If you follow me on twitter, you’re probably aware that I like to exercise. I’ve always been into fitness, I’ve just gotten more consistent and have pushed myself harder in the last couple of years. In a recent article at Fast Company, The Creative Brain On Exercise, Jonathan Fields tells us why fitness for writers and artists is a good idea:

…exercise isn’t just about physical health and appearance. It also has a profound effect on your brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to literally rewire itself). It affects not only your ability to think, create, and solve, but your mood and ability to lean into uncertainty, risk, judgment, and anxiety in a substantial, measurable way

Consider me a sample of one. Lately I’ve been asking myself, “Why am I in such a damn good mood?” It’s not like I’m a Joe Konrath/Bob Meyer indie-publishing success story. Nevertheless, I am in a good mood most of the time, and 2011 looks like it will be one of my most productive years ever. I think exercise has a lot to do with that.

I’m not all that disciplined. I don’t exercise everyday, but I do a lot more now than I did a couple years ago. If you’re interested, here’s an older post on the book that got me going again.

Let me know if you exercise, if you’d like to exercise, if exercise is a drug that works for you. It’s good to have a sample size larger than one!

(Hat tip: I found the Fast Company article via Andrew Sullivan’s blog.)

After I started selling novels, I stopped writing short fiction, for two main reasons. First, I was better at novels. And second, the short stuff took me way too long to write. It didn’t seem like it was worth the investment of time.

But in this year of “trying new stuff” and “writing faster” I wanted to try writing short again, so I plotted a story. To make it easy on myself I set it in The Nanotech Succession story world and used a minor character from my novel The Bohr Maker as the protagonist–but the story is independent of the book and takes place some years before.

Psyching myself up, I figured “4,000 words–how hard could that be?” I knew the story would likely be much longer than that, but 4,000 words sounded so un-intimidating.

(Do other writers play these head games? I have no idea.)

And then I applied the “Write the first draft fast” approach. Four days later I had a 7,500 word story which I dumped raw onto my local writing group the day before we were due to meet. They were very good natured about it. Several more days went into revision, the story turned into a short novelette of 8,900 words, and now it’s ready to go to market.

Naturally I hope it sells, but after all these years of no short stories, simply having written it feels like a win.

A couple weeks ago I blogged about a new novel in the early stages of development, and the frustration of coming up with a coherent plot. I’m happy to report I did come up with a nice plot skeleton that I can definitely work with, but there was another question I needed to answer after that: what point of view to use?

I wanted to write the story in first person. My initial conception of the novel suggested first person, so I sat down and wrote the opening chapter—and I didn’t like it at all. Partially, this was because I didn’t feel like I had the character’s voice right, but more importantly there was a structural issue of how and when to introduce information.

After experiment and consideration, I realized that if I opened in the main protagonist’s point of view/first person, he would either have to withhold key information to maintain the intrigue, or I would have to give up on intrigue and engage in lots of info-dump to get the reader up to speed. Of course neither option was acceptable.

So I re-wrote the opening from the point of view of another character, and I think it works much better. So it looks like it’s going to be third person, multiple viewpoint, which is what I’ve used for most of my novels.

In contrast to these struggles, last week I outlined a short story and then set out to write it—in first person. I was deep into the story before I realized that I hadn’t even thought about what point of view to use. The story simply demanded first person, and in this case it worked out fine.