How Writing is Like Running

By Kait Carson

Many of you know I’m a runner. More when I lived in Florida than now. Maine has these things called hills. Something I never trained on and tend to avoid. Still, come spring and early summer, I’m out there running the circumference of our mowed field. On the hill. I should know better.

My running days began in the 1970s. I belonged to The Book of the Month Club, and I bought Jim Fixx’s book, The Complete Book of Running. I ran daily until Son of Sam appeared and murdered women in Kissena Park, six houses from mine and home to my running trail. Screech. Slide to a stop. After Sam’s capture, I took up the sport again, and then we lost Jim Fixx. Running might not be all it was cracked up to be, and I stopped.

Then I started working for lawyers. I’m sorry. I know several of my blogmates are Bar members, but truly, lawyers were the proximate cause of my rededication to the sport. Legal work is stressful. Running provided an outlet, and all the law firms I worked for fielded teams for the Miami Corporate Run. I never was much for racing. Not that I’m not competitive. Boy howdy, I am. It’s just that I’m SSSSSLLLLLOOOOWWWW, but preparing for and running is a great team-building exercise and it’s fun. Group suffering is the best.

What in the Sam Hill (who was Sam Hill? Anyone know?) does any of this have to do with writing? Oh, more than you think.

The hardest part of running isn’t ticking off miles. It’s lacing up the shoes. The hardest part of writing isn’t accumulating the word count. It’s butt in chair, fingers on keyboard. Once you get past the prelims, clear sailing. Not.

As with running, writing, at least my writing, proceeds in fits and starts. New ideas bring endless hours of plotting, pounding out chapters, working up characters, red herrings, clues, and research. Then, here comes the hill. Life gets in the way, or something doesn’t flow, or, and this happened to me twice, a key bit of story changes or disappears and it’s back to the drawing board. The setbacks may be temporary or permanent, but either way, they slow you down, or, in the case of losing a publisher (or agent) put your writing life on hold.

Then there are the days, weeks, and months when the ideas flow and you wish for a second set of hands to pound the keyboard. In running, this is called the runner’s high. It’s a real thing, and it is directly analogous to a writer’s high. When it’s good, it’s good, and the author knows it. Those are moments to crave and cherish. True confessions—I’m in one of those periods now, and I wish I could bottle it.

As an aside, lawyers figured in my writing life as well, and they are the reason I use a pen name. You see, in my first book, I killed off a lawyer. The book was a work of fiction, but after twenty years in the legal field, people knew me, and the firms I worked for, and I wanted to avoid the ever-popular game of pin the crime on the attorney!

How about you? Where are you in your writing life? Smooth sailing, on hold, or laboring up the hill?

Kait Carson writes the Hayden Kent Mysteries, set in the Fabulous Florida Keys, and is at work on a new mystery series set in her adopted state of Maine. Her short fiction has been nationally published in the True Confessions magazines and in Woman’s World. Kait’s short story, “Gutted, Filleted, and Fried”, appeared in the Silver Falchion Award nominated Guppy Anthology Hook, Line, and Sinker. Her nonfiction essay was included in the Agatha Award-winning book Writing the Cozy Mystery. She is a former President of the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime, a member of Sisters in Crime, and Guppies.