"Every Exercise Should be a Core Exercise"
Why it's important to engage your "writing brain" in everything you do
💡 If you do a lot of writing and want to sharpen your skills as much as possible, this should be helpful.
I was watching a gym workout video on YouTube a few weeks ago. In it, someone said something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.
NB — Watching gym videos on YouTube isn’t something I do often, but it’s something I was doing recently nonetheless. Make of that what you will.
At one point in the video, two people are doing overhead tricep extensions. While they’re doing the exercise, the trainer who’s directing them says:
“Engage your core. Every exercise should be a core exercise.”
This is a really interesting concept to me, when you look at it through the lens of writing.
For writers, every exercise should be a “core” exercise too.
But what do I mean by that, exactly?
Engage Your Writing Brain in Everything You Do
Your core muscles give you a foundation for every exercise or physical activity you do. The more you use them, the stronger that foundation will be, and the easier you’ll find physical exercise.
So, the trainer’s point in the video was that when you’re in the gym, you should try to engage your core muscles whilst doing every type of exercise, regardless of whether it’s tricep extensions, dead-lifts, or anything else.
If you make a habit of doing that, you’re going to become a lot more capable physically than you were before.
And writers should be actively trying to do the equivalent of this.
With this analogy:
Your body is your brain
Your core is the part of your brain you use for writing.
So, you should try to engage your “writing brain” all the time, in every “exercise” you do.
If you only use your writing brain when it’s time to sit down and write something, you’re significantly limiting your ability to develop your writing skills.
There are lessons to learn about effective writing and storytelling all around you. You just have to train yourself to pay attention to them.
There are infinite ways to do this, but I’ll provide a few suggestions here to help you get started:
When you’re reading a book, look for the stylistic and narrative choices the author has made, and try to determine why they made them. Go even further and think about things they could’ve done differently to improve the story.
Or, if you’re reading a book you don’t like, try to identify exactly why you don’t like it. Is it the writing style, slow pacing, lack of specificity in the narration, or something else? When you’ve figured it out, you can take this on board as something you’ll actively try to avoid in your own writing.
When you’re writing something boring at work, like an email, actively practice using as few words as possible. Cut all needless words and try to use one word where you’d usually use two or three. This will help you expand your vocabulary and become a more concise, efficient writer.
When you’re watching a film, take note of how the director puts you in the protagonist’s perspective with the types of shots they use, the editing, or even musical cues. Think about how these narrative elements affect your interpretation of the story. For example, have they convinced you to side with an immoral character?
If you’re watching a film with a plot that’s difficult to follow, question the director’s movement from one scene to the next, and try to identify missing scenes or information that could’ve helped the story flow better.
When you’re listening to a podcast, pay close attention to the language the speaker uses. Look for opportunities where using different words would’ve helped them express their point more clearly.
If they’re making a point that’s confusing, consider whether it would’ve helped if they’d given more context first, or explained the information in a more linear sequence.
When you see advertisements from brands, analyse the copy and try to find ways that you could make the message more impactful.
When you’re having conversations with people, get used to recognising the unique ways in which they speak, then borrow from that to enhance the dialogue you write for your fictional characters.
Or, if you’re writing in a business context, adopt the language your customers use to make your content more authentic and relatable to your target audience.
If you’re listening to a song with unusual lyrics, try to interpret those lyrics and determine what the song is really about. Even if you only form your own interpretation, you’re still using your writing brain to explore how an ordinary idea could be communicated in unusual ways.
Let’s say, as part of your day job, you’re trying to write a lot of posts on LinkedIn.
If your writing style is a bit flat, it could be beneficial to read some classic poetry, paying close attention to the structure and rhythm of the verses.
You could then apply your learnings to your writing on LinkedIn, making your style more lyrical, unique, and engaging.
Look for Inspiration Everywhere
When it comes to engaging your writing brain to find new ideas, there are thousands of real-life examples in fiction.
One that always sticks with me is how legendary horror director Wes Craven famously got the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street by reading a newspaper article about people having nightmares and dying in their sleep.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of Craven’s best films, and one of the most iconic horror films of all-time. But, despite what most people would assume, he wasn’t sitting at his desk brainstorming on a piece of paper when he came up with the idea.
He was engaging his writing brain whilst reading an article in the paper. From that, he imagined the burned face of Freddie Kruger, then plotted a scary story about the kids of Elm Street being terrorised in their dreams.
Please leave a comment if you know any other examples of ideas for famous works of fiction coming from unlikely places. I’d love to put together a list of these for a future article.
Of course, this article you’re reading now is another example. Watching a YouTube video about a gym workout isn’t an activity you’d usually associate with creative writing. But a throw-away sentence in that video gave me the idea for this analogy and inspired me to write about it.
It Takes Practice
In one of the first modules on our creative writing MA, we were taught to “read like a writer.”
This involved training yourself to read books using some of the techniques I mentioned earlier. It’s difficult at first, but — much like engaging your core whilst doing non-core exercises in the gym — once you make a habit of it, you’ll start doing it without even noticing.
If you practice engaging your writing brain whilst doing non-writing activities, you’ll improve drastically as a writer. You should also begin to see that new ideas for stories can be found everywhere you look, whether taking your kids to school or standing in the queue at Tesco.
Here’s a challenge for you:
Give this a try this week. Start treating a few different exercises as “core” exercises.
Pick one or two of the activities I mentioned above. Whenever you’re doing that activity this week, start looking for ideas, inspiration, lessons, patterns, trends, opportunities for improvement, and so on.
See what you can find, come back, and comment on this post something that you found while doing something that you’d usually consider unrelated to writing.
I’d love to hear how you get on.
This Week’s Sunset of the Week
Richmond is such a great place to watch the sunset because you have a clear view west down the river without any buildings crowding the sky.
And hasn’t it been so nice to have the sun go down later than 5pm this week?
Here’s a beautiful one from around 6:15pm on Wednesday this week, March 20.
Writing Workshop Highlight of the Week
Last week’s writing workshop was a special one. A good friend, Ezra Harker-Shaw, brought the hard-back copy of their first novel to show us all, which is set for release soon.
Everyone in our writing group first met on our creative writing MA back in 2017. Since then, we’ve all been providing feedback on each other’s novels through several drafts on a near-weekly basis.
So, when one of us reaches the incredible achievement of getting one of those novels published, it’s a very proud moment for the whole group.
Ezra’s book, The Aziola’s Cry, is available from May 7. If you like historical fiction and/or Mary Shelley, I’d highly recommend checking it out.
This Week’s Song-on-Repeat
There’s not much that needs to be said about this one, to be honest. Simply sit back, turn the volume up, and enjoy!