When I wrote the first three School for Good and Evil books, I wasn’t in any kind of shape.
In my teens and early 20s, I struggled with anxiety and stressed-based stomach issues, and at 6 feet tall, I was only 118 pounds at my heaviest. Yes, it’s as skinny as it sounds. I was never hungry and my intestines were in a permanent knot and I lived life in one long cold, floppy sweat. Even worse, each of those books was a mammoth effort, a big complex fantasy to be written in a year or less, and the sheer intensity of the schedule, plus touring, plus tutoring teenagers for money 7 nights a week, plus the pressure of delivering the quality I expected myself… well, each book left me even more broken than the one before.
Here was my schedule in those days:
7am: wake-up
8am-3pm: write
4pm-9pm: tutor
10pm-11:30pm: write
Rinse, repeat, die a slow death.
I felt like I was 60 before I was 30.
(An acupuncturist in London confirmed this to me once: “Your pulse is so weak,” he marveled. “Like you have very little life.”)
This wasn’t sustainable.
After Book 3, I made a decision.
I didn’t have to tutor anymore. I could be a full-time writer if I wanted. And I knew I wanted to write another SGE trilogy, but I promised myself that I’d do this one differently: health would be my priority over the books, even if these books were poised to be more ambitious than the first three.
Something had to give, right? I figured it would be the books. But there were no other options. My body couldn’t take the old ways anymore. I hired a Crossfit trainer (Dave Stogsdill — the greatest), got back into tennis, and revamped my writing schedule so it looked like this:
6am: wake-up
7am: tennis
9am-2pm: write
3pm: weightlifting/crossfit
5pm: write
6:30pm: finish work
10pm: sleep
It was strange, at first. The tennis wasn’t great after six or seven years not playing much — my college-level days were long gone. I couldn’t squat or bench press an empty barbell because I was so stiff and weak (Dave noted that my body seemed to be in permanent “startle mode,” like a scared cat.) All in all, I felt like the kid in PE who can’t do a chin-up during the fitness test and yet, still has to hang there for 45 seconds until you’ve “officially” failed. Worst of all, I wasn’t writing as much as I was before and I was finishing work so much earlier than I’d used to… so there was this general feeling like I was slacking and underperforming and wasting time. And for a kid whose entire identity was based in overachieving, that’s not a good emo-swamp to be in.
But slowly things changed. I got stronger, fitter. I started putting on weight. My writing sessions were more focused, less addled and anxious. I didn’t wake up at 3:30am every night in an icy sweat with thoughts racing. I didn’t skip meals with that twisted feeling in my stomach. I started prioritizing meeting friends and going on dates over late-night writing sprints. Even in the heat of deadline, I never missed a workout, reminding myself that my “job” was my health.
Four years later, when I finished Book 6, I was no longer a writer.
I was a human being.
I’d put on thirty pounds of muscle. I had a normal, balanced life. A life that was sustainable, repeatable, day after day, month after month, with no decline in my health or need for a crash-and-burn recovery after finishing a book. And even stranger… the writing was better!
The more I lived life like an athlete, the more creative I became.
And indeed, that’s how I started to think of myself.
A creative athlete, who strove to be as strong in body as in mind.
More gurus appeared to help me down this path. A new trainer named Ben Foster got me faster, tougher, more athletic in a way I’ve never been before (I still invent very weak reasons to go back to NYC every few weeks to keep training with him). The superhero duo of Kelly and Juliet Starrett magically came into my lives and reshaped my mentality on how to merge athletics and creative work. Where I once read books and biographies about writers or artists, now I’d watch sports docs and read athletes’ interviews, trying to suss out tips on peak performance.
I modeled how Kirk Cousins uses biofeedback to calm cortisol levels in moments of stress. How Iga Swiatek uses singing and mnemonic devices to disable her conscious mind and find flow state. How champion water polo players weight-lift and plyo-train underwater. I even changed my diet to Tom Brady’s for a year. Just constant tinkering and messing with every part of my physical life in the hopes it would jump up my writing.
Then, 14 months ago… I started this new novel.
The one that when I finally explained to my older brother, story, concept and all, he burst out laughing and howled: “Soman. This is… CRAZY.”
More in future entries about why this book is so crazy, but if the later SGE books, 600-page complex fantasies, were a difficulty level of 10/10 for me, this is more like a… 22.
Here’s where the athletic routine became even more critical.
At the beginning of writing this book, it felt far beyond my capabilities. I had dreams of being in AP biology again, unprepared for the final exam… dreams of being lost in my own backyard… dreams of showing up naked to sing the national anthem at a football game (I can’t sing). My subconscious knew I was well out of my depth, which was obvious, because in my waking life, I was lost too. Yes, I knew it was the book I wanted to write. But I didn’t know how.
For the better part of the first year, I spent weeks writing chapters and throwing them out. I tried third-person, first-person, even highly pretentious attempt at second-person. I experimented with outlines, notecards, and keeping a little diary of poetry and inspiration like Taylor Swift. All went in the garbage. I was just treading water in a vast, wide ocean, no land in sight. Yet, away from the book, I still had my anchors — tennis, training, a strict working cut-off-time and that solid block of sleep. And deep down, I knew, that just like I’d somehow put on those 30 pounds and rebalanced my life without really knowing how, this book too would find its way.
Not without a price, though.
I had to level up my intensity. Instead of a casual hit with a local club pro in the mornings, I started training with members of the Wash U and SLU varsity tennis teams (shoutout to Case and Jonathan!), super-athletes in peak-season form, which pushed me to work harder to hang with them, even if I’m twice their age. In St. Louis, I found a trainer named Steve Wallace, who’d made it to the Crossfit games and immersed me in a community of high-level power athletes. I found a physical therapist who helped me stay in the game without getting injured or needing chunks of time off. All the while, I did everything I could to up the level of difficulty off the page, so I could make Level 22 feel less daunting on the page.
Six months after this amp-up, the book came into focus. Chapters imprinted into my master document. My visual plan for the book gained architecture and dimension. The characters became real, the plot propulsive. Where Jun and I once would spend days worrying about whether a book like this could even work, now we were deep in the weeds on fact-checks and easter eggs and sourcing art. Everything was on a low simmer before. Now it had all started to cook.
My partner mused the other day: “You’ve been working so hard for so long on it. You’re not getting tired?”
I blinked at him. Because in my head, it really hasn’t felt like work at all. Instead, it’s felt like process — a process I’ve committed to 100%. When I first started weight-training. I’d take a shirtless selfie every 2 days, desperate to measure progress. That lasted for years, with me needing the contrast between those pictures, my own personal befores-and-afters, to give myself the motivation to keep going. Results motivated process. But I can’t remember taking a picture like that in the last couple years. Because now, process motivates process. That fizzy feeling that I’m in uncharted territory, gaining steam and growing in unfamiliar ways, because I keep leveling up in book and in life, which levels up my experience of both.
If only I could tell my younger self.
Get into your body to get into your mind.
But it’s never too late to find the secret… and to share it.
What’s your secret to share?
Until next week…
Thank you for sharing! Needed to read this today. It’s all connected ‼️
This is great advice and a very motivational story! I agree that sometimes the stagnation of just sitting and writing can take more of a toll than we think it does, and even though I don't enjoy exercising it really is so helpful for hitting reset on a moment of feeling stuck.