What’s your warm-up?
My husband is a musician, and I’m always learning new things about the creative process by watching him work. Lately I’ve been thinking about scales, and the value of a standardized but flexible warm-up. You can play scales for five minutes or one hour. If you want to get yourself ready for intense practice on a challenging piece, scales help you work up to it. If the biggest goal you can manage today is simply touching your instrument for a bit, scales are there for you. If you aren’t sure what you have the energy for, you can start with scales and see where they take you. Scales give you a place you know you can start, no matter what might happen after that.
I have yet to find an equivalent in writing. Nonfiction/journalism requires several different modes of work—to speak generally, research, interviews, and writing—and you can layer them into kind of a crescendo that guides you into the hardest work. For example, organizing research can slide seamlessly into outlining that then opens the door to writing. But while the three modes all depend on and support each other, they aren’t the same kind of work. In the case of interviewing and writing, they are actually the opposite kinds of work, to the point where I find it incredibly taxing to switch between them in the same day. I could never use an interview as a warm-up for writing, or vice versa. Research is a little fuzzier in that it can more or less naturally lead to the other two modes, but pulling yourself out of it on command can be counterproductive. Also, treating research, and the organization thereof, as subordinate to your “real” work is an invitation for any future fact-checker to murder you.
In the end, there always comes a moment in my work where the next step is “write.” Just sit down and write the thing. When the thing is a 600-1200 word article of the kind I’ve written hundreds of times before, ok, I can manage it. Newsletters too. I usually start at the beginning and write until either the thing is done or time is up. (If this sounds bonkers to you, PLEASE read on and give me your advice.) But when the directive is “write” and the thing is a book chapter? I freeze. My un-belabored, beginning-to-end process goes from path to obstacle. I feel like a musician being told to play a challenging solo as soon as they’ve picked up their instrument. I’m not ready yet. I need a way in. I need a warm-up. I need scales.
So I’m asking you: What are your creative warm-ups? If you’re a writer, what do you to gently guide your sentence-forming brain from cold and foggy to alive and buzzing? If you’re another kind of artist or creative, what are the warm-ups that are common in your field, or personal to you? As you can see with the scales example, I think there’s a lot of potential for cross-pollination here. I’m turning on the comments for the first time (be kind; we’re all human beings here), or you can email me your thoughts by hitting reply. Next week I’ll share some of my ideas and experiments, and hopefully yours, too!