“What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer to that was a baseball player. And I really thought I had a shot. What kid doesn’t when speaking of his dream? Suffice it to say, things didn’t turn out as I had hoped. I should have learned my lesson. I didn’t. I next wanted to be a tennis player. And again life put me in my place. Did I dare tempt fate for a third time? I did, I do. Indeed writing is my last ditch effort at fame, riches, and immortality. Here’s how I intend to make it happen or zonk out trying.
1) There's a saying in basketball: don't settle. It means going for the higher percentage shot for the sake of the team. How does this relate to writing? It doesn't as there is no team in writing. It's you against time and self-doubt. And yet the injunction resonates. It resonates in the sense that if you settle when writing, you won't push yourself to the limits of your capability. Settle and your literary game will stagnate, regress, and even degenerate. Don’t settle, and there’s a chance you’ll surprise yourself to the extent you’ll be content to call it a career knowing that if you put your mind to it you can make words heed your whims and megrims.
2) Swing for the fences. This comes from baseball, arguably America’s pastime. When applied to the game itself, it's actually bad advice, as it's an all-or-nothing philosophy that's more about attitude than winning strategy. Applied to writing, it not only makes sense; it should serve as a motto. No one wants to read about undergraduates getting high on cannabis and talking about pseudo intellectual nonsense while listening to Pink Floyd. But write a story involving a domestic dispute that spills into the public domain where a life hangs in the balance, and the chances are you’ll have us wondering who, what, where, why, how. And if comedy is your thing, what could be funnier and more ironic than a story about an altruistic atheist who lives long and prospers before dying peacefully in his sleep at the ripe age of 105?
3) Last but not least, defense will win you championships. This is a saying that actually applies to both sports and writing. Unlike offense which is equally dependent on your skill and the vagaries of luck or what have you, defense, being a matter of effort and commitment, is entirely up to you. Likewise, something like divine intervention is required to write the perfect passage in one go, whereas it’s entirely up to you to stare at a paragraph for hours on end for the sake of getting it just right. As the former occurs about as often as a total eclipse (if at all), the writer would do well to rely chiefly on his level of effort and energy to get through a typical day of writing. Rely on anything else, and productive days will be far and few between.
4) Oh, I forgot. One more thing. Pressure is a privilege. This saying has a one-to-one correspondence to writing. Writing is a privilege. This is especially true historically but even today when writers seem like dime a dozen, only a handful will have a readership beyond the here and now. Of course not everyone can be a Hemingway or a Scott Fitzgerald, and I imagine some of us don't care to be one. That's all fine and dandy but consider this: let's say you are a fisherman, and you have the choice of catching a bass or a marlin. Or let's say you are a hunter and the object of your hunt is a groundhog or a fully matured antlered buck. I wonder which you would choose. As if you already didn’t know, the bigger the occasion, the greater the thrill, the more intense the adrenaline rush.