HOW WRITING IS LIKE SPORTS: A long, somewhat obvious comparative essay

The equipment of my life's work (above) and play (below).

            This blog post is too long, but what the heck. It deals with the two things I’ve given most of my life to.

            At one point in my life, the trunk of my car was filled with the following: a golf bag containing clubs, balls, gloves, tees, and all the other usual golf stuff; a shag bag bulging with 150 or so golf balls; a carry bag containing two tennis racquets and assorted tennis gear like wristlets and vibration dampers; a metal basket containing fifty or so tennis balls; a baseball glove; three baseballs; a baseball bat; a basketball; a racquetball racquet; and a bowling ball.  I estimate that I have spent 45,990 hours of my life playing sports. That’s 5.25 solid years of doing nothing but hitting and throwing balls. I’ve spent about another two years, solid, doing nothing but watching sports, in person and on tv. I lettered in baseball in college. I earned my way through college teaching tennis. I spent eight years at Golf Digest and two years at Tennis magazine; I was the instruction editor at each magazine.

            My car’s trunk is a little tidier now—just golf and tennis stuff there at the moment. All this is by way of saying that I know something about sports: learning them, playing them, and teaching them.

            I’ve spent an even larger portion of my life reading and writing (about 140,000 hours or 16 solid years). I’ve also taught reading and, especially, writing.

            Here (finally) is the point: I know something about sports and I know something about writing, and I think getting good at one is a lot like getting good at the other. Here are some of the things that good writers and good athletes have in common:

Roger Federer's grace and efficiency recall great writing.

1) Efficiency

            Good athletes don’t waste motion: think of a Roger Federer forehand or a Peyton Manning pass. Good writers don’t waste words: think of a Hemingway short story or a J.D Salinger sentence.

2) Idiosyncrasy

            While nearly all good athletes are efficient in what they do, they rarely do it the same way. Anyone who follows golf can tell Tiger Woods’ swing from Jack Nicklaus’ in his prime; anyone who follows basketball can tell Michael Jordan's jump shot from Jerry West's in his prime.

Likewise with writers. Although all good writers are efficient, they all have different voices, different vocabularies, different rhythms, different ways of handling figures of speech, different tones, different ways of constructing sentences. I can tell a David Foster Wallace paragraph from an F. Scott Fitzgerald paragraph instantly, and there’s never any confusing Jane Austen and Emily Bronte.

3) Endurance and persistence

            The best athletes can maintain a high level of effort and efficiency longer than average athletes. Writers, too, require stamina. It is exhausting to write for more than an hour at a time. Novelists spend years on their novels—sometimes twenty years or more. It is easy to give up when you’re writing—just as it is in the fifty-first minute of an overtime basketball game or the twentieth game of the fifth set at Wimbledon.

4) A thorough understanding of the rules

            You can’t play football without understanding what offside and holding penalties are, or the difference between a lateral and a forward pass. You can’t play basketball without understanding what traveling and double-dribbling are. The rules of golf take up hundreds of pages, and the best professional golfers know them in detail.

Likewise, you can’t write well if you don’t know basic grammar and syntax rules, and have a good sense that a word means this and not that.

Both good athletes and good writers know the rules so well that they don’t have to think about them. They can instead focus on making plays and simply writing.

One of the special things about writing, however, is that you can sometimes break the rules and not just get away with it, but achieve something extraordinary (see e.e. cummings’ poetry, for example). LeBron James, poor guy, can’t get away with a double dribble unless the refs are looking the other way.

In general, though, it’s best to know the rules so well that you don’t have to think about them while you show off on the field or on the page.

Ichiro Suzuki hits with the creativity of a poet.

5)  Creativity

            Great athletes finds new ways to do things—ways never before tried. Rafael Nadal hits his forehand like no one else before him. Phil Mickelson can hit flop shots like no one else in golf history (and Seve Ballesteros was magical at inventing shots from impossible situations). Ichiro Suzuki came to the U.S. hitting a baseball like no one else in modern history.

            Likewise, of course, great writers find fresh wording, unprecedented rhythms, unheard-of metaphors to say what they want to say. The wonderful thing for writers is that they can even find new things to write about (the old saw that there are no new ideas under the sun is just wrong, in my opinion) and new forms to create (Twitter novels, anyone?). In this sense, writers can even invent a new game to play—an advantage they have over athletes.

           

6) Awareness of audience

            This is a big one.

            Most athletes of course are aware of those watching them: spectators, coaches, scouts. But the audience I mean here is even more important: the other players on the field. Great athletes are constantly aware of their teammates and their opponents. Derrick Rose knows where everyone is on the basketball court—sometimes, it seems, before they themselves know it. Tom Brady reacts to every move by each opposing linebacker, as if he can see in three directions at once. Novak Djokovich obviously knows not just where his opponent is on the opposite side of the court, but what his tendencies and weaknesses are. Athletes are hyper-aware of others on the field of play: of who they are and what they are like. They have to be.

