When I get stuck in my writing, I feel it in my body: aching wrists and shoulders, blurred vision, and the beginnings of a headache tightening around my forehead. Paradoxically, these can also be markers of a good writing session—one in which the words fly out of me, and it’s so intoxicating that I forget to stop and take care of myself. On these rare, good days, the exhaustion that follows such a marathon writing session feels luxurious.
On the stuck days, though, everything feels wrong. My words feel like utensils jangling, stuck in a drawer. I begin to panic and tell myself that whatever has kept me going as a writer is finally gone. My body feels lumpy and miserable, like a series of angry knots. That’s when I have to stop and call myself back into my body. I place one hand on my heart and the other on my stomach and count to ten, taking deep breaths. Then, if I still feel terrible, I take ten more breaths. I continue this for however long it takes, until I can either get back to writing, or relax enough to take a break.
Inevitably, this small ritual reminds me that my body is an integral part of my writing process. While so much of writing seems cerebral or ephemeral, much of it is quite physical. It is a butt in a chair, fingers gripping a pen or tapping on a keyboard, or even a voice dictating into a recorder. In re-rooting myself, I remember my writing lives in my body too, with me. And since it is a part of me, it is not something that can leave me—even on the stuck days.
—Gina Chung, author of Green Frog (Vintage, 2024)
Photo credit: S. M. Sukardi