Running Through the Writing Process Fourth Wall

This essay is part of The Headlight Review’s series, “The Process,” which features writers describing the steps they take to develop and realize a literary work. Writers discuss their inspirations, stages of their drafting, the swings and misses, and the messes they’ve made.

A narrative can focus on the story of a single creation or may instead frame a process the writer employs on a regular basis. We dig hearing writers talking about writing and understand not everything can result in success. Failures can tell a story, too.

In addition to a submission call, we asked a quartet of our favorites—Jason Crawford, John Henry Fleming, Robin Silbergleid, and James Whorton Jr.—to participate. These essays will kick off our series.  

We hope to continue publishing narratives on “The Process.” Any writer interested in participating may contact THR with a pitch, or we’ll be glad to look over a submission in its entirety.

Word count: 1500 or thereabouts. Multi-media essays are encouraged.

“Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions” —Elizabeth King 

When I wrestle with a first draft of shorter writing—an essay in this case—I take it for a long run. No music, no podcasts, just two hours of nature, water in juice-box-sized bottles, electrolyte gels, and my outline entirely in my head. I have no choice but to write, because I’d rather my thoughts excavate the soil around an essay prompt than draft anxious emails (admittedly, I do take these out for runs, too).  

While running, unable to write or type notes, I continuously draft and condense in my mind. Though it sounds like it is, this process isn’t the “editing as you go” trap; it’s more like Michelangelo’s famous quote about carving away the marble that wasn’t David—my ideas gallop across a single, hilly run-on sentence, and I sculpt it in such a way that it’s impossible to forget before I can physically jot it down. I’m forced to write what’s strong enough to remember. 

Writing this way helps me both build and “dismantle the scaffolding,” as Zadie Smith encourages in her clever essay, “That Crafty Feeling.” It also allows me to lean into the somatic question driving both writing and distance running: How heavily should we lean on staging? A structured training or race plan? Is this freedom or terror? Of course, it depends on the person and the creative work, but for a first draft, this process works for me. 

When I race, my key somatic question is: What’s the fastest pace can I maintain across a particular distance, and how do I recruit my muscles, organs, blood, bone, and joints to do it? A final draft of writing doesn’t quite work the same way, but the practice of training is similar to that of writing. I only train at “race pace” for twenty percent of my race plan; the other eighty percent is slow. With writing, the vulnerable eruption of a first draft may only take up twenty percent of my writing time while the other eighty percent consists of revising and building connective tissue. Even so, whether running or writing, my thresholds increase. 

The pace I can maintain for a ten-kilometer race is faster than the pace I can maintain for a half marathon and again for a full marathon. A similar question can be asked of writing stamina: What pace works for an email or text (five kilometers), a poem (ten kilometers), an essay (half marathon), and a novel (marathon)? These aren’t perfect synchronicities—there are hundreds of genres, lengths, and hybrids of writing. But in any example, we ask what yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily pace or practice seems most feasible at the outset of a race training program or the beginning of a writing project. We all set out with scaffolding, even if sparse: “I’m going to write about x” or “I’m going to follow x training plan.” Then, to our simultaneous dismay and delight, we write about everything but x. Or life happens and we can’t follow x training plan perfectly.

“Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” 

If we tune into the process like our favorite TV show—not our mind’s but our body’s—we might be saved from only accomplishing what we thought we could do. In other words, if we listen, the process might give us what we haven’t even considered possible. 

~ 

It usually takes me twelve to eighteen weeks to prepare for a half marathon, my favorite distance, from start to finish. It might seem an essay doesn’t need as much time to construct, but when we think about the reading, ideas, conversations, drafting, editing, and revising added up, over weeks, I’d say the timing is comparable.  

Each day has a plan. I don’t always follow it. When I go for a run, I’m stacking readings, ideas, conversations, drafts, edits, and revisions, just like I’m stacking fast, slow, long, and short training days. Running needs strong physical muscles. Writing needs strong muscles too, even if abstract and invisible. What a beautiful thing that they can strengthen simultaneously—my muscles, organs, blood, bone, and joints offer my writing a body to borrow, and my writing muscles allow my body to perform. Truthfully, I run best when I have a draft in my head. I write best when my body is running. And it is in these moments when I recognize that my intentions for a piece are almost always impoverished and humbling. These moments are the very reason why I write—the process almost feels like it’s not me writing at all. 

The new somatic consideration then becomes less a question and more an awareness: How do I balance the execution of my plan with what my heart, body, and spirit are telling me? How do I listen to what my whole body knows, not just what my mind thought it knew before I began? 

Engaging your whole body helps you sift out what you need to say and understand why you want to say it. More often than not, this is why our intentions feel impoverished; we have one appetizing line—a seed—but we can’t answer the “what” or “why” before we start writing—before we start moving. 

One of my writing mentors once told me that every sentence must move. To both write and run—to move—too much staging might slow you down.  

Thus, to break this writing process fourth wall, I took this essay—the one you’re reading right now—out for a run. 

~ 

In epic Capricorn fashion, I scheduled a specific day and time to execute my plan. By the time it was precisely 3:30 p.m. on said day, it had snowed about four feet. And it wasn’t stopping. Of course, this is Canada, so there was already a sturdy layer (or thirty) of ice and snow on the ground. 

What did I do? Stay inside and try again tomorrow? Absolutely not. How dare Winter try to dismantle the staging I’d built?  

