Write To Live Longer
Increase Your Longevity
Improve Your Quality of Life
Are you on a high speed collision course with your obituary?
Although we can not avoid that ultimate collision, let me show you a way that you may be able to slow the closing speed —
Extend your life and have fun doing it.
Are you:
• Bored
• Lonely
• Hurting
• Worried
• Sleepless?
Replace those conditions with accomplishments and pride.
Creativity prevents Mind Rot and promotes longevity
The creative prescription for Mind Rot is
WRITING
It may be too late to become an accomplished violinist or painter, but you can already write. Become a writer. Strive to become a published author. It’s a fascinating journey worth living.
And as a bonus, you’ll gain a better quality of life.
Are You Rocking Yourself to Death?
Eons ago, when I was in my 40s, I ran into something that made little sense to me at the time. My friend, Larry, was employed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While still in his 50s, he was required by the Corps to elect his retirement age of 62 or 65 because two years prior to the selected date, Larry had to start a retirement training program designed to give him an outside interest such as lapidary, fishing, stamp collecting or any number of other activities.
The program was instituted because, on average, a Corps retiree reportedly died eighteen months after retirement. The worst longevity record was for railroaders. They only survived a year after being cast out. It was believed that certain all-consuming lines of work left little time or opportunity for outside interests. When suddenly their life-long activity was removed, retirees were left in a form of free fall. If no subsidiary interests had been developed, there was no reason to get up and greet another day with enthusiasm.
Even those retiring from somewhat less than all consuming jobs find themselves with an abundance of time that many are ill prepared to handle. There was an interval when my work placed me in the houses of others at odd times of the day. At one home, I watched the owner grow fatter and fatter as he sat in his recliner clicking through endless reruns of "Hawaii Five-O," " Dukes of Hazard" and "Magnum P.I." until he died.
Down through the years, I have come across many retirees who find dissatisfaction in their post-career lives.
Boredom is a major source of this discontentment. It can become an ever-present Bandersnatch lurking in the corner.
Another major hazard of an endless vacation is over-drinking. When there is nothing on the calendar but another blank space, it is all too easy to have that first drink earlier and earlier in the day until one needs a glass of vodka on the night stand to be able to face a new day.
Another possible hazard to longevity is being under your spouse's feet all the time.
Staying Alive
Early in my working career, I joined an organization that was primarily made up of young men. There was one exception...Nels. He was going to retire in another year. The first of the Volkswagen campers had come on the market. The local dealer had a demo in the showroom. Nels put a deposit on the vehicle. Each noon, Nels would meet his wife at the dealership to measure and plan the remodeling of the camper to conform to their special needs. The Mrs. measured for curtains and searched for the right fabric.
Nels designed a front trailer hitch so he wouldn't have to back down to get his boat into and out of the water. Months were spent on working out itineraries for trips. That pre-retirement year was a busy one. Days after Nel's retirement ceremony, he and his wife were off on the first leg of a grand adventure that lasted for many productive years.
I also did a job for a retired space engineer, who saw his obituary approaching. His devised method of staying alive was to hire a journeyman carpenter to work around his holdings. The carpenter arrived at 7:30 each weekday morning, which meant that the boss had to rise early enough to get cleaned, shaved and dressed. There was also breakfast to consider. Except for a short lunch break the engineer sat on a stool closely supervising the work. Of course, the retiree had to pay a premium wage to the carpenter for him to tolerate such tight direction.
Golf and tennis can provide powerful incentives to stay healthy and active. However, any physical sport can be suddenly out of reach following a debilitating accident or illness, leaving a deep, dark void.
There is a long list of hobbies and interests that can keep one active both physically and mentally. From this list, let me advance one that provides numerous benefits not found in many others.
My choice is
WRITING
If you are literate, you can engage in this wonderful pastime. It can be done in any language.
You don't need a course, field, court, laboratory, studio or any other specialized location in which to engage in this activity.
It is portable. You can write at the kitchen table, while in the den or office, on the front porch or in the back yard or aboard a cruise ship.
You can do it while waiting in the doctor's office or between the salad and the entree in a restaurant.
There is a vast array of acceptable equipment. The current preferred method is a computer. That is the vehicle of writing I use for my night book.
However, my day book is initially rendered with a ball point pen on a white legal pad. Later, I dictate it into the computer for future transmittal into printed form, but you can hire someone for that phase if computers seem beyond your realm.
