The Hard Work of Writing

 In his recent substack article on writers working and producing into their 80s and 90s, Joel J. Miller writes about these superagers:

[T]he magic seems to involve a mix of lifestyle choices. Super agers display four common habits, according to McDowell:

• they stay physically and intellectually active;

• they continue to challenge themselves;

• they remain socially active; and

• they curb their indulgences—they’re not, for instance, heavy drinkers.

That could all look like a million things, but let’s focus on intellectual activity and personal challenge, which relates especially well to writers. Based on her research on super agers at Massachusetts General Hospital, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says the best advice boils down to four words: “work hard at something.” Strenuous mental effort represents a big part of the ticket. How strenuous? Sudoku and online brain games won’t cut it, she says.

Exercising the necessary areas of the brain is tough. “When they increase in activity,” says Barrett, “you tend to feel pretty bad—tired, stymied, frustrated. . . . Hard work makes you feel bad in the moment.” But that’s exactly how you know you’re doing it right. “You must expend enough effort that you feel some ‘yuck.’ Do it till it hurts, and then a bit more.”There’s a reason this works. Neuroscientists highlight a concept called cognitive reserve: brains shaped by decades of demanding intellectual work develop alternative neural pathways conveniently available when the primary routes start to fail. Learning builds cognitive reserve, so does complex work. And if writing books for fifty or sixty years doesn’t qualify as complex work, nothing does.

Writing draws on nearly everything the brain can do: planning and structuring across hundreds of pages, holding themes and sentences in mind while composing new ones, retrieving vocabulary and knowledge with precision, managing the frustration and self-doubt that come with the work, and imagining how a reader will receive what you’ve written. It’s hard to think of another sustained activity that exercises so many cognitive functions at once—or potentially generates so much of Barrett’s yuck.