One Good Deed

A Guest Post by Meg Waite Clayton

Recently, I gave a shout out to a fellow author whose birthday it was, mentioning her book. The day before, I hosted another author on my blog. I’ve posted about friends’ new books (still) caught in a squabble between publishers and Barnes & Noble that found books in limited quantities on the chain’s back shelves. I’m mentoring a University of Chicago student/aspiring novelist. Today, I responded with a longish, encouraging email to an aspiring writer who connected with me over a piece of mine in the Los Angeles Times.

In my New Years’ resolution box: ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

A few years ago, pondering fifty years of failure to lose ten pounds or get to the gym every day, I decided on a smaller approach: Pushups. I can do 20 now, and I do them pretty much every day.

Flush with that success, I decided the next year to try turning outward: One Good Deed. Little things, like the pushups. It’s easy enough to do in this interconnected world. I can hold open a door. On a particularly busy day, I can retweet a bookstore post about their reading that night or a friend’s book release news while waiting in the grocery check-out line.

The little deeds I do are all things I might have done anyway, but like with the push-ups, adding the New Year’s resolution box to check each day has helped build it into my routine. Like with the pushups now, if my head hits my pillow and I haven’t done my one good deed that day, I have to get up and do it or I simply can’t sleep.

I find my help tends often to go out to other writers, perhaps because my own first novel was ten years in the making by one measure: the time I first put pen to paper to the time it hit bookstore shelves. Some of my good deeds are routinized now: Almost every Wednesday, I host a fellow author on my blog. I pay the toll for the person behind me every time I cross the Dumbarton Bridge because once, when I’d accidentally left my wallet behind at a bookstore twenty miles back, someone in the next lane paid mine. I host a monthly writer’s chat on SheWrites.com, where I also try to greet new fiction writer members and invite them into my novelist group.

But much of it is random. I buy coffee for the person in line behind me. I share news about a first novel by someone I have no connection to, because first novels are so tough. I set down the Margaret Atwood novel at Books Inc. or Keplers even though I’m dying to read it, and instead look for first novels, and buy them instead, or too, because Margaret Atwood is going to sell well whether I buy her or not, and a first novel is always a tough sell.

And in the end, it benefits me at least as much as the recipients of my good deed-dom. It lifts my spirits whether I can see the confused smile on the person in the coffee line or not. And as the summer approaches and I’m not making it to the gym or fitting into that yellow dress, I see that I can do the things that are really important. And I can look forward to the second half of the year with my resolutions intact.

Meg Waite Clayton is the nationally bestselling author of The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, and The Language of Light—all national book club picks—as well as the newly released  The Wednesday Daughters (July 2013). Her first novel was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize (now the PEN/Bellwether), and her novels have been translated into languages from German to Lithuanian to Chinese. She’s written for The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, Writer’s Digest, Runner’s World, The Literary Review, and public radio. Her “After the Debate” on Forbes online was praised by the Columbia Journalism Review as “[t]he absolute best story about women’s issues stemming from the second Presidential debate.” An Order of the Coif graduate of the University Michigan Law School, she lives in Palo Alto, California.