On Having an Opponent

I often think of writing in terms of rugby. This is undoubtedly a roundabout approach. But (according to cognitive scientists) the mind understands the intangible in terms of the physical (anger is heat, love is a journey) so since I have devoted years of energy to shaping my rugby skills, I suppose rugby was a natural vehicle for understanding hard-honed craft. I imagine the ideal way to understand writing is in terms of sex, but sadly, art as seduction just doesn’t translate for me. In any case, I was reading an interview with David Foster Wallace today, and I had an epiphany.

It was an old Believer interview, and in it, Wallace discussed distraction and work. He said that when a piece inspires him, he can write any which way, but when he is forcing himself to write, he has to set hours and build a routine. (DFW: “What often happens is that when work goes well all my routines and disciplines go out the window simply because I don’t need them, and then when it starts not going well I flounder around trying to reconstruct disciplines I can enforce and habits I can stick to.”)

You ever try to lift weights with no routine? You wander around the weight room sampling dumbbells and copying the exercises you overheard a personal trainer teaching to a lady named Fran who works out in a red tracksuit. When I lift properly, I have a schedule from my rugby coach of exercises, reps, and sometimes even specific rest times. This way, at 6:30 in the morning, with no motivation, I can plop myself down on the bench, see how much I lifted last week, and try to beat it. The momentum of a routine only helps you if you build it in a direction. You know what you plan to do and what you’re capable of, so the routine pulls you through uninspired moments.

Some of the excellent writers I know love structure. They tinker and toy with it, and brighten up like kittens when they find a new structure to experiment with. Even in my own writing, I’ve noticed that I write better within a structure. Structure frees up brainpower. It’s one of the reasons post-concussive syndrome wears on an artist—the first thing you lose in concussions is “working memory,” which is the ability to hold onto multiple ideas at once. An average person can remember seven things in their working memory, and it’s nice to use one of them on overall structure, one on what you’ve written so far, one grasping the truth you’re trying to communicate, and to use the final bits of working memory playing legos with sentences. Imagine tinkering with structure as you go, too. Something slips.

Writing within a structure, like lifting with an exercise schedule, means you don’t need to be inspired for every minute of effort. You wake up in the morning, plop down at your desk, and know where to start. You can fight through, using willpower when you lack inspiration’s gleam.

But your best rugby doesn’t emerge when you’re willing yourself to endure pain. Your best performances emerge when you’re having so much fun, the pain is incidental. Your lungs burn, sweat stings your eyes, your collarbone aches ominous and you need to sprint to the ruck, coldly read the field and call a play. Tricking yourself into ignoring your body just focuses your mind on the pain. You play best not in a frenzy, nor in prove-yourself blinders, but when you’re so busy toying with the other team, you forget yourself entirely.

Which is why I think inspiration, in this getting-yourself to write sense, comes down to the object of your focus. Allow me another sports example. Mike Tyson used to begin fights by staring down his opponent to find an eye twitch, a swallow, a hint of mental weakness. I play my smartest rugby when I am determining, with almost sadistic glee, how I intend to damage my opponent. In principle, this tiny attitude adjustment seems no different from spending the game dwelling on what my team should do. “I’m going to nail this tackle” barely differs in meaning from “this schmuck’s gonna hit the grass.” But the difference is vast.

Inspiration, I suspect, is partly a product of joy, of forgetting yourself while you test what you can do—you toy with the story, or the ideas, or the audience you’ll manipulate into ecstasy. On the other hand, when you’re thinking about you—and how to avoid distraction, how to trick yourself into sitting at a desk—you’re occupying bits of working memory that could be probing your story for weakness, imagining plans of attack. The effectiveness of a writing routine (or a stressful deadline) is that it walls off the girlfriend and internet and whatever might release you from the contest and return you to your own weak flesh.