In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 278.
You’ve probably heard about Grace Paley and the bath. Her famous claim, that it’s where she did her best writing, was less about actually being neck deep in the tub surrounded by wilted pages, and more about honoring the space around the work. So much of our best writing happens when we leave behind the deadening glow of the screen.
What I do is run.
Running plays a prominent role in my new novel, Hidden River, but unlike my narrator, who gets sucked into the sport as a teen, I was a latecomer, turning to it ten years ago at the ripe age of forty. Since then, it has plucked me from some lousy lows and cracked me open creatively. Running clears the dreck in my head and provides a low-stakes path through narrative challenges. It is a constant exercise in humility.
On long runs, I wander into a character’s inner life, stumbling upon salient moments and details. Call it research: I completed the Philly half-marathon twice while drafting Hidden River, jogging up and down the banks of the Schuylkill River just like my narrator does in her story years earlier. While much has been said about the running/writing connection (perhaps most notably by Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, published by Knopf in 2008) I can attest that the corny platitudes work. You don’t even need to own a pair of sneakers to benefit. A few mantras that sustain me:
Get out the door. Don’t wait to clear your calendar or for your favorite Muji notebook to restock. Forgo all preciousness. Whenever I’m in a training block I tell myself: Don’t think, just go. Even when I’m dog tired, I show up. I write before dawn. It’s not pretty. It’s never enough. But something’s more than nothing. Like this, the words, the miles, accrue.
Become comfortable with discomfort. There’s the physical ache from sitting until your thighs go numb and then there’s the existential ache that comes with facing the page. This writing stuff, it’s hard. It often won’t feel inspired. A book’s murky middle can fill you (me) with dread. Telling the truth is painful. Cue the blood, sweat, tears. (And don’t get me started on the mess of publishing.) But that struggle is what makes it worth it.
Run the mile you’re in. The runner’s version of E. L. Doctorow’s “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” It’s easy to get bogged down by self-doubt, but fear of the unknown can lead to overdetermining our material. Instead of fixating on what’s ahead, embrace where you are. That’s where you’re supposed to be. Who the heck knows where we’re really going anyway. All we can do is stay curious about this moment, this character, this scene.
Know your why. No one else is losing sleep over your next race or writing project. The sooner you understand your intrinsic purpose, the easier it will be to keep your head down and follow the heart of the story you’re driven to tell.
What doesn’t challenge you won’t change you. We all fall into complacency and rote patterns. Even if I keep telling the same old story, I want to tell it from an angle that pushes me outside my comfort zone, destabilizes assumptions, and demands fresh growth. We never come out of a project the same as we were. That’s a good thing.
So find something that will enliven and nourish. Maybe it’s running. Maybe it’s carpentry. Take baths if that works. Step away from the desk. It’s amazing how much you’ll get done.
Sara Lippmann’s most recent novel is Hidden River (Tortoise Books, 2026). She is the cofounder of the Writing Co-Lab, an online teaching cooperative, and the editor in chief of Epiphany magazine.
image credit: Artem Horovenko