Writing is a solo enterprise. In the initial creative period, you need no team. You don't have to make up a twosome or foursome. You don't have to reserve a court or call for a tee time. You don't even need a designated driver.
There are no rain delays or cancellations due to excessive snow. This activity can continue either indoors or outdoors. No special equipment or clothing is needed. No licenses or certifications are required.
Recently a friend sent me some material from the January, 1974, issue of Analog Magazine. It was a reprint of an address made by Robert A. Heinlein, the noted science fiction author, (Stranger in a Strange Land) given at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, his alma mater. Heinlein stated that when he became disabled, he began writing to make a living. He pointed out that H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson and Cyrano de Bergerac also wrote because of physical disabilities.
Should there be painful impairment, writing is one activity that can be a superb analgesic.
However, now I must insert the mandatory warning: Writing can become addictive, although not a hazard to your health.
It Keeps Me Out of Bars
Writing can quickly become an all consuming preoccupation. Not only does it gobble time while either pushing a pen or pounding a keyboard, but it sneaks into one's consciousness periodically throughout the day.
The mind continues to ruminate on the story line while you are performing other daily functions. It will pick up a word better suited to a sentence over which you have been fretting. A gesture by a woman on the street might enhance the description of one of your characters. You can dwell on the memories of a bully from your childhood to form the personality traits of another of your characters.
The pursuit of the written word is a marvelous consumer of time. I can leave the TV during the half-time report of an NFL game to add a few more words to my current novel with the intention of returning to the game once play resumes. Many times my next awareness of the TV is hearing the theme music for the post-game show.
Whole evenings can quickly disappear. I have my watch set to chime at midnight to remind me it is time to go to bed if I expect to get a reasonable start on the next day.
With such time consumption, there is little room for loneliness. I feel no driving need to go out seeking entertainment or companionship. It keeps me out of the bars at night.
However, writing does not make one a recluse, disinterested in the world about you. Social and business interests still retain their importance. It might be argued that writing enhances those other activities. Writing hones one's observational abilities and burnishes one's communication skills.
It should be pointed out that writers need social input as fodder for their writing. All out-of-house experience will have its benefits. In social intercourse, as a writer, you always have something new and exciting to relate concerning your current project.
Writer and non-writer alike find such a conversational topic fascinating. Other writers feel that the exchange of ideas is beneficial to their own endeavors and non-writers find information concerning the inner workings of the creative process intriguing. Writers seem to be held in a special high level of esteem worthy of attention.
Another, equally important function of those periods away from the keyboard is "fishing" for material for your current and intended projects. It seems as if once I touch on a subject in my writing, I become more aware of it in the world around me. How many times have you bought a new car and suddenly the world is full of the same make, model and color cars as yours?
One of my editors pointed out that coffee was an important item in a mystery series, but I had never made any particular point as to the type of coffee, coffee maker or any other of the finer points of coffee.
I am a frequent visitor to a coffee house where I work on my day novel. There was a young fellow working there who seemed to be very conversant in the various aspects of the coffee world. One day, when there was a pause in the flow of business, I dropped a ten dollar bill on the table and asked him to give me ten bucks worth of coffee information. I received a fascinating, full-blown course on coffee. Now I am prepared, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, to engage in some rewriting. This new information will enhance my story.
Recently, I placed my protagonist in a Jeep with a metal top. Then a roadside bomb tossed the vehicle into a crick. Until I ran across a like model in a mall parking lot, I was uncertain how to extract my hero. An internet search had done nothing to solve my problem, but a trip to the market did. I parked next to the vehicle of interest where I gathered the information I needed.
One day, from my perch in the window of the coffee house, I watched a young fellow-tall, skinny, gangly and not shaving yet-seated at one of the outside tables five feet away from me struggle through what appeared to be the anguish of a monumental personal decision. One day, a version of those antics will find its way into one of my projects.
With diversions such as these available all around you, what need is there to manufacture mindless, time-consuming activities. These are the things upon which stories are built. There is no time to waste sitting around bars at night.
Friends May Go...
With advancing years comes an unpleasant little truth. One loses friends for one reason or another. I had always found it amusing to watch my elder friends first turn to the obituary column before getting the news of the day or the sports scores. Now I realize they were checking to see if they had lost another friend. I find myself doing this with increasing regularity.
