The best writing advice I’ve ever heard was from an author I’ve never read: 

Ass in the chair. - Nora Roberts

I was recently asked by a friend what gets my ass in the chair. “Lunch,” I said.

As I’m typing this (ahem, pause) I’m eating a bowl of yogurt and berries. Food excites me. I will sit down for food. Then while my brain turns and churns, figuring out what I want to type, I will eat said food. (As you can guess, my keyboard is not pristine.) Once my plate is empty, I usually have coffee to drink and gum to chew. There has to be some act of physicality to keep me locked in the chair when the writing isn’t happening, when my fingers and mind aren’t in sync and I’m not in the zone. Many people would call this anxiety. 

Surprise! Writers are nervous fucks. That’s why we need cigarette breaks to either stay in the chair or make an excuse to get out of it and why we drink booze to turn off our minds after we’ve picked through every crevice of it. And why, as I’ve demonstrated in the paragraph above, writers are traditionally a bit pudgy. 

Thankfully though, we’re in the age of the young marketable lit star (i.e. Jonathan Safran Foer and Colson Whitehead, not Bukowsky or Hemingway), and we vain modern writers have become multi-taskers, able to work off our gluttonous guilt and escape our neurosis at the same time. Ask any writer under 45 what they do for physical activity, and most would say, “I run.” Us nonathletic book worm types love the spontaneous non-commitment of putting on shoes and sprinting out the door. It gives us an excuse to get out of the chair, in fact, get far, far away from it. Then when we return, we can sit down, refuel, inhale toxins and do it all over again. Neurosis is all about cycles and patterns, the human condition we must master before we can make our characters and subjects real on the page! 

That and we justify bullshit for a living.