I gobbled this book up in about 24 hours, reading through the night after being incredinly tired and sleep deprived. That fact that I was captivated until 6am shows the calibre of the account, and the quality of the writer. I feel I can really learn from his worjhorse approach: setting a wordscale and a timeline (deadline) and then breaking it down into daily quotas. I also realise that I need to read more rivetting writing to understand what can be done, and then study the writers I admire. I particularly admire Krakauers style, because it is factually accurate, honest, but it is also immediate - he is not an academic, he is actually a courageous adventurer who also writes, which I feel is an important distinction that sets him apart from a host of nerdy and pathetic creatures whose prose may be brilliant, but their lives lacklustre. A good writer must have lived well, or experienced the extraordinary, to be worth attention. Writing should be the result of life, not the source of it, but that does not preclude writing that leads to inspiration, writing that is the source of an idea for a next adventure.