Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

As John Gardner’s incarnation of Grendel said, “Balance is everything.” In writing, it is the balance between action and character or setting that keeps the reader enthralled, perhaps, but real life tends to be a bit more complicated.

I know Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is a classic, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have its good points, but the man lost me when he went on for about nine pages describing a dress. There are people that probably found that fascinating, I’m just not one of them. There is no ideal length of description, though, because each reader is different, some will want more, some less, and some will wonder why she’s wearing clothes at all. Trying to please all those people isn’t possible, nor should an author try.

Balance in life should be easier to achieve, since the only “reader” is yourself, and presumably you know when you’ve had enough of any one thing. Judging by the number of self-help books on the subject, though, I’m going to hazard a guess that even if you know, you aren’t really that great at keeping the balance up. I’m not. Neither is anyone I know.

One of the main reasons is that we try to please far too many “readers” in our lives. It is true that some people are important to us, and their needs should be addressed, but we tend to forget that they are our lives, our goals, and that our happiness requires keeping a balance we can live with. Worse, we often allow complete strangers, or people we don’t even like, to call the shots on how we balance our lives.

Do they think you spend too much time writing? Too little? Do they criticize your choice of profession, constantly pushing you to become a ‘respectable’ person like themselves? Or have you actually allowed their words to keep you from doing what you know will make you happier in the end?

Stephen Covey, guru of the business productivity world, wrote a famous book called The 7 habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve read it at least half a dozen times, but one of the things he said never really made sense to me when I was young. He called it maintaining the P/PC balance. Here P is production, and PC is Production Capability.

Partly, I understood. I mean, I live on a farm, so I know that things need to be maintained if you want them to keep producing. Watering the garden in August is the only way to continue to get vegetables in September. Failing to feed the animals, while cheaper, would of course have disastrous results. I thought this was what he meant, and to some extent that is true.

Bodies require sleep, food and general maintenance to keep doing the work we need to do to achieve our goals. Minds and hearts require maintenance as well, though, and that is the part that I missed.

I can’t tell you what balance you need, because I am not you. For each of us, the amount of time spent playing, dreaming, conversing, reading, or relaxing to recharge ourselves will be different. Achieving those dreams of yours will require your full energy, it is important to recharge your batteries, and not waste power on what random other people think you should be doing.

They have their lives, you have yours.

Strange as it sounds, you actually produce far more when you take the time to recharge. I’d never actually finished writing a novel until I took that time to reorganize the way I balanced my life. I still struggle with workaholic tendencies, and the desire to please everyone, but I’ve made my own desires part of my schedule, decided I was important enough to merit some of my own time.

I now have three completed novels, two short stories, and two more novels in process, all in just over a year’s effort. There is no reason you could not do the same, or better.

Cheers,

Michelle