Is Your Body Telling You to Write?
How my body subtly tells me to get back to writing
“Walking down the road, her dog trotting in front of her, she eyed up the line of trees and realised she was doing it again. She was narrating her own life. There’s only one possible explanation for this. She hadn’t done any writing in a long time.
How long had it been? With a sigh, she reached the treeline and let her dog wander off to sniff. Three weeks. It’s been three weeks. Three weeks and she’s already narrating her own life.”
True. Story.
Narrating my life to myself is the third sign that I really need to write.
I first noticed these signs when I was nineteen and in my first year of university. I was enjoying myself, delving deep into being a Fresher, studying interesting modules and staring at boys (and freaking out when they talked to me). My focus was not on my writing or the novels I just couldn’t finish.
Then, during one lecture about something Greek (I was studying classics and archaeology), I just couldn’t concentrate. As I tried to take notes, my brain refused to work. My stomach began churning and as I lifted my hand, my fingers were trembling.
As soon as the lecture was over, I rushed back across campus to my room in halls. A normal person might have drunk some water, laid on the bed and wondered what was wrong. Maybe low blood sugar or lack of sleep.
Nope. Not me.
I turned my computer on and started typing.
The rest of that day is a blur. All I remember after that is writing and writing and not stopping.
I felt much better afterwards.
This sign doesn’t happen much anymore and I wonder if it’s been replaced with a new sign. Lately, I’ve noticed that if I go a week or so without writing, I get grumpy.
Proper grumpy.
I snap, I sigh, I get angry at ridiculous things.
Perhaps I didn’t have the capacity to get grumpy during my first year of uni, so instead it came out physically as trembling hands.
Getting grumpy isn’t my first sign of needing to write, though. The first sign is simply an urge. A desire. A need to get into another world, to be with certain characters.
My own worlds have become something of a happy place recently.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons I wrote four books in 2020.
So, those are the signs that I need to write:
1) A burning desire to disappear into another world.
2) Taking out the frustration on the people I love by getting stupidly grumpy (or, potentially, feeling sick and shaky).
3) My brain takes things into its own hands (as it were) and starts narrating my own boring life.
There might be a fourth. I don’t know. When I start narrating my own life, I take it as the final warning sign and get back to writing. I’d much rather be narrating someone who’s interesting…like the pilot of a flying ship, a museum worker about to fall madly in love with someone harbouring a secret, a ghost hunting witch, or a dragonslayer, a forbidden office romance, an engineer, or Death.
I’m a big believer in listening to our bodies. My body always seems to know what I need, whether it’s to get out of my job, to stay away from a client, to jump onto an opportunity or get writing.
Thing is, it always starts as a whisper. It takes practie to learn what those sound like. We owe it to ourselves, our mental health and physical health to learn those whispers.
I know, I know. I need to practice what I preach.
When that desire hits, I should write. My mind shouldn’t have to resort to writing without me.
When that desire hits, you should write.
Don’t wait.
Make some time, even if it’s only ten minutes, and make your heart happy.
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