Today is National Day of Unplugging, from sundown tonight to sundown tomorrow night, a time to unplug from technology, electronics, and social media. So, are you going to unplug? Could you do it? Would you write? And how (charcoal on the wall of a cave, mitten in the snow, quill pen, pencil, fountain pen, ball point, Sharpie)?

Creativity – noun – the state or quality of being creative; the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.

***

As writers, we’re all creative people, or strive to be. The creative process is part of who we are. So, if I could give you one simple thing to enhance your creativity and improve your writing, as well as making you healthier in the long run, would you be interested? I thought so.

Recent studies reveal some surprising findings about the relationship between exercise and creativity.  We’ve all heard of the benefits of aerobic exercise to strengthen our bodies and reduce stress, but there’s more.

According to a 2016 online article in Quartz by neuroscientist Dr. Wendy Suzuki, exercise encourages the growth of cells in the hippocampus area of the brain. This is advantageous no matter how old we are since the hippocampus is one of only two brain areas where new brain cells continue to be generated throughout our lives. And research has shown the hippocampus is important in enhancing long term memory and even possibly – listen to this, writers – creativity. Dr. Suzuki writes that “… this discovery suggests that exercise might be able to improve the imaginative functions of the hippocampus …”

Further evidence appeared in an article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in 2013: “Anecdotal literature suggests that creative people sometimes use bodily movement to help overcome mental blocks and to get deeper into a problem.” They even quote the philosopher Henry David Thoreau: “The moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow – as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper.”

As recently as February 2021, The New York Times published an article about exercise with the subtitle “To spur innovation and ideas, try taking a walk.”

Runner’s World magazine expanded the list of benefits in its August 2018 issue with an article that states, “Studies have shown that running can help prevent obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, some cancers, and a host of other unpleasant conditions. What’s more, scientists have shown that running also vastly improves the quality of your emotional and mental life. It even helps you live longer.” More time to write!

Of course, there are many ways to exercise: brisk walking, swimming, biking, jogging, zumba classes, and more. The benefits of aerobic exercise are so enormous, we can’t afford to ignore them. We can live longer, happier, healthier lives and be more creative if we do just one simple thing: exercise to get our brains moving along with our bodies.

Be strong and write long!

TKZers: What exercises do you do to keep in shape? Have you noticed an increase in your creative output after exercising? Have you found a brisk walk or other exercise helps to overcome a mental block in your writing?

“DiBianca’s motif of time, clocks, and watches—evident in her previous novels—is a superb gimmick, and the idea of two teams of smart female detectives working almost in parallel is equally clever.” – Kirkus Reviews

Limited Time Sale – 99¢

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I hope you’re not munching a donut or toast right at the moment.

You probably saw the story about the closing of 400 Family Dollar Stores due to a rat infestation at one of their distribution centers. After a whistleblower’s report, the FDA went in and found a thousand “dead rats and birds” scattered inside.

Warehouse worker Robert Bradford says he was fired from West Memphis distribution center, Arkansas, after he shared footage last month of rats fighting together on the warehouse floor, scurrying up and down the aisles, and a dead rat that had been caught in a trap.

Kind of makes you want to run right out to a 99¢ store and buy a can of Vienna sausages, doesn’t it? The report also included this little item:

Bradford’s clip also showed an unidentified coworker trying to feed one of the rats a Pringle with his own bare hands.

Hey, the little fellas have to eat, right? And what else should you do with a Pringle anyway?

Family Dollar has since initiated a voluntary recall on certain products from the distribution center, with the comforting words, “We take situations like this very seriously and are committed to providing safe and quality products to our customers.”

Nice to know!

Never one to turn down an apt metaphor, I am now just as concerned about Rodents in the Warehouse operating right next door to the Boys in the Basement.

For review, The Boys in the Basement is Stephen King’s metaphor for the writer’s subconscious mind. Down below the conscious level the imagination always churns and gets ideas. Those ideas are stored in the warehouse part of our brains. There are things we can do to unlock the warehouse—like writing morning pages.

But what about rodents getting into that same warehouse? These are mental pests, and they’re real. If left alone, some of the best and most creative ideas and books will never make it to our mind, let alone the marketplace.

One big fat rat is fear. Fear that your ideas aren’t good enough. Or marketable enough. Or might offend someone. Or might make you seem like a drunken fool. Fear is always lurking around the writer’s mind, and needs to be dispatched forthwith.

One way to do that is by writing a half-page précis of your ideas. Not a synopsis, just your summary of why you think the idea might fly, who might like it, and—most important—why you are jazzed about it.

If you find, after doing this exercise, you’re not that excited after all, you can move on. At least it won’t be out of fear.

But do get a couple of people to give you feedback on it. Are they as interested as you are? If not, again, you can get along to the next idea.

Which leads us to another corpulent rodent—disorganization. If you leave your ideas lying around randomly, you’ll never give them the focused attention they deserve.

