I've Won Lots of Medals

It's important when producing a blog that you constantly refresh it with frequent posts, at least once a week and the oftener the better. The problem with that imperative is the necessity of having  something compelling to say. It makes it much more interesting to the reader (to paraphrase Steve Martin in PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES).

Unfortunately, I sometimes find myself blanking out when it comes to conjuring intriguing topics for my horde of readers. After exhausting the most obvious topics about 15 posts ago, I've found myself staring at an empty screen more often than not. But I've found an answer:

I ask my wife!

She may not be a professional writer, but she has lots of good ideas for stories...and blog topics. In fact, one of my most successful posts was one of her ideas: starting a garden. Pretty damn good! And so I went to her again and she inspired this post, which cuts to the heart of my modest success as a writer.

As a competitive runner for the past three decades, I've amassed an enormous collection of medals. I display these tokens by looping them around a gas pipe in the basement and in front of the table where I do my writing so that they're never out of my line of sight.

These medals point up similarities with my writing. They show that, like writing, I've been running a long time. They show the wide variety of races in which I've competed, like the various media in which I've written over the past 40 years. What the medals don't show, however, are specific victories.

The medals handed out at races are called "finisher medals." It means you finished the race--that's all. And I do finish races. Of the hundreds of races in which I've competed, there was only one that I didn't finish, which was more than 20 years ago.

The same holds true with my writing. I have started and finished six books, and am working on a seventh that I will certainly finish. I don't get a medal for finishing a book, but a do get a hefty Word file and plenty of rejection notes to mark the existence of my work.

Finishing is good. I know plenty of people who have started writing books and never finish them. And many fine writers who are afraid of even starting a book. There's satisfaction in finishing a long complex project like a novel, just like there's a certain elation to training, competing and finishing a marathon.

Sure, it's not the same thing as winning a race or signing a publishing contract, but it is something special. You've accomplished something difficult that few people would even consider undertaking. There's a certain consolation in that.

And it's something I think about when I look up at my gas pipe and its jam-packed row of finisher medals.