Another cause for dwindling numbers of associates can be illness that takes them out of circulation or that there comes a time when there is a strong family draw. Many of my friends have moved to be closer to their kids.
Through the years, I have lost many cherished friends for sundry reasons. As I have gotten older, replacing those losses has become more difficult. However, through my writing, I have been able to retain a sort of contact with them by incorporating them or some of their traits into characters in my novels. Many of our mutual experiences have found their way into episodes in my writings.
Look back on your own associations and experiences and you will find healthy seedlings to transplant into your budding writing adventure. Most fictional work is a composite of your own personal history. It's much easier to write about what you know. It reduces the need for research immeasurably.
The Glory of It All
One of the glories of fiction is that it is fiction. Just as you can be in any location to write, you can write about any location. Should you choose to use a known geographic site, you must be aware of the idiosyncrasies of the spot. Don't have your characters spending their evenings lounging about the pool in bikinis in an area where you must arrange for a blood transfusion before going out to get the morning paper because of the mosquito population...unless you explain that the pool is inside a screened enclosure.
If you wish to use Seattle's Pike Place Market as a location, you'd better know something about it. Recently, I had occasion to refer to that unique spot in something I was writing. I had been there decades ago, but I had also heard that at one time there had been a movement afoot to do away with the old landmark. So, I went onto the internet to refresh my ancient memories and lo and behold it is still there. I found abundant photos to show its current configuration.
I did the same thing with the state park at the jetty to Tillamook Bay, as well as other parks up and down the west coast. The Internet is an amazing research tool.
However, you can produce your own public market or state park and make them conform to your own story line.
Actually, you can create whole new planets, civilizations, species and all the allied properties necessary to make your own world function. A prime alien creator is S.L. Viehl in her Stardoc series. Naomi Novik creates an air force for the Napoleonic Wars out of dragons in Temeraire. There are no limits in this world or other worlds.
You Have the Experience
I've been amused watching art school antics. Kids come out of high school and proceed on to art school. After four years, those students are handed a piece of paper that the public takes as a proclamation that they are artists. In actuality, that stay in school was only a language lesson. They were learning the language of art. To be an artist, one has to have something to say and the school training was only exercises in pencil, conté, perspective, color and such, giving students a language in which to say something once they have sufficient experience to form an opinion on a given topic.
Writers face the same challenge. However, the older one gets, the larger the treasure house of experience. You have struggled with all the problems of growing up. Based on your experiences, opinions have been formed. It really doesn't matter what those opinions are, as long as they are yours. It is difficult to convince a reader of your sincerity while mouthing someone else's point of view. You can speak with authority only from your own convictions.
Your Character Treasure Trove
Another great asset of age is the collection of characters that you have encountered through the years. This accumulation is writers' currency because fiction is made of interesting people, sufficiently described to make them live in the minds of your readers. Good prose needs good, good people and good, bad people because between those two poles is where tension blooms.
Right now, I imagine that from your experiences you can dredge up the images and characteristics of a sweet, little old lady or a snotty teenager. How about a pompous social climber or a macho womanizer? You probably have prototypes of any physical or psychological type rattling around in your head. If you don't want that smart-ass next door to recognize himself, you just have to change the gender, height, color or any number of attributes to have a truly fictional character that you can slide between the pages of your first novel.
Keep Your Butt in the Chair
Once you establish a writing routine and stick to it long enough, then that activity takes precedence over other considerations. If a friend calls to suggest you go to a movie during your writing period you'll probably refuse the invitation since you are not available during that time slot. Your friends should eventually recognize your schedule and honor your commitment.
For a few years, I lived in San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico. It was a little colonial town loaded with expatriate artists, composers and writers from all over the world.
Periodically, one would see a writer sunning himself in the jardin in the morning, partaking of Happy Hour at the La Fragua in the afternoon and dining at La Princesa at night. Suddenly he would disappear into his creative hole. The less astute camp-followers would temporarily try to intrude into the writer's creative space. The more knowledgeable ones would simply await the writer's reemergence into society once his project was finished.
