Writing Inspiration for the Highest of Places

Well George, we knocked the bastard off--Edmund Hillary to George Low after coming down from the first recorded conquest of Mt. Everest.

Well dear, we knocked the bastard off—What I plan to say to my wife shortly after Rules for Giving gets published.

On occasion I read Smartbriefs for Entrepreneurs, a regular e-blast of articles about businesspeople and how they get to the top and stay there. Today there was a link to Being First: Ten Innovation lessons from Mount Everest, by Gijs van Wulfen, author of Creating Innovative Products and Services. Like an article I referenced in a blog post last week (click here) from the Harvard Business Journal, you can take out the word innovator and drop in writer—same difference.

Here are the ten lessons, with my take on how they pertain to writers.

1. Passion. There are some exceptions to the rule, but most of the great writers are passionate, possessed by a drive to write, to tell stories.
2. Urgency. Gotta tell the story now. Write it down before you forget.
3. Teamwork. Most novels take a team, from your significant other who tolerates you to your friends and co-workers who excuse you  to your critique group (the most important), who beats you up and reminds you that you can do better.
4. Courage. Fiction writing is a soul-baring exercise. You are inviting readers inside your head and see the world as you see it, and as you communicate it. Some are going to tell you it’s a load. Someday you might even get good enough that the New York Times reviews your novel. You hope they don’t tell everyone that you are an egotistical, whining ninny.
5. Test. I blogged yesterday about how I’m experimenting with point of view. Either I’ll pull it off, or my critique group will rip it to shreds. Either way, the experiment will be tested.
6. Initiative. My alarm clock is set for four o’clock every morning. If I want to write, that’s when I need to get my butt out of bed. It takes initiative.
7. Choices. Vampires, zombies, romance, paranormal, porn, mainstream. I can tell the same story so many different ways. Some work better than others.
8. Overcome setbacks. This means coming back after getting your butt paddled by your critique group or, worse yet, a bad review of your published novel.
9. Competition. Other writers are competition, friendly competition, but still competition. We often look around at our critique group and wonder which one will win the Pulitzer. Then again, you could be Hemingway or Mailer and take it much more seriously.
10. Luck. Before a World Series game in the ‘70s, someone asked Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson if he felt lucky. “Luck is a combination of talent and effort,” Jackson replied. I have always liked that answer. True luck is also a part of it, though. Hillary got to the top, blessed with good weather. Two previous attempts by the Swiss had to turn back when confronted by cold temperatures, icy winds and exhaustion. At one point they were 300 meters of the summit when they called it quits.

So there it is, more reasons why you should quit thinking about your writing career, and doing it.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Comments

[SilverTill]

Great article.