This excerpt is taken from a speech I delivered on Superbowl Sunday showing how writing is like football.
This may be
blasphemy to admit on Superbowl Sunday, but I am not a big fan of sports. I know writing, but I had to dig deep and even research a little to get the right sports terminology for the following.
Pregame for writing: You discover you have an interest, maybe you attend a seminar or writing or join a group, and start practicing by yourself and then
with others. You have to have a place to center yourself and store your supplies, but writers usually call that a special chair or an office instead of a locker.
Next you approach the game more seriously. You've got to make some decisions and determine what specialties to develop. What team will
you be playing for? Fiction or Nonfiction Serious or humorous? Lengthy works or short works. You need to know which position or area to pursue. Writers call that genre.
You work on conditioning, taking classes and workshops and attending classes to build up your skills in writing to become a stronger more efficient whole. Sometimes we call in trainers and support like content and line editors. Like athletes, writers do timed challenges with writing, we lift heavier loads by adding more depth to our manuscripts, and we keep going to practice even when we don't feel like, have doubts about our success, or get knocked down in critique. We enter smaller contests too along the way, because writers have that drive to succeed that the best competitors possess.
What about teams? Some writers will go on to make points on their own. Self-publishing are writing's field goal kickers, they are part of the overall team, but rely mostly on themselves to handle the job. Others will seek a path of sending our queries to agents and editors to be their defenders on the field of publishing. Some writers will be good enough to be courted by agents and editors. Once you join with an agent or a group you learn the rules of the organization, meet the other players, and learn what your own role will be in holding the line in the book world. Be sure to remember that no matter what type of writer you are or how much work you do yourself, there is no "i" in the team of writing. We are all here, because someone somewhere helped us along the way.
So you condition and practice some more with even more dedication. Somewhere along the line you realize that you have a style or a voice coming out. You will need to
build a platform, so you do reviews for others, and you tweet and Facebook, and
network to gain supporters.
Because it's Game Day! You have a book and it is coming out. You hope that
enough people will buy the ticket and help fill the stands. You know your family and friends and regular
cheerleaders will be there, but you are hoping that your game is good enough that people are glad they came. You hope your book is good enough to outweigh the opinion of those who you might offend or didn't like your style and write a bad review about your work on Amazon. Like
true athletic professionals you realize you shouldn't say much back in response. But that’s okay, because your fans will go toe to toe
or Facebook or twitter message to message for you.
You realize you’re the quarterback of this game. You the one on the field who has the final say on what play to call, what risk to take, and then you take
the ball in hand and throw it out hoping your books make it into the hands of the
receiver. Sometimes you reach the audience you intended and
sometimes it gets to someone else instead. But you are selling books. Touchdown. *dance dance*
Half time is called conferences or retreats for writers. You get good food and drinks, meet some famous people, and there's great entertainment.
And then it's time to go out in your second half and go through the process again. You will have learned some things to apply and now you have the challenge of coming up with something new.
After a few books and good sales everyone calls you a winner. I would argue that anyone who began writing and kept on going through all of the difficulties can claim the title of winner, no matter what their sale numbers.
Even published writers don't always reach their intended receivers on a play and sometimes when you least expect someone or something
comes out of nowhere and tackles you to the ground. Genres aren't hot anymore, agents quit, companies close, or the
business changes. Maybe you are injured in the writing world, either by your actions or a rumor by others.
Writers have instant replay too. It's called networking. Your good actions are talked about time and again. So are your bad ones.
Whatever good plays or bad, you can always find writers doing the conditioning and practicing and whatever it takes to keep in the game.
