I confess. As soon as I finish reading a novel, I have a need — almost a primal urge — to go behind the scenes. Is there a connection between the characters and the author? I have to know. Call it an innate reflex or a carryover from Lit 101. I’m addicted to the story of the story.

But try finding the autobiographical hook in fiction that offers alternate universes in spades and a protagonist whose identity never stops shifting. That was my happy challenge when I came to the end of Life after Life by the English author, Kate Atkinson. The heroine of the novel, Ursula Todd, is continually born, reborn and re-created in a timespan roughly covering World War I and II. In one chapter she moves from London to Germany, marries and has a child with a handsome German. In another scenario, she remains in London, childless, and recovers bodies from war-torn buildings during the Blitz. Elsewhere in the novel, Ursula is raped, becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and then marries a wife abuser. Which, if any, of these tantalizing bits was pulled from the author’s life? Will the real Kate Atkinson please stand up?

Interviews with Atkinson provide a wealth of autobiographical clues. Life after Life was conceived as a big war novel with a particular focus on the London Blitz. The fictional Ursula experiences World War II as a young woman. Atkinson, born in 1951, missed any direct contact with air raids and bomb shelters. However, her grandfather served in World War I and was killed by a stray bullet in World War II. The shadow of war was ever present and not present in her family, she told an interviewer. “It was there, but people didn’t talk about it.” What a perfect set up for a novelist. Enter imagination.

Still, I was curious about the structure of Life after Life with its hairpin turns and endless plot permutations. Why did such a gifted author need so many crafty maneuvers in which she scrambles timelines and rewrites scenes from different perspectives? One reviewer suggested that if Atkinson pushed the parallel lives premise any harder, the whole house of cards would collapse. Atkinson, however, does not shrink from this critique. She describes herself as a tireless explorer of what ifs, bifurcating roads and coincidences. Indeed, she says she is not finished with that construct yet, perhaps a reflection of her own unpredictable rise to literary stardom. Like the career trajectory of many women, Atkinson juggled parenthood and an assortment of jobs, including home aide to the elderly and legal secretary. Only after she failed the oral exam for her doctorate in literature and abandoned academia did she turn to writing fiction. If she had her way, she has said, all her characters would go down multiple paths.

I get that. When I finished reading Life after Life, I wanted to open the bottom drawer of my desk and dust off my unfinished doctoral thesis on the founder of modern economics in Britain. It would make great fantasy fiction.

The acclaimed Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, once wrote, “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.” In his memoir, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, Murakami, a marathon runner and triathlete, says that “ exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and …for writing.”

Although I am not a runner, I often think about Murakami’s metaphor when working out at the gym. Is there a connection, as he believes, between the extreme physical exertion demanded by long distance running (or any other sport) and writing? My experience, based on countless hours of exercise, suggests not. Rarely do I generate an idea for a novel while spinning at my maximum level of intensity on a stationary bike. Sometimes the title of a short story will come to me on a seated climb. All too often, what seems brilliant on the bike turns into gobbledygook on my computer screen, such as the time I titled a creative nonfiction piece “Zen and the Art of Jewish Baseball” while pedaling furiously.

Yet, the discipline, focus and endurance required to achieve athletic prowess does seem transferable to writing. Murakami is not the only acclaimed novelist to thinks so. The American writer John Irving says, “I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.” Given that Murakami and Irving both write hefty novels and are exceedingly prolific, I decided to try finishing my first novel while simultaneously mastering a difficult core exercise called the plank.

I had many opportunities at the local gym to hone the skill of planking, which entails holding up one’s body weight in a static push-up position for an extended period of time. (The world record is 3 hours, 7 minutes and 15 seconds.) In yoga, I practiced the plank as part of avinyasa in a flow sequence. In boot camp, I learned to hold the plank until my wrists were screaming. There wasn’t a muscle that escaped the reach of the plank. As I grew stronger, my instructor whose tattooed biceps rippled under his Lululemon T-shirt, lengthened the time period for the exercise, insisting that the plank is one of the safest ways to condition the total body — as long as you are not planking between two buildings.

But, did the discipline and stamina needed to hold a plank for increasingly longer time periods fuel the completion of my first novel? Was my focus and concentration transferable to the writing process? I considered these questions in detail as the instructor’s stop watch ticked slowly, very slowly. Then, one Saturday morning, as he counted down the final five seconds of an eight minute plank, I found clarity. As I hovered above the floor in the aerobics studio, oblivious to what was happening outside, I entered a place of enormous possibility. My outstretched body was no longer an imperfect form with a curved spine. I was a sleek, floating tabletop of marble. At least, that’s what my instructor said. And I believed him. I had entered the fitness dream in the same way that a novelist enters into a fantasy of her own creation.

John Irving put it this way: “I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.”

Irving appears to be talking about the presumed boundary between wrestlers and non-wrestlers. But, more to the point, he identified an infrequently noted quality that athletes and novelists share: that mesmerizing ability to construct “a small world unto ourselves.” To borrow from another of Murakami’s illustrative metaphors, athletes and novelists seem to descend into a deep well. I know I did as I planked my way to the last sentence of my first book, working out regularly while working in.