Writer's Health: priming your space and your body

Firstly, if any of you are suffering from computer eyestrain and headaches from looking at lit screens, try using a projector.  It lets your eyes look into the middle distance instead of close up, and lets you look at reflected light instead of straight into the light source (which is not what human eyeballs evolved to do: the blue light from digital devices can cause cumulative damage and macular degeneration.) 

Second, if your legs go numb and your back hurts from sitting in a chair, try sitting on an exercise ball. 

Why worry about this, you ask?  Writing's not particularly physical.  It's not as though I'm going to strain myself.  I sit.  I write.  Anytime.  Anywhere.  It's not as though we're athletes.  It's not as though we're carpenters or ranch hands, suffering work-related injuries.  In fact, the profession of writing is about as unlikely to cause injury as any imaginable.  Is this not so?  Besides, I'm not a wimp.  A little headache, a little backache... I can deal.

But oh, writers.  Oh, my fellow writers.  This career takes a long time.  We peak late.  We write draft after draft, and throw away hundreds of hours of work each time we junk a scene in frustration.  We aren't athletes, crashing and burning young; we aren't physical laborers peaking in strength in our twenties. 

We're knowledge workers.  Our teens and twenties and even thirties are just a warm up.  We may put in those 10,000 hours to mastery before we ever see publication.  The quality of our writing may peak in our fifties, or even sixties. 

Dear writers, you do not want to reach your peak age of productivity crippled with carpal tunnel, stooped with lower back pain, and half blind from staring at computer screens.  Therefore, I beseech you:

Be gentle with yourself. 

In how you treat your body, and in how you arrange your writing space: pay attention to what causes discomfort. And eliminate it.  In the short term minor discomforts don't matter.  But in the long term- 10,000 hours and decades of long term- tiring lighting, or a stiff chair, or not letting yourself unroll a yoga mat to take stretching breaks every hour will mean the difference between writing happily through your fifties and sixties... and hardly writing at all, because it hurts so bad.  I'm not yet fifty; I'm not quite speaking from experience.  But I had a harrowing experience last winter with headaches, and computer screens, and light sensitivity, and for a few weeks I was so nauseous and dizzy at the sight of screensI feared I was either going blind or would have to give up being a writer, both of which would be equally devastating.  I'd already tried wearing polarized sunglasses; that worked for a year.  I tried wearing gaming glasses, dimming the screen, turning all text green on a black background, etc.  Reading books was fine.  Only screens caused a problem.  After far too long wallowing (I went to architecture school; I'm supposed to be a speedy creative problem solver, in theory) I realized the problem was light, all light, computers, phones, and headlights, anytime I stared straight into a light source.  I also realized projectors are one way of working all day long on a computer without staring at the lit screen. 

It works.  My eyes are fine.  I project Scrivener on a bedsheet on the opposite wall for hours on end; no headaches, not ever.  Lucky for me, grandma's basement contained an old Epson Powerlite S5 from years ago.  Now, after I've done at least a thousand hours of projecting, the bulb is still going strong.  No problems.  And no need to rig up anything fancier than this, if you want to try it for your own writing.  I've got the projector propped on an old piano bench, and my computer elevated on books; my screen is an old bedsheet on a broom handle, strung beneath the bunk bed about ten feet away. 

Works like a charm. 

Dear writers: if it's your dream, do whatever's necessary to make your writing better.  You always concentrate better when you're not in pain.  So don't mess around with your bodies.  If it hurts find a different way.  Kristin Cashore, bestselling author of Graceling, writes longhand and transcribes with voice recognition software and revises on paper, because typing- all typing- hurts; she's still an author.  Don't stop writing.   

And even if it seems like you're making a fuss over something tough people just deal with?  Be gentle with yourself.  10,000 hours is a long time to have nauseating headaches. 

I now sit on an exercise ball (no lower back pain.)  I put a hot water bottle on my feet (no cold toes).  I wear a coat, and scarf, and often snow pants indoors (no cold anything).  I use Christmas lights and a Himalayan salt lamp (no exhausting fluorescent glare).  And I open the window for fresh air beside me, even in winter, because I once read here that lack of fresh oxygen makes you dumber.  I probably look like a seriously strange sort of human, perched here in winter garb with a hot water steaming on my feet and hot tea steaming by my arm and flecks of snowflakes coming in through the open window and the next novel projected on a bed sheet across the room. 

But if you're trying to unhinge your mind from your body for hours on end?  If you're trying to visit whole other worlds in your head and dream your novel to life?  Best not to come back to a body sluggish, cramped, or stiff with hypothermia. 

Happy writing, writers.  And may we all be in our prime until our nineties. 

-mlj