Some people seek total private immersion into their creative world while others can write intermittently during the day. They don't maintain a precise schedule, but they can still get in their licks. I do a little of both. Normally, I have two novels going at any given time...my day book and my night book. I write on my day book Monday through Friday, starting at about 2:30 in the afternoon when I drive to a coffee house, order a mug of dark and climb onto a stool at the window bar. There I write on a legal pad with a ballpoint.
My night book is done at random times during the day, evening and night on a computer when I am home. If I have half an hour before I need to leave the house for a doctor's appointment, I will spend that time on the night book.
When I get to the doctor's office, where I normally have to wait, I have the day book on my clipboard and I add to it instead of fuming at the doctor for not making his appointment on time. I write at the restaurant while waiting for my meal. Any time there is a slack period, I can add a few more words. It is amazing how quickly you can tell a story.
Permit me to introduce myself. I am Kee Briggs. I'm sniffing at 76. My younger brother is long gone. My dad died at 52. I never knew my grandfathers and here I am having the time of my life. I'm about to let you see my secret plan for living. For my bona fides go to www.keescapes.com. There you will find twelve novels, all of which have been published since 2001. There are seven more on the shelf, all edited and awaiting publication. Two others are in the editing stages and two more are nearly finished. And I have a raft of short stories to boot.
I have lived far beyond my closest male antecedents and I am charging into the future, brandishing my pen, as if it were a broadsword, with a grin on my face and a cheerful greeting for each new day.
Permit me to show you a path out of the mundane into the magnificent. For less than the cost of the latest Stephen King novel, I will introduce you to the world of the written word and provide you with all the necessary inspiration and tools to begin reaping the rewards of this creative life.
I leave no time for boredom or loneliness. With my mind filled with other considerations, aches and pains fade away. I am never plagued by worry because I have hosts of ideas crying for mind-time. And wait until you find out how I handle sleep.
Don't rock yourself to an early death. Take control of your future...so that you have a future. Stick around for those who love you and have a marvelous time while doing so.
For only $29, shed your rocking chair and begin a new journey into the future. Click here to purchase right now!
This is an absolutely NO RISK deal. Purchase Write to Live Longer Toolbox now. If, in the next 60 DAYS, you decide this plan is not for you, simply click here to ask for your money back. 100% refund.
Is your current life sufficiently rewarding to make waking up to a new day a warm experience or is it a challenge in perseverance to make it out of bed in the morning with no improvement in sight?
Should your situation not be to your liking, are you still willing to sit back and let your life run its course, whatever that may be or wouldn't it be better to improve you circumstance? "Get a life," as the kids say.
If you don't wish to play "poor me" anymore, do something about it. Take measures to keep physically fit and protect yourself against mind rot...start writing. If you can take up a pen and write intelligible sentences, you can enter a world of wonder.
Writing may not be a foreign undertaking, but putting the material into a writerly form may be a problem. To solve this problem, I have devised the
The tool kit is designed to give you a running start on becoming an author. For those of you who find writing a new interest, there is no sense in wasting your time relearning all that is already learned.
Writer’s Tool Kit Includes:
• Types of Writing: Learn the differences between short
stories and short, short stories, novellas and novels, etc.
• Reference Material: dictionaries; books on style,
grammar, editing; fact books.
• Online Resources
• Research
• Support Groups
• Publication
• Marketing
Anyone who is concerned with extending his or her life doesn't want to waste time trying to figure out how to start. I have put together the tool kit designed to start the writing journey immediately. Buy Now
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BONUS For a limited time, I am offering a bonus. With each purchase of Writer’s Tool Kit I will add the ebook, The Painted War. This is the electronic edition of my $12.95 book which I sell on my website www.keescapes.com
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For $29.00, less than the cost of the latest Grisham novel, you can download Write to Live Longer, Writer’s Tool Kit now.
Buy Now. After the purchase, your ebook will be available for an immediate download in a PDF format.
Write to Live Longer may not, either in part or in full, be reproduced by any means without express written consent of kee@writetolivelonger.com.
By the time you turn out the lights tonight, your writing trip should already have begun. Have a long, pleasant journey.
Thanks to Lou Belcher, www.loubelcher.com for October Sky, the cover photo.
©Kee Briggs─All Rights Reserved www.writetolivelonger.com
Disclaimer:
This book is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not rendering any professional advice. The information contained herein represents their views, which are subject to change, thereby causing them to reserve the right to update and alter their opinions in accordance with new conditions. This report is for informational purposes only.