G’day Bullshido folks,
I’ve a series on my blog, ‘The Write Tools’: about the favourite tools and rituals of authors and illustrators.
Today’s guest is author and boxer Mischa Merz. You might enjoy reading this.
Cheers,
DAYoung
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[I]Welcome to another edition of ‘The Write Tools’: a blog series featuring authors, artists and their favourite tools.
Today’s guest is author Mischa Merz. Mischa is the author of Bruising: A Boxer’s Story (2009), as well as fiction and creative non-fiction. She is also a champion boxer, winning the Golden Gloves and Ringside World competitions. Her latest book, The Sweetest Thing, will be out in the US in April 2011.[/I]
Some writers like to romanticise the struggle and the solitude and overplay the pressures and the agonies of deadlines and editorial demands in their lives. But I’m not one of them.
Once you’ve been punched in the head a few hundred times it seems pathetic to whine about the torment of an empty page or a blank screen because anyone lucky enough to earn a living from something they enjoy doing shouldn’t complain.
Having trained as a journalist in the old school style of sink or swim, I also learned quickly to write while there was noise and chaos all around. Sometimes I had to file my copy over the phone to a copy taker who sounded like she had smoked a million Craven A’s and had heard it all before – unimpressed and unshockable.
But my most productive times have been when the punching and the writing have worked together and become a writing-fighting co-dependency, one feeding the other and the physical demands of training allowing me to settle in to the sedentary writing position in a more focussed state. Does that make boxing officially a writing tool?
- more here, at my blog