Atticus   

Ten years ago, at the end of a street no more than 200 yards long, I rented a tiny two-bedroom house in a small North Georgia town.

My closest neighbors were a newly married couple in their first home. Scott and his wife are close friends of mine still today.

During my two years in that house, I can’t count the number of times I watched the late news or Saturday Night Live, turned off the overhead living room light and, when taking one final look out the panes of the front door, saw Scott standing before an easel in his spare bedroom-turned-studio, dabbing and slapping paint onto canvas.

Acting on inspiration whenever it arose was his trademark. I’d phone him from my office about lunch at Randy’s, Pizza Hut or some other local eatery only to interrupt him pouring a bowl of cereal for breakfast because he’d been up painting from 2-5 a.m.

One day while he was driving to Chattanooga on I-59, Scott stopped his truck on the shoulder to sketch. Something about the way the fog and the clouds were hugging and, in some places, concealing Lookout Mountain motivated him, he later told me.

I remembered this persistent (and ultimately beneficial) habit of Scott’s a couple of months ago when I e-mailed writer George Singleton. Singleton taught a class I had attended last winter, and I e-mailed him to get his recommendation on some books I should read about fiction writing since I have little to no experience with it. His response: Read the best fiction writers, and write every moment you can.

Anne Lamott, Julia Cameron, Ray Bradbury, Michael McAllister — they all say the same thing. Yet I have the toughest time disciplining myself to do it despite my desire to do so.

Before Scott and his wife sold their house and built on the bluff of Lookout Mountain and I relocated to Atlanta, I frequently joked that the hamlet we, at that time, called home would one day suffer a steady flow of tourists on pilgrimage to the former residences of the Pultizer-Prize-winning writer and the world-renowned artist who once lived next door to each other.

At this point, only one of us is on target. Scott’s paintings sell for thousands of dollars in Atlanta and other cities across the South.

As for me, well, I’m writing corporate spin. And that’s about it. But maybe all hope isn’t lost. It took me six weeks before I finally fleshed it out, but this blog post has roots in an idea I scribbled onto a scrap of paper as I waited for my workout partner at Lee Haney Fitness Center.

Maybe you really don’t want to write, maybe you want to read, but if you do want to write, life is going by very quickly and if you’re not careful you’re going to be 80 years old and have spent your life wishing that you’d gotten your work done. I think it’s good to consider where you’re going to be at 80. I believe at 80 we’re not going to wish we spent more time cleaning our houses. —Anne Lamott