            Fine writers have a similar awareness of audience—in their case, their readers. Nonfiction magazine writers, for example, must often fine-tune their prose to an audience of specific education, age, culture, and interests; business and technical writers must do the same thing. Fiction writers must consider how the words they use—and the words they leave out—will affect a slightly more general reader, although a writer who expects to be published in The New Yorker may tailor his story to a different audience from one who expects to be published in Playboy—or, more accurately, a writer will send a Playboy story to Playboy and a New Yorker story to The New Yorker, because she knows their audiences. Poets must weigh the effect of every word, metaphor, and image on readers.

              Sometimes students are told to “write for yourself.” That, in my opinion, is nonsense. The only time you write for yourself is in your diary (and many famous writers clearly tailored even their diaries for future biographers). You should write so that you yourself are as satisfied as you can be with what you’ve written, but you should always write with your readers in mind.

Gustave Flaubert (above) was as fastidious in his writing as Ted Williams (below) was in his hitting.

7) Attention to detail

            Tiger Woods has experimented with every club in his bag to be sure it has the optimal loft, lie angle, shaft flex, and grip size; on the practice range, he lays clubs on the ground to check his alignment and ball position precisely. Great hitters like Ted Williams and Albert Pujols check out every single bat they order, one at a time. Roger Federer is fastidious about the shoes he wears on court, the racquets he carries, and the exact string tension in those racquets. Great athletes, in other words, pay attention to the smallest details of their craft, so that nothing impedes their talent.

            Careful writers also pay attention to the smallest details. Nonfiction and technical writers make sure their every fact is correct and every question their readers might have is answered. Fiction writers and poets often struggle for days over a single word or sentence (the novelist Gustave Flaubert and the poet Hart Crane were famous for agonizing over a sentence or word for weeks). Novelists must be careful not to have gaps or inconsistencies in their plots, and every character and motivation must be accounted for at the end. Good writing, like great athleticism, has no unintended loose ends.

8) Repetition with variation

            When they were teenagers, Monica Seles and Andre Agassi are said to have spent weeks at a time practicing just one shot: a week hitting nothing but down-the-line backhands, for example, or a week practicing nothing but kick second serves. Professional golfers hit thousands of six-foot putts in practice, just as Larry Byrd once practiced thousands of three-point shots on his family’s practice court, sometimes in moonlight. The point of all this practice, of course, is to ingrain a consistent, repetitive motion—so deeply ingrained that the body can act on its own in games.

            And yet no two backhands are ever the same. No two six-foot putts are ever the same. No two three-point shots are ever the same. Great athletes ingrain the repetitive motion so that it can be applied in varied situations. In fact—and this at first seems counterintuitive—the repetition is exactly what permits the athlete to improvise and do it slightly differently, but successfully, in the muddle of actual game situations. The ability to adjust to changing circumstances is a direct result of the ability to repeat a motion exactly under controlled circumstances.

            Writers, too, do one thing over and over: They write sentences—long sentences, short sentences, simple sentences, complex sentences, even intentional nonsentences like fragments. They may not think of it as “practice,” in the same sense as Agassi practicing kick serves, but every time a writer writes, he’s practicing his craft, even if the result is thrown in the waste basket. Good writers get good at sentences and the strategies that help to create them well: things like parallel structure, balance, alliteration, and figures of speech. They can “repeat” these things easily, just as Larry Byrd could repeat a three-point shot. Then, when a technical writer faces a writing problem that’s new or a novelist comes to a moment in her work that demands a fresh approach, she can fall back on all that repetition to come up with the exact variation she needs.

              Simply put, athletes and writers practice repetition so that they can improvise more easily when they need to.

Peyton Manning has intelligence a novelist might envy.

And Emily Dickinson had the wit of a quarterback.

9) Intelligence

            Great athletes absorb and interpret information with astonishing speed, and react effectively, just as fast.  Josh Hamilton’s brain gauges the break of a split-finger fastball in hundredths of a second and applies the bat head to the ball with amazing accuracy. Peyton Manning reads zones and makes passing-lane adjustments while simultaneously weighing, intellectually, the blitz of a 230-pound linebacker. Phil Mickelson can read the lie of a ball in the greenside rough with the precision of a surgeon about to excise a tumor. Anyone who thinks these athletic feats are not examples of intelligence has too narrow a view of what intelligence is.

            Fine writers have a slower, but no less remarkable, intelligence. A good technical writer can gather and organize masses of information in ways that help his readers make decisions or understand problems that can affect the future of giant corporations and whole countries. A great poet—Yeats, say, in “The Second Coming,” or T.S. Eliot in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”—can digest and distill a whole century of human feeling into a few lines or—like Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop—can find the universal miracle in the briefest moment of a life. Novelists from Dickens to Marilynne Robinson turn the chaos of life itself into art—which, in a sense, is exactly what a point guard does.

Michael Jordan (above) and Ann Patchett (below), both graceful in their craft.

10) Grace

            One kind of grace is a person’s ability to do something difficult with elegance and apparent ease, in a way that gives the spectator of that grace a kind of serene pleasure—the pleasure of sharing humanity with someone so graceful. Joe Dimaggio, Roger Federer, and Michael Jordan have grace in common with E.B. White, Ann Patchett, and Donald Hall.

            One can pursue these sports/writing comparisons forever. Great athletes and great writers also share such virtues as vision, wit, and consistency. But just as most athletes know when to get off the field and rest, I shall take a time out now.

Thoughtful writers know when to call a time out.