I have been writing since college in the mid-nineties. As a late bloomer and theatre major, the first major work I wrote was a play that was eventually produced and performed at my university. Then I took a novel-writing class. I began my first novel in my final semester of senior year, and completed it in 1999 while sitting at a fold-out table in a cramped apartment dining room. Then I wrote a second novel. And a third. Soon, my new husband and I moved to a bigger apartment where I had my own office.

Around the same time, the pain started.

I have always been somewhat athletic, meaning that I work out five days a week, can touch my toes, do a backbend, run around the block a few times without blacking out…

I remember the exact moment the pain began. It was early in the morning and the sun was just coming up. My husband lay sleeping soundly beside me. My hips shouted me awake. They hurt deeply, like I’d tried a new workout (which I had not) or I’d been doing hours of gardening (which I had not).

I spent the next few weeks downing aspirin and hoping the pain would subside. When I found no relief after a few months, I went to a chiropractor, who locked me into twenty visits, even though he did absolutely nothing to alleviate the pain. I went to a second chiropractor. Then an acupuncturist. All to no avail. Then I went to my general practitioner, who decided that checking my stomach, having an MRI on my back, and offering Lupus, MS, fibromyalgia, and Lyme’s Disease screenings were needed to rule out possibilities. All came up negative, thankfully.

But you know what? Not once did any health care provider ask me what I did all day. If they had, I would have said, “I sit on my ass, writing for countless hours at a time, in a chair that sinks in the middle, with my back hunched like a ninety-year-old.”

The pain continued.

Over the course of the next ten years, I’d written seven novels. I was proud of myself, privately tutoring in the evenings to support my writing habit, spitting out thousands of words four days a week, loving every aspect of my little writing career. My husband and I had moved to North Carolina, living the Southern life in a lovely Victorian home. I’d landed an amazing agent, and my work was consistently being submitted to top New York editors. I was totally happy, totally in my element. I couldn’t have asked for anything else.

Except for the pain, which had decided to travel up my spine to my shoulders, and then to my neck. To put it bluntly, I ached all over, from my ears to my ass. And still no one asked what I did all day.

I visited another chiropractor. I bought a butt pillow. A new chair. A new laptop. An exercise ball. I paid out of pocket for back massages. Sat in the hot tub. Used heat compresses. Cut my writing hours from four to three. Added more stretching to my gym routine. I visited a quack who tried to put me on depression medication after speaking with me for one whole minute and failed to give me a physical exam. “Cymbalta (an anti-depressant) will get rid of your physical pain,” he said. I tore up the prescription and told him, “I’m sad because of the pain. Not the other way around.” Idiot.

Then a miracle happened.

I was tutoring one of my students who one evening decided to work at the kitchen counter instead of the dining room table. Most of my students tend to work at either their dining room or kitchen tables, as it makes it easy to spread out their homework. But this time was different. For over an hour, my student sat on a high stool. Because the stools were clunky and we had a difficult time sitting side by side, I stood.

Let me repeat that last simple sentence: I stood.

For the next few weeks, each time I worked with this student, I stood next to him. I noticed that the pain after working with him did not seem to be as severe as when I sat with other students. While I could not ask all of my students to work at their kitchen counters, there was one place I could stand for hours every day without it affecting anyone but me: my writing office.

Excited, I went online and found dozens of standing desks. Some were on wheels, others came with different shelves, or knobs for raising and lowering the height, or computer chargers built in. Most were in the hundreds of dollars. A few were nearly a grand. But not all.

I found a standing desk, a dummied down version of the high-tech kind. It is metal and stands on two funny-looking legs, and has built-in knobs for changing the height. It is not a desk in the traditional sense–it is actually a riser to place on a desk, to be used with a laptop. This one even has holes in it, so the laptop can stay cool. I ordered it right away. I got it in the mail within a week. I set it up the moment it arrived. I bought a separate Bluetooth keyboard and mouse so I could alternate between having my hands at chest height and hip height.

And my life dramatically changed.

Six years and five additional novels later, I am relatively pain-free. I say relatively because even standing has its draw-backs, like sore hips from leaning (do the cannon-ball stretch every 30 minutes) and varicose veins (wear support hose if you are prone). Even with a standing desk, you need to MOVE. A lot.

In fall of 2018, it was discovered that my spine at C3 and C4 are fused. When I asked the orthopedic surgeon if this is because I sat all those years, hardly moving my head for hours at a time, he told me no, that it is a genetic condition. But there is a part of me that believes if I had bought the standing desk sooner, allowing me to move more while I write, the fusing may not have happened. As an aside, a few weeks of physical therapy showed me how to help the situation, and I am pretty good about doing my neck stretches a few times a day.

No one gets out of here alive. But who wants to live with pain? If you are a writer, get a standing desk. I don’t care if you are twenty or one hundred. You need to move. You cannot sit and sit and sit and hope there will be no ramifications. Your spine needs to move. Your legs need to have proper circulation. Your neck needs to turn.

Stretch high, bend low, shake your booty. Do a dance every five-hundred words. Or jumping jacks. Take a walk around the block.

You want to be a writer? Then tend to your own needs before you tend to your characters.

Your real-life body will thank you.