Great Writing Tips no. 428 - Remember to Eat!

I met my young friend Siege, aka Carlos Malvar, when I attended the British Council's Animating Literature conference in Manila a couple of year's back and he made an impression as a performance poet and really nice guy. Now he is the author of two best selling young adult novels, and he's started a rather good blog called Not So Unreal.

I really like what he wrote about writing and eating! :

Tip to all budding writers out there. Before getting elbow deep into your work, make sure you’re well fed. Never face the blank page on an empty stomach. Hunger pangs are distractions. You don’t want to think about what you’re going to eat while you’re figuring out how to express your character’s fears in 50 words or so using graphic descriptions and gothic settings. Writing is hard work. You’ll get hungry. Eat, eat, eat.

Also, do you know that thinking burns calories? Usually, I watch what I eat. I came from a family cursed with the fat genes on my dad’s side, and with the short genes on my mom’s side… which makes me a hobbit, especially now that I have curly hair, and furry feet. Anyway, I watch what I eat because I tend to get fat more than the usual person, and usually, I try to squeeze in some jogging in my moderately busy lifestyle of watching videos. BUT, when I’m writing intensively, I let myself loose and basically feast on junk food, loads of carbs, heaps and heaps of sugar (via coffee, iced tea, Coke), and whatever I can munch on. It’s OK, I’m writing. I’m running full speed on my mental threadmill.

When you’re writing, you will get very very hungry. This is because you will experience bending time while writing. While you agonize over three paragraphs where nothing happens in your “narrative time” except for one of your characters making himself some coffee, an entire hour may have elapsed in real time. A single page of manuscript may detail nothing but a fleeting moment in your narrative timeline, and you didn’t notice it, but four real time hours have gone by!!! That’s what it’s like to be a writer.

Siege was one of the performance poets invited to take part in the British Council and Apples and Snakes' Speechless poetry project last year, along with others including our own Priya K and Singaporean Pooja Nansi, and under the tutelage of Jacob Sam-la Rose and Malika Booker.

Siege's more personal blog is here. Yeah, he's nuts. So?

Maybe if we all shout loud enough he will be forced to come over to Malaysia and read some of his work for us.