The Unexpected Writing Advice I Picked Up From the Game Of Love
You learn best by unabashed and unconstrained playing
I am not a professional tennis player, nor have I even played in a quasi-professional sense like an intramural team or whatever. So please don’t expect me to use the right terminology. Expect me to be as technically knowledgeable about the sport as someone who has taken the time to watch the first two lessons of Serena Williams’ Masterclass on 1.25x speed.
That said, I have recently become quite taken with the sport. Due to a lifestyle reconfiguration (read: unemployment), my partner and I have been clocking in a couple of hours during the week at the public tennis courts. Over the summer, these hours under the sweltering sun have accumulated. With each day, I have begun to play with more… intention. I find I am thinking about the shots I take before and after the ball hits the ground.
With all this thinking (arguably too much of it), I recognized a striking parallel between my newfound activity and a slightly less new one: my belaboring writing practice.
I guess it’s not a surprise I’d draw a parallel between two of the very few things I do and think about every day. So when the similarity first struck me, I swatted it away because thoughts like this are one in a literal billion. But of course, the similarities kept funneling in, growing, and becoming a bit more nuanced in my mind. I motioned for my partner to stop his ball-whapping and ran to the car to jot some words down.
The first bullet on my Samsung notes read:
“forget the boundaries just hit the ball.”
While you may find the above to be both full of transformative depth and articulate expression just as it is, I have taken care to massage the maxim a bit more so there’d be a point to this song and dance. Here goes:
Stop trying to do things the “right” way.
When you begin an activity, do your best to release any preconceived notions about doing it “right”. Obsessing over the “right” technique or sequence of things from the outset will mark the beginning of the end.
In previous years, the impatient part of me wanted to dive into the game playing, the point-scoring. But with each game of tennis, there were stops and restarts every time someone hit a foul serve, which was often because I was terrible. Instead of moving to the spot I was anticipating the shot, my eyes would scan the lines, fingers crossed, hoping my opponent’s ball went out of bounds. My feet, of course, remained astonishingly still all the while. As a result, my playing became more reactive than proactive.
Over time, I realized that playing full-fledged games were not terribly conducive to learning how to actually hit the ball. This summer, I began to gravitate toward an unstructured form of playing. Rallying, they call it. I got used to gripping the racket just so and hitting the ball from various positions on the court. I was willing to play in this space (mostly) devoid of expectations.
Unbeknownst to me, I was establishing a rhythm for my playing. I ignored the service line. I ignored all boundaries, actually. I hit the ball without a clear sense of the “path,” of doing things “right”.
This pressure of doing things by the book makes things tricky. We all strive to do things the right way and be efficient with our time, but sometimes it’s done at the expense of our ability to sustain the practice. Playing or doing anything with too stringent of constraints will ultimately derail us.
When something’s no longer enjoyable, it siphons off our life force. Our growth, dependent on this life force, is severely compromised.
These self-imposed limitations can also create notoriously, grueling writer’s block.
When I first began my writing practice, I believed the only thing that distinguished a rough draft from the final one was a round or two of proofreading. A falsity, of course, I gleaned from my acutely limited and painful experience of writing school papers.
This line of thinking served as a form of abominable strain on my writing. Following this template of pure, debilitating grit, I’d write, and re-write, and re-re-write a sentence while only having a very vague idea of the direction of my piece. It was as if I was laying down one brick after the other with three layers of plaster in between worried it would budge, only then to realize the house was facing the wrong way.
These self-imposed (and delusional) limitations paralyzed my ability to do any kind of writing or thinking once I was out in the real world. So, I abandoned these limitations. This was done a bit more easily when I realized these “rules” I had bound myself to were just machinations my mind made up about the writing process.
Our minds love to consume themselves with rule-making.
Making up rules is how our minds can feel secure that writing won’t be a complete waste of time or ambition, or whatever fear our minds are grappling with that given day. But just like an overprotective parent, these rules can stifle and drain the passion from our fingers before we ever make real use of them.
Dropping all of this mental baggage released my chronic writer’s block. I forced myself to just write unedited, suppressing the internal voices pointing out how discombobulated a sentence sounded on the first-go. I would set a timer to write for an hour and keep to it. I allowed for the space to produce something akin to a stream of consciousness. I’m far from that final draft, but my thoughts flow, a little schizophrenic to be sure, but unencumbered. Draft after draft, these words produced rather superfluously evolved into a cogent flow of ideas.
If you find yourself at the whim of “writer’s block,” follow this simple 3-step process:
1. Recognize that your writer’s block is a mind-made structure.
Your mind, bless its own toiling, finger-fidgeting heart, has built up a little cottage for you to work on your craft. It’s quite…erh, thoughtful really, but the execution is slipshod at best. (Your mind never did complete its degree in architecture.) You have to crawl to get through the entryway, and your desk is the size of a business card.
2. Once you have recognized this is not reality but your mind’s best rendering of it, it’s time to tip the walls over.
Watch each of them crash, mind the splinters, and breathe in the fresh air. Off to the side, your mind will continue to keep whittling away new houses for you to live in. Go ahead and let it waste its time. We can only hope the houses get more spacious over time, but in any case, make it a habit to recognize when you’re in one that’s a bit too cramped.
3. Now, write freely and write often.
Freestyling with your words, thoughts and ideas is a version of rallying, of this “mind-less” back-and-forth play. The return on investment in this unrestricted “playtime”, whether it’s on the court or putting pen to paper, is undeservingly undervalued.
Before you set out to grow either as a writer or a tennis player, give yourself the space to learn the craft uninhibited by the rules or your mind’s best interpretation of the rules. Giving yourself room to breathe will allow you to establish, at the very least, a foundation of fondness for the activity. You might be surprised by just how far something so feathery and light as play will take you.
