I wish writing were not so mental. I sit here in my chair, my stomach pressed against the table’s edge. My elbows on the tabletop, leaning forward, hunched over my laptop. Trying to think of novel ways to re-write a phrase. Ten minutes already, I’ve labored over this one phrase. Twenty minutes more, I’ll likely sit here. My back aches, my elbows are red, the table has made an indentation in my torso. What if writing were physical? What if I could use my body, which has not evolved to sit at a desk, to write? I would punch a punching bag one hundred times for one sentence. I would run a mile for a metaphor. I would swim around Alcatraz and back to the Wharf for a whole chapter. I would swim the length of the west coast for a novel—around the whole continent for a good one.