Habits for Student Writers: Writing as Sport

I’ve been recently taken by the ways in which great writers — poets, especially — describe their craft. These descriptions, which are often quite vivid and about which I someday hope to write — strike me as a means of dealing with writer’s block. After all, it is freeing to think of writing as farming, or baking, or blacksmithing — as something other than crudely willing words onto a page. 

For my own part  — out of a need to overcome my own obstinate writer’s block — I have learned to think of writing as sport. I grant that the comparison is strange (even to the point of being funny), but, for me, it has often made the difference between writing well and failing to write altogether.

Allow me to explain: 

To write really well feels just as deft and breathless as running an extraordinary play toward a net, and it depends just as much on the lessons that a body learns in playing a sport. Why? Sports teach us to cope with tedious, even painful progress toward an end. They teach us to pace ourselves — to spare our energy at the start of a thing and exert it fiercely at the right moments.

And they demand that we think tactically about when to drive straight forward at a goal, and when to build a slow play around the far reaches of a field.

These lessons are crucial for a writer, who must endure mental pain, martial his energy, and, as I wrote recently for CSC, be very careful about working himself to exhaustion.

The comparison leads me to new advice for parents and their student-writers. It goes like this: 

#1 Rest & Eat Like an Athlete

Rest, in my experience, is severely underestimated by students. As they approach an essay, your students should sleep well, but not too much. They should eat well the night before. In the crucial hours before they start to write, they should eat lean, avoiding heavy, fatty meals and sweet desserts, which make a writer jumbled and slow. Caffeine is good in small doses, but never late at night when it disrupts sleep and ruins a student’s potential for the following day. 

#2 Sports Remind Us How to Work and Clear our Minds

Hard physical work reminds us of how to delay our gratification, reminding us of how to endure tedium and pain for the delicious rest that follows. If your student hasn’t worked out or played hard in too long, her mind has forgotten this lesson, and simply can’t rally itself to the hard work of writing. Prompt her to give it a reminder. Challenge her to a game of 1-on-1. Send her outside on a run. 20 minutes is all she needs. 

#3 Take a Lesson from Track & Field

I was a passably fast sprinter in high school, and I now coach a sprint team at the school where I teach. My experience with the sport has taught me an invaluable lesson — and given me the best, most practical trick I know— for writing. 

The very first part of a race is often the least pleasant because the body has to reconcile itself to the idea of working hard. The body recognizes this fact as distasteful: it has to move more blood, handle more oxygen, and dip into stores of energy that it has laid by for harder times. In response, it invents pain and worry, exaggerates them, and sends them as signals to the mind to stop running and return to rest. A mature athlete knows to recognize these signals for what they are, ignore them, and — as my friend and fellow coach Derek Gilmore says — “just keep running.” 

The same phenomenon besets writers, especially when they are young. The body recognizes that writing, much like running, taxes its resources and imperils its comfort. In response, it seizes on any available reason to stop, pretending hunger, thirst, heat, chill, exhaustion… really, any conceivable excuse for ceasing to work. I count my own body as especially devious on this count: in my first minutes of writing, it makes my nose very itchy and my mouth very dry. I’ll scratch my nose every thirty seconds and gulp water every sixty. Twenty minutes will pass and I’ll have written almost nothing. 

“When you sit down to write, your body will try its hardest to distract you.

Don’t listen to it. Sit at the keyboard for ten minutes, and refuse to lift your hands from the keys…”

I’ve dealt with these false signals for long enough to know that neither sensation is ‘real’; rather, each is a pretense — a misguided attempt by my deepest instincts to keep me comfortable and at rest. Overcoming them is simple: “just keep running.” To my students, then, I say this: when you sit down to write, your body will try its hardest to distract you. Don’t listen to it. Sit at the keyboard for ten minutes, and refuse to lift your hands from the keys. It doesn’t matter if you earn no words from this first stage of the work. Rather, by refusing to give in to your body’s distractions, you recall it to its discipline and demand that it apply its functions to the work at hand. After ten minutes have gone by, thirst and nose-itches will abate, and the words will come. 

. . .

Ian Atherton teaches literature at Golden View Classical Academy in Golden, CO. He works closely with students in various grade levels and believes that literature is valuable because it reminds us that life — any life, in any station— is worth living.