Aside from doing inverted quantum physics and string theory equations with nothing but a blank paper and a pencil, is there any better way to put the gray muscle through some circuit training than by writing?
Think about it. You’ve got to comprehend all the emotional angles and shades that your characters experience. That means a lot of social factors, working the angles of jealousy and anger, finding just the right amount of motivation to push a protagonist forward. Emotional balance and surge is just one part of the mental workout, however.
It shows up in the basic structure of some genres, like thrillers and mysteries, but any plot must have logical connections, often fraught with plot twists and witty dialogue that any modern sitcom would be proud of. Do we wake up, bake an idea in the microwave for thirty seconds and have a finished story steaming and ready to serve? No way. For me, it often takes at least a week or two of mind-to-grindstone to eek out the beginnings of a solid outline and plot synopsis before even starting in on the story. Figuring out the logic of a new system of magic, creating the physics of a new world and how all these factors are going to create a greater sum of the whole…whew. It’s exhausting.
So I guess it’s a good thing to run across an article like this:
Keeping the mind active seems to help preserve its functioning and even improve it at times if any problems arise. There are no specifics yet as to how many minutes of I.Q. calisthenics we should engage in per day to keep our brain power from dipping, but it is encouraging across the board that we constantly make ourselves face new experiences, learn new skills, and so on. What pursuit makes us learn more and travel farther than writing and all the effort it involves to distill an entire world and a cast of characters onto a blank page? Anyone have an alternate way of pumping up their gray matter? Am I the only one who finds myself mentally wearied after chopping at a rather knotty plot snag?
I see that smile.
Am I the only one who finds myself mentally wearied after chopping at a rather knotty plot snag?
I’m not a fiction writer–it’s that whole “don’t hear voices” problem. Maybe if my doc took me off my meds . . .
But I digress . . .even as a non-fiction writer, I find myself mentaly exhausted after I’ve wrestled a magazine article or a book chapter into submission (pun intended.) Writing, whether you’re creating worlds and characters or culling interview notes into well-written prose, is a challenging mental workout.
Usually I’m humming “If I only had a brain” by the time I finish writing and rewriting an article.
My two cents.