The hardest part about both writing and running in the winter is the slush. It’s warmer, yet somehow more slippery than ice, and it cakes itself into every sulcus of your brain, every groove of your sneakers. The cold air thrusting into my nose and down my throat burned like taking a shot of vodka fresh out of the freezer. There was so much snow that the trees looked like Kawase Hasui’s painting Pine Tree after Snow. I could hardly see, my sunglasses blurred with sticky snowflakes. When I swiped at them the lenses smeared. Even with winter sneakers I slipped and slid, needing to switch between car tire grooves, bike lanes, and sidewalks to find the paths most recently plowed. I’d run this route before—a straight out and back to County Road 27.  

Of course, I didn’t think I could be stopped, powering through the slight decline to my halfway point. Words and metaphors tumbled around like falling snowflakes, and I caught them on my tongue, memorizing the ones that might work. But then I reached the dead end of County Road 27. I turned around, now on a slight incline. My shoes sank, slipping into salted slush. The harsh wind, from what used to be Ancient Lake Iroquois, blew so fiercely that my gaze stuck to the ground, the top of my hat bracing the bone-deep chill. I needed to walk back the way I’d come. Walk. The word felt like it’s spelled—wet chalk—and everybody knows you can’t write with wet chalk. 

Usually, for the second half of my runs, I turn around and move in the direction I came from, seeing the backside of everything I’ve already passed. I’m forced to revise, where revision means “to see again.” But I’m usually moving pretty fast, and with the intent to revise my draft. This time, however, I needed to slow down enough to not only see a stop sign but notice that it was so coated in snow that it couldn’t be read. 

Sometimes we must stop to move. 

~

Once upon a time, when I played basketball for Stanford University and Team Canada, every layer of life felt fast. There was no eighty-twenty split. When I retired from basketball in 2020, I was drawn to distance running because it was healing to sustain a slower pace—to have a relationship with my body that enabled conversation as it moved. But that basketball pace never left my fibers; it carried over into writing. I wanted to write the equivalent of a basketball game in the length of time it took to play a basketball game (forty minutes). Not unlike stuffing a stats sheet, my volume of output felt vital. The best writers are crisp and efficient—they don’t waste any time, right? Surely, they never stop or slow down?  

Writers “waste” a lot of time, but I’ve vowed to stop calling it waste. It tastes capitalistic. Rather, I admire how one of my favorite writers, Jedidiah Jenkins, thinks about it: crafting a relationship with what we create and consume; sitting down to eat a whole meal instead of snacks. 

Another poignant essayist, Ayan Artan, writes something similar about developing relationships, using fiction as an example: 

When you pick up a fiction book, the unfamiliar is made familiar through exposure. I am not Iranian, queer or a recovering addict but as I work my way through Kaveh Akbar’s brilliant novel Martyr!, I am one with Cyrus, the book’s lead. His wins are my wins, his losses mine too. We are tethered. 

Words in the right hands become weapons. Art in the right hands becomes a mirror. Look at yourself. What do you believe? 

We are a people intent on running away from ourselves. 

Interestingly, one of my 2025 goals is to spend more time with one and each thing at a time. One essay, one book, one poem. Maybe—gasp—reading each more than once. But what about myself? 

I was trying so hard to stay on schedule that I forgot to allow writing to do what writing does best: run around time’s racetrack, fraying its linearity. 

The common denominator of writing and running is my cyclical relationship with my body and its movement—consider a breath a paragraph break or heart rate an essay’s rhythm. Relationships with movement require time.  

As I was running through the snow with this essay, I unintentionally held my breath, raising my heartbeat. I heaved a few times to recalibrate, but couldn’t find a rhythm. Likewise, the words wouldn’t come. There was no breath and blood to feed the brain generating them. My sense of control was irregular, disconnected. I could feel it and I tried to ignore it. Tried to keep brainstorming, ultimately leaving my brain—and body—behind in a snowstorm.  

Often, when your body, environment, or work ask you to slow down, it’s not because you’re incapable of a particular pace, that that pace isn’t valuable, or that working to achieve it in reasonably adverse conditions isn’t fruitful. They’re asking for more time. If I had run home, the second half of my run would have been thirty minutes to my front door. If I walked, it was an hour. 

I was met with something I knew but hadn’t quite thought through: in any given moment, there’s what we can do and what’s needed. In every training run, I can sprint. Similarly, I believe in what I’m capable of writing. It’s an entirely different question to ask: What do my running and writing need at any given moment? Perhaps it’s a slow jog or a messy first draft, neither of which are any less valuable. When I retired from basketball, I asked myself the same question in different words: Just because I can (play at an international level), does that mean I should?  

~  

I stood in the bike lane along the road I needed to continue, knowing I could push myself if I wanted to. But I wouldn’t have been listening to what my body and writing wanted. 

Listening and time are sisters, you see. 

I began searching for the scaffolding around me. Everything was white. I couldn’t tell the sky from the street from the sidewalk. It was a blank page of snow, and I almost panicked. Was nature trying to enact writer’s block? The next right thing was to walk, breathe, control my heart rate, and trust my way home from memory. And that’s exactly what I needed to do. 

Assembling an essay’s skeleton before writing isn’t at all a bad thing. But it explodes like the Big Bang when it’s given time—when it’s in relationship with the ebbs and flows of movement.  

As I walked, my brain gathered the snippets I’d collected in part one of my run, like stray threads, and spun them into every metaphor or image you’ve read thus far. I needed to build a relationship with what I was creating and let each next step and each next sentence be in conversation. I needed to let that relationship build a home from the scaffolding. And whether running or writing, that home was me. 

So, what is breaking the “writing-process-fourth-wall?” Maybe it’s spending time building relationships between our bodies, work, environment, and readers. It’s an incredibly rich process, and perhaps the only intention that can never be impoverished. 

A special thank you to the Conscious Writers Collective & Maya C. Popa.