, running 10 km and swimming 1,500 m every single day: “Repetition is a form of mesmerism”.

What works for one author might not for another. Mohsin Hamid, not lacking in nous, adapted Murakami’s punishing routine to his own creative needs. Hamid’s logic was practically sound. He told The Atlantic : “Murakami’s quote is about writing long novels. I write short novels. So it made sense that while he has to run to get fit enough to do what he has to do, I could manage with just walking.” Waking at 6am, Hamid starts with a walk of half an hour, then an hour, before extending it to 90 minutes. He discovers that a daily five-mile walk was just what he needs: “Walking unlocked me”.

Other famous walker-writers include Alice Munro (three miles a day) and Charles Dickens, who, at sharp two every afternoon, left his desk for a three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, “searching for some pictures to build upon”.

Kurt Vonnegut, on the other hand, is more reasonable about his exercise goals. He likes swimming in the local municipal pool — “which I have all to myself” — for half an hour in the mornings. In a letter to his wife Jane, written in 1965, he adds: “I do push-ups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as if I’m getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not”.

Now we are in the thick of the fitness age. Couples work out together. There is no room for Vonnegut’s “maybe not”. From an NYT profile of Jonathan Franzen, published last summer, one learns that twice a week, the author, along with his “spouse equivalent” (he doesn’t like the word partner), surrenders to a personal trainer, Jason: “Jason administers a workout that is ‘terrible’, though Franzen, who is 58, has grown to love it: push presses, 400-meter flat-out rowing”.

There are also writers who become Jasons themselves. Arundhati Roy taught at a gym for years; as she says in an interview to Kyoto Journal : “I started doing aerobics and I wanted to be good enough to become an instructor, so I became an instructor”. Like Murakami, she feels there’s a link between writing and exercise: “Doing exercise and being in touch with my body is something that I really value... it really makes me happy to do that; to be a person who is physical. It’s exactly the same kind of discipline that you need to write a book”.

Jhumpa Lahiri draws a subtler comparison between exercise and writing. Relatively late in life, she learns to read, speak, find her voice and write a book in a foreign language: Italian. In her book In Other Words , she writes, “A foreign language is a delicate, finicky muscle. If you don’t use it, it gets weak.” It’s important to “exercise” a new language.

There are writers who find gyms and trainers monotonous, who incorporate physical activity in their day-to-day lives. Irwin Allan Sealy, when not writing a novel, immerses himself in tending to his garden or making alterations to the physical structure of his inherited Dehradun house.

In this he is akin to Saul Bellow, who, no matter how overworked he was, continued to ride his mountain bike, chop the fallen limbs of apple trees, carry in logs for the morning fire and remove boulder-sized rocks from the garden.

Sitting is the new smoking, doctors now say, and perhaps it’s no surprise that we have 21st-century authors who work from ‘treadmill desks’. Author and journalist AJ Jacobs wrote Drop Dead Healthy while walking on a treadmill. He measures time not in days but miles: “It took me 1,200 miles to write my book”.

Writers, it seems, like solitary exercises. As the writer swims, cycles, walks, runs and jogs, plots work themselves out in her head, knots untie themselves, the ominous block is suddenly amenable and porous. The mind, even while exercising, is always on the job.

This is where yoga comes in. As the novelist and yoga guru Ira Trivedi tells me, “When doing yoga, you shut your mind. You give yourself a nice mental break and then get back to what you were writing. When writers work long hours at the desk, it’s the neck, back and shoulders that ache the most. Yoga helps with that too.”

Finally, for writers searching for a more vigorous form of exercise which involves brute physicality and the skilled release of pent-up rage, there’s always Ernest Hemingway, who famously said: “My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything”.

Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Palash Krishna Mehrotra is the author of Eunuch Park and the editor of House Spirit: Drinking in India

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