Photo by Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash

The house is quiet except for the gentle gurgle of a water fountain and the low hum of an air purifier. The sky beyond my windows swirls in the inky black of an early morning breeze. It’s not far beyond the witching hour, so my words seem to stream from me like an ancient spell. This is the second half of my morning routine. A recently closed book and a cup of coffee sits beside me. This is how I maintain my authorial fitness.

Authorial fitness is like physical fitness. It has two parts: mindful consumption and mindful performance. When we work to improve our physical fitness, we can’t just change our diet or just start an exercise routine. One without the other leads to very little progress. However, when adjusted in conjunction, we can achieve real improvements in our level of fitness.

The same is true for writers. To really see progress we must adjust both our reading and our writing habits. We need to be mindful of the texts we are consuming and be disciplined in our writing performance. Like any routine, this can be challenging. However, like physical fitness, the more you do it, the more natural it feels.

As an English instructor at a local college, I often teach classes at 7:00 am. Some might cringe at this, but I appreciate traveling to campus before the early morning traffic. However, this does mean that I need to start my day early, so I wake up at 4:00 am. The first thing I do is brew a cup of coffee. I then spend about 20 minutes reading a good book. It does not matter if it is fiction or non-fiction as long as I can learn some quality information or revel in some quality story telling. This is a mindful decision to upgrade my reading from the empty calories of social media consumption I used to engage in when I first woke up.

I then spend 20-40 minutes writing. Granted this is not a lot of writing time for an aspiring novelist. Manuscript writing happens later in the day. This early morning writing is intended to prime the pump, a little morning yoga before the marathon of constructing scenes for chapters. It is a chance to be mindful again, to stretch out my writing muscles rather than wallow on the couch of status updates.

As I write this, it is late summer, so it won’t be long before the rising sun splashes tropical colors through a humid sky. Then, I will be prepping my lesson plans for the semester ahead. Will I be able to keep up my reading and writing routine once I’m locked into that grueling routine of teaching and grading? It will take discipline, but as Will Durant says, ““We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”