If your words, moods, body, and brain all appreciate exercise, why not have a ten-minute dance party? | lucyflint.com

Mix up your writing day, shed that crappy mood, and fire up your creativity--by moving around.

To music.

Right now.

Some people call this dancing.

We're all pretty aware of exercise's physical benefits. (Unless you've been living under a rock. In which case, you also haven't been working out much.)

Seriously, though: it's too easy to forget that we live in our most important writing machine. It's our bodies that do all that writing and reading. Our ten typing fingers, our bloodshot eyes, our aching necks.

We've got to honor these word-loving bodies of ours.

And then, all our dizzyingly creative brains: they need some love and support too, right?

Those words and ideas and bits of genius dialogue don't come out of thin air. We're brewing them in our brains. They're hanging out with our moods. Scuffling around in our memories.

Can we all agree to love on our mental processes with some exercise? (Because seriously, the mental benefits of exercise are super-huge.)

So, if you're already in an exercise routine, good for you. Yay for gyms and running shoes and DVDs and whatever else it is that gets you moving.

But I'd also say: use your writing breaks to move. Your writing will love you for it.

And why not dance, which is pretty much the funnest way to move ever. (I just said funnest. It's okay.)

Crank the tunes and shake it for ten minutes.

It's simple. You can do it right there. You don't need to change clothes or make a huge plan or overcomplicate it. You can do something super brilliant for your writing, your words, your body, your self, right now.

Dance when you're stuck. When you've been sitting for an hour. When you've been overthinking it.

Dance when you feel a MOOD coming on. When you're in a creative rut. When all you're doing is snarling.

When you take a break, when you need a change, when you want to eat all the chocolate: dance.

Oh, and don't even tell me that you're a bad dancer. Please. I am The Worst of Dancers, and I have my own little dance parties all the time. (I danced all through the process of writing this post, for instance.)

Because there's this, too, my lionhearted friend:

If you can't dance awkwardly and foolishly at your writing space when no one is looking at you, then how can you write your awkward and foolish drafts that no one else will read?

We gotta practice bravery some time, right?

So be a bit foolish. Be a bit crazy. Get your heart pumping. Embrace your awkward.

And welcome the words when you're done.

Okay?

Here. Get some fantastic inspiration from Love Actually and Hitch. (Because I couldn't resist. I really couldn't. And because our Mondays needed that.)

Good? Yeah. I thought so. Me too.

Time for us both to step away from the screen, and dance it out.

You and me. Really. Right now.

(Take that, Monday.)