Writing

You may not think of writing as a physical act, but the dents in the bone on my pen-holding fingers say otherwise. So did the pain in my hip from the hours of leaning I did as I wrote.

Writers often find themselves forgetting the body until they look up from the page or the screen.

Regaining an awareness of yourself,  not only alleviates the aches and pains of repetitive movement and long stretches of sitting, but also can stimulate the imagination and bring the body into the work. It can also help you to do what you thought was impossible.

While I’ve written all my life, I thought I could never write a novel. About a year into the training program, I started one and finished it a few months before the training ended, thereby doing what I’d always believed impossible.

I just read this article about a screenwriter and the knot in his back. While it’s about a different form of bodywork, the lessons he applies relate directly to the Feldenkrais Method.

From “Is Your Rewrite a Big Pain in the. . .Back?” by Jacob Krueger

Often as writers, we get obsessed with the spot in our screenplay.  Beating on it, kneading it, stretching it, rewriting and rewriting again and again trying to relieve that nagging ache of a scene that just doesn’t work.

And often, just like that spot on my back, we find the more we work on it, the tighter the muscles seem to get, the less inspired the scene seems to be, the further away from our intentions we seem to be getting, and the more agony it all seems to be causing us.

Every element in your script is connected, through a complex structural musculature that is sometimes hard to see until you start moving things around and exploring the way they relate to each other.

And this handy infographic makes the body and writing metaphor quite literal. And funny.