by Tom Lombardo

I'm not one of those writers who sit down and write everyday whether I have something to write about or not. I hear this all the time atconferences from famous writers—the old saw, "Get up and write for (fillin the blank) hours, even if you don't have a topic, write yourself into it,then, revise, until you get (fill in the blank) good words."

If you're a writer who avoids writing, then perhaps that's agood process for you. And I'm not saying that the routine of writing each dayis a bad thing, especially if you're a novelist and need to get 75,000 wordsdone by year's end. But if you're like me, then you might wait until the musestrikes to put pen to paper or fingers to keys. This aspect of my process maybe the fallout from my career as a journalist, both full-time and free-lance.For me, deadlines have helped me learn how to turn on writing at will.Deadlines have become such a part of me that when I don't have a deadline, Ican still write whenever I want to. I can write daily or I can write weekly. Ican write at my desk, I can write at a coffee shop, I can write on an airplane,I can write in the water closet, I can write while sitting on my front porchsmoking my forbidden cigars, I can write on all forms of public transportation,and I can write in the car on long trips as long as someone else is driving.

One place I can't write is on the tennis court or the hockeyrink, two sports I manage to play into my old age. In order to continue playingthose sports, I need to exercise, which I do many days, early in the morning,before any writing begins. But I don't have a real job to go to every day likemy wife does, so the self-questioning arises when one of my tennis buddiescontacts me for a 9 AM match. Should I write all morning or play tennis allmorning? Coming home at noon from playing 3 hours of tennis is not conducive towriting at all. After showering and eating, there's hardly time left in my daybecause I must pick up my children at their respective schools from 3 PMthrough 4 PM, take them to their various tennis practices, friend's houses,hockey practices where I'm their coach, etc., and then cook dinner so that it'sready to eat when my wife arrives home from work. Then, there's the laundry,shopping, etc., that goes with being the spouse who works at home, does notprovide health insurance, and does not bring home the kind of paycheck neededto keep our family of four fed, clothed, and sheltered.

Even with so little time in my life for writing—essentiallymornings to early afternoons—I strongly believe in exercise and its effect uponwriting. If your body is not fit, your brain cannot work properly. This is anarea that some writers ignore. You don't have to play a sport, but you can atleast walk somewhere outside, breathe your share of the troposphere, get yourblood moving, clear your head. And you'd be surprised what can come upon youduring exercise. Just this week, I was playing tennis on a beautiful day in Piedmont Park in Midtown Atlanta, and walkingright by the courts, just outside the fence—I found the woman with the lavenderbuttons. I've been looking for her since high school, and there she was walkingright by the court I was playing on. Praise the god of good fortune because itwas between games and I was sitting on the bench against the fence, and as shewalked by, I noticed, and she smiled. So, I pulled out my cell phone (always keep your cell phone handy, mosthave recording functions) and recorded a couple of lines, then the next morningdrafted a poem about her, spent the following day revising it, and now it'sready for submission. Had I not been playing tennis at that very instant, Iwould have missed her completely, and missed the poem, too. Had I stayed hometo spend my hours writing instead of playing tennis—perish the thought—I mightnot have come upon anything as provocative to write about. My point being this:writers can't just be writers. Writers must have lives that enlarge themselvesto include experiences that may lead to writing.

Maybe those famous writers of the old saw exercise, too.Maybe they do it in the afternoons, after their writing sessions. ErnestHemingway, a particularly avid proponent of the daily writing mantra, was alsoan avid outdoorsman after all. Unfortunately my afternoons get blocked off bymy Mr. Mom duties, so I face the choice on some days: exercise or write. Mychoice, usually, is exercise over writing. The only time I choose writing overexercise is when the exercise comes up against my own personal writing mantra:Paying writing comes first. Always. My creative writing, at this point, doesn'tpay much. Yet. So until it does, I put aside all creative writing and sometimeseven my tennis game until I meet the freelance deadline. After all, I mustsomehow pay for the tennis balls and court fees.