Literature Is Not Dead

Perhaps because I’ve been closely following TH Mafi’s hilarious Querypolitan, I’ve been stricken by the bug to write about the intersection of physical fitness and a writing career, which I very briefly touched on here.

Writing seems to most the dreadful nemesis of physical fitness, a stony-faced Greek goddess armed with the ability to inflict spare tires and varicose veins. The more my writing and my fitness are left in my own hands, though, the more they seem to have some secret natural connection.

Writing seems less like Nemesis and more like Nora, the svelte and witty darling who when joined by her dapper husband Nick can overcome any number of gun-totting villains or olive-laden martinis (and Nick and Nora of The Thin Man drank all the time).

But when I sat to write this post I couldn’t think of much to add to my previous thoughts besides fanciful metaphors. The increased blood flow and energy from working out are obvious benefits to mixing physically strenuous activity with a writing lifestyle, but there’s clearly more, and that more to me seems to be centered around running.

I’ve tried, but have yet to exhaust all the connections between writing and running. I find both damn hard. Both require an iron self-motivation. Both are intimates with solitude. Writing is done alone, and as my friend pointed out, running is one of the few activities in modern society that allows for true solitude. When running we’re allowed to leave behind even our leach-like cell phones.

I was still trying to suss out the nuances of the relationships between running and writing when I finished Lolita and peered in my skyscraper-like stack of books-to-be-read and found What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami.

And so I point you, dear reader, to Murakami, as he’s far more lyric, even in translation, than I am, and an excellent chronicler of the interactions between writing and running. I’ve only just begun the book but it’s already cleared everything else out of my head, much the way a nice hard run will.

Every day of the last two weeks I’ve nearly been run over.

I donated my car weeks ago, and though I have always walked and biked around town a lot, being car-less has made me notice how often I have to dive back unto the sidewalk or swerve out of traffic to avoid being mauled and mangled by a driver who simply isn’t driving.

When not dodging Dodges, I’ve been researching for my work in progress by reading Atul Gawande’s Better, which includes his essays on how difficult it is for doctors to achieve the incredible levels of focus and attention to detail that good doctoring require.

Diligence isn’t just difficult for doctors, though, as my experiences on the road prove. Driving isn’t particularly hard but it requires constant attention and thought. To be perfect drivers we need to pay perfect attention the entire length of our drive and we never do.

Which got me thinking about something I never do: publish short stories. Disappointed with my inability to get my many short stories published, I compiled a list of them in a spreadsheet, ranked by various attributes, with notes, comparing them to see if I could find a trend. There wasn’t one single thing wrong in every story. Instead, I found they’d all suffered in different ways from a lack of follow-through, or, you might say, diligence.

So how do we train ourselves to remain diligent? This is a life-or-death question for doctors, but Gawande unfortunately doesn’t have any easy answers, although one of his later books attempts to tackle the question again. It’s called The Checklist Manifesto, and makes a convincing argument for the usefulness of checklists in aiding us to achieve higher levels of performance. When I read it I beleaguered my scientist girlfriend with all the ways she could improve her life with checklists, although, of course, they would never work for an artist like me.

Right?

Maybe it’s time to find out.