Scrambling across the internet I found this, about running and writing by Joyce Carol Oates:
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments. Running seems to allow me, ideally, an expanded consciousness in which I can envision what I'm writing as a film or a dream. I rarely invent at the typewriter but recall what I've experienced. I don't use a word processor but write in longhand, at considerable length. (Again, I know: writers are crazy.)
By the time I come to type out my writing formally, I've envisioned it repeatedly. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind's eye, the pages I've just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.
For a long time I think I struggled with fiction writing because I placed so much emphasis on the words on the page and on writing pretty and poetic sentences. I suppose that Oates' idea of the novel as a vision, as a wraith requiring precise embodiments, is not a new one, but it resonated in such a way that the whole act of writing a novel seemed to swing into focus.
Writing a novel is the creation of a universe made entirely of the writer's singular imagination. This brief, almost incidental passage changed something in me. I suppose because I've been thinking a lot about novel writing and how it works and why it fails. I find it hard to believe that I spent all those years studying creative writing and I never got what Oates is talking about. I don't know whether that's because no one ever really said it, or whether it was a concept I couldn't or wouldn't get. I think it also has something to do with that combination of novel writing, running and meditating. I still don't fully get what that trifector is really doing for me but it certainly seems to be doing something.
On one of my meditation CDs the guy says something like "the deep stillness we seek does not arise because the world is still or the mind is quiet, stillness is nourished when we allow things to be just as they are for now, in this moment, moment by moment and breath by breath." Like I said, I haven't quite worked it out yet but there is something about this statement, as beautiful as it is, that is akin to writing fiction. If only that for me I seem to need the stillness to sustain something. Perhaps it's about slowing the process down, or as Oates says, expanding consciousness.
