Fiction author Robin Brande talks about writing, reading, and other vital matters

I keep forgetting that when I actually take the time to sit down and read some of the many magazines that accumulate around here, I tend to learn things. Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Two articles in particular that I read this week intersect very nicely, and I thought I’d save you the trouble by recapping them so you don’t have to take too much time away from holiday shopping or being sick or whatever you’re doing this weekend. (Three words, Diana: lemon ginger tea.)

The first article is in this month’s Outside. It’s a profile of ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes. You may have heard about his insane feat this year, running in 50 marathons in 50 states over 50 consecutive days. Thanks for taking care of that, Dean, so that we don’t have to.

Here’s the quote I found useful:

“I never really had a five-year plan. I just asked myself, ‘If I could script my perfect life, what would it look like?’ It would be spending a lot of time with my family and my kids; doing what I love, which is exploring the limits of human endurance; being in the shape of my life; and dedicating myself wholeheartedly to my craft. I love nothing more than to run through the mountains for 100 miles. It’s been the most rewarding experience of my life.”

The article also gives us a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” Apparently “Thoreau was obsessed with preserving a ‘broad margin of leisure’ in his schedule, so he cut his to-do list down to the essentials: thinking, writing, hoeing his bean rows, and evading human contact.”

Smart man.

The other article was in this month’s Romance Writers of America newsletter. Writer Patricia McLinn provided a round-up of various business books out there, relating them to our writing careers.

One book, Good to Great: How Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins, includes the advice that companies headed for greatness decide what they can be the best at in the world (their “core concept”), and then they eliminate all the distractions and activities that don’t feed into that core concept.

“In this, Collins reports, the greats found ’stop-doing’ lists far more important than ‘to-do’ lists. ‘To do’ is simply adding more to what’s already in the core concept, while items on ’stop-doing’ lists actively take away from the core concept.”

An interesting idea to contemplate. I’ve noticed in these past several weeks, as I’ve been working twelve to fourteen hours a day on my new novel, how happy I am with the shear effort of it. This is what I love to do. And when I’m fully committed like this, it’s so easy to say no to everything else. No to lunch invitations, no to TV, no to all the distractions I normally let take over my day, leaving very little time for what I claim I want to do.

If I, like Thoreau or Karnazes or a company on the hunt for greatness, whittled my life down to its essentials–its core concepts–what would those be? Time with family and friends, time to write and read and think, time to exercise and play outdoors, and . . . that’s about it. I realize there will always be the ADLs (Activities of Daily Living) that must be attended to, like grocery shopping and cooking and the bare minimum of cleaning, but generally what I’ve seen these past several weeks is that it’s possible to cut out so much of what doesn’t matter to me, so that I can spend almost all day and night doing what I love most.

It’s interesting to think about a Stop-Doing list during the holiday season, because there are so many demands on our time that we don’t feel right about refusing. How can we possibly turn down a party invitation or an offer to get together with someone we haven’t seen in a while, or skip all that Christmas shopping that we know won’t take care of itself and so we simply must drag ourselves out every evening and every weekend to make sure everyone will be happy come the 25th?

But be honest: if you could make up a list right now of what you REALLY want for the next several weeks, would it include all that running around? All those social engagements that don’t really make you happy, and in fact might actually make you tense and miserable? If you could come up with two or three things that your ideal December would be made of, what would they be?

In other words, if you could script your perfect life with its perfect December, what things would you have to put on a Stop-Doing list to make that happen?

Technorati Tags: Writing, Publishing, Dean Karnazes, Henry David Thoreau, Simplification, Simplify Your Life, Patricia McLinn, Jim Collins, Books, Reading, Outside Magazine, Romance Writers Report

Posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 9:07 am under Life, Reading, Writing . Subscribe to responses: RSS 2.0 Comment Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.