The answer is to clean up and organize your warehouse. Don’t leave any idea untended. When you find it, put it on a shelf. I suggest a master document just for ideas. I have one with opening lines, quick concepts (usually starting with What if?), possible characters, possible settings. I go over this from time to time and find the ones that still strike me and develop them further. These go into another file called “Front Burner Concepts.” That’s where I go when I’m ready to choose a new project to write.

Finally, a whole pack of rats like to strike when you experience burnout. If our brain gets tired from overwork, we don’t have anybody watching the warehouse. Lots of good stuff gets gobbled up.

I wrote about this in my book The Mental Game of Writing. Here’s a clip:

The thing to do about burnout is head it off at the pass. And the best way I know is to observe a Writing Sabbath. Just like when God knocked off for the week.

It can be on any day you choose. As I mention in the Discipline chapter, I choose Sunday.

On that day I do not do any writing or even thinking about writing (at least I try not to think about it. It’s the day when the Boys in the Basement get to work out in earnest).

It’s a good day to catch up on my reading.

And my relationship with my wife! We’ll take a trip to the beach, or go up in the hills and look at the view. We’ll watch a movie together, have a nice dinner….

If it’s football season, I’ll watch a game or two.

I try to get out in the sunshine.

What all this means is that the pressure is off.

Though sometimes my mind and my fingers want to write something. It’s sort of like the thoroughbred that is primed to run every day, but one day is just hanging out with a blanket and some hay. The legs tremble. The nose sniffs the air.

At times like that I keep my legs calm and my nose in a book.

What about during your writing week?

Two things if you can manage them: get exercise and get very quiet.

The benefits of even short bursts of exercise are well known. Walk around as much as you can, if that’s the least you can do.

Follow the Pomodoro Method. Write for twenty-five minutes, then take a five-minute break. Do some walking or deep breathing (with your eyes closed).

Also, I’m a big believer in the power nap. That’s a twenty-minute or so stretch of nodding off sometime during the work day. We all have a “zombie time.” For me it’s around 1 or 2 o’clock. My mind turns to jelly.

So I trained myself to get to sleep quickly and wake up twenty minutes later. You can do this, too. It will take you about two months to instill the habit, if you so desire.

In sum, your Boys keep at their work. Your job is to keep the Warehouse clean. Then what you bring to market will not have to be recalled.

Bon appétit!

Do you find any other pests sniffing around up there in your brain? Do you have methods to organize your madness?

By John Gilstrap

“So, John, what’s new in your life since we last chatted?”

Well, let’s see. Blue Fire launched yesterday. It’s the second book in my Victoria Emerson series, and at the risk of sounding immodest, it’s really friggin’ good.

Two days after my last KZB post, we moved two moving vans worth of worldly goods from the storage bay where its been held for the past 7 months into our brand new shiny home in the woods. A week ago, we moved the worldly goods from the apartment where we’ve been squatting, into the new house as well.

And I started a new company for my writing.

Meet Kimber. She’s a Caviston–Cavalier King Charles Spaniel + Boston Terrier. A 3-pound bundle of love.

And we got a new puppy.

As you read this, we may or may not have an internet connection robust enough to support all the Zoom events attendant to the book launch, so I may be Zooming from an empty apartment.

Nowhere in here should you see even the hint of a complaint. None of these life change units are anything but terrific. In fact, they represent dreams coming true. I’m just a little surprised that they all came true in the same 10-day period. It’s a little like saddling a rocket. It’s an unforgettable experience, but you’d best hold on tight.

A Bit About Writing . . .

I’ve been doing quite a few interviews ahead of the release of Blue Fire. In many of these cases, the interviews take the form of written questions to which I write my responses. Some questions are more engaging than others, and one in particular got my attention. It was quite a long interview, and at the end, after I’d talked about my career in general and Blue Fire in particular, I read this:

“Are you proud of your accomplishment? Was it worth the effort?”

Well, of course I am, and of course it was. But the structure of the question bothered me. The interviewer put effort and accomplishment on a collision course, as if outcome is the only measure of hard work. Here’s how I responded:

I’ll answer your question in the opposite order. Was it worth the effort?

TEACHABLE MOMENT ALERT:

The effort itself is the only thing to be proud of. My books have been successful and have made me a lot of money, but that’s never been why I write. I write to entertain, whether it was my mom when I was little, or the fans who read my work now.

I’m proud of the fact that I have stared down the blinking cursor on an empty Page One over two dozen times, and I’ve stayed with each of those stories even when the plot wasn’t working and the words wouldn’t come. Folks, it never gets easier.

I’m proud that time after time, for decades, I scribbled out stories that never had a chance of publication, and never will. Without that effort—without those “wasted” hours (which were anything but wasted)—none of my work would ever have been published.

This is a frustrating endeavor. Rejection is baked deeply into the cake, and success–defined however you wish–is capricious, driven largely by factors over which individual authors have little control.

What we do have control over is our commitment to the craft. If we write solely for the purpose of getting published and making money, we’re doomed because we’re aiming at the wrong target. We write because we love writing–most of the time. We write because we want to make a point or we want to entertain. Maybe we want to entertain by making a point.

The effort is all there is. We should all be proud of it.