I have recently gotten myself back in the habit of working out every other day after work. I don’t enjoy it, but I need to be doing it, and I’m glad I’m doing it.

It got to me thinking, somehow, about what writing and working out have in common. (That’s how my mind works . . . I intuitively seek out and find connections and context for pretty much everything).

There’s the obvious answer, of course: discipline. Both require discipline if they’re going to yield results.

Yet, I realized there is something else in common between working out and writing, or specifically, revising:

YOU HAVE TO TEAR STUFF UP TO MAKE IT STRONGER

This may not be true of everything, but it’s true here.

When you work out, you are slightly damaging your muscles. When they heal, they heal stronger than they were before. That’s the whole point.

Ideally, this is a great analogy to what happens when we revise a draft.

We pick apart scenes, paragraphs, and sentences. We rend them, tightening them up, perhaps throwing pieces of what we removed into other parts of the story.

We slice our phrasing down to be less ambiguous, more emphatic, or easier to understand.

Like when we work out, that can be uncomfortable. We may try to avoid it or make excuses to keep things as they are rather than put in the work.

At the end of the day, though, the work needs to be done, and (hopefully!) our stories become stronger for the revision work we throw into them.

Check out my recent posts:

• Meet Verony TODAY! Find redemption with her and the Crimson League
• She took part in a sorcerer’s coup, then changed her mind.
• COVER REVEAL!!!
• My characters are kind of like my kids
• We are go! With magic of a different kind in this one.

Also, The Crimson League: the Fight for Hope releases June 15! Please spread the word about this fun, sword and sorcery YA fantasy!