The Sport of Writing

When I was in college, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a sportswriter. I had a job on the night desk of the UPI (alas, no longer in existence, but the former rival of AP). I showed up at 9:00 and generally got off in the wee small hours of the morning, falling into bed around 3:00, then waking up at 4:30 a.m. to DJ a morning radio show. The three guys on the night desk of UPI were interesting to be around. One had worked the desk in Tel Aviv (and I had a massive crush on him), one was a political junkie (and wore a bowtie . . . I thought he was dreadfully dull until one day he had to fill in on the sports desk and it turned out he was funny and witty and loved basketball), one lived and loved sports. They each had at least 15 years on me, and were full of stories. I wrote football stories.

I've loved these guys since I was in diapers. But if truth were told, I was a bigger boxing fan. I was very into following the sport for years, rattling off stats on fighters like this guy. But except for a couple of years playing field hockey, I never gravitated toward playing sports myself. I think at least part of it was I didn't enjoy high school (so much so I graduated early and skipped senior year), so playing team sports for my school wasn't for me.

Which brings me to writing. As much as we all cheer each other on, in the end, it's a solitary sport. It's much more akin to boxing. And most definitely, it requires an intestinal fortitude. The ability to hit the canvas and get back up again.

I sit here and think of yes, all the great things that have happened to me as a writer. But then I can also think of having to bounce back from an assortment of disappointments: imprints I was writing for closing, two editors who left mid-book on me for other jobs, a solid proposal--only to see a book with the same exact title and a similar enough premise sell a week later, the death knell of chick lit (a genre I enjoyed writing for), enough ups and downs in the market to make a writer dizzy.

I have one or two friends I lean on when things go amiss. Lurker Monkey has pulled me up from the canvas a time or two. But in the end, every writer has to find inside themselves that inner drive, the guts and most importantly the stamina to tough in out in one of the toughest sports around. I'm not sure why writers do what they do. I sometimes think I spot the ones that are going to stay down on the canvas. In fact, I seem to have an uncanny knack for that. And I usually can spot the ones I feel sure will be there when the last bell rings.

But only the writer knows which one he or she is. So what is it that makes you stagger up, even if you have to hang on the ropes, instead of staying down on the canvas? What inner drive compels you to tough it out?

A Little Thing We Like to Call . . .

Determination.

Two days ago I blogged about how sometimes writing seems an accidental career. By that, I basically meant it chooses YOU, you don't choose it. No one would choose it. Not really. Too much rejection. Very solitary. You have to have a certain kind of mindset to end up a writer.

Except.

The other side of it, is you must be determined. Persistent. I can't tell you--I really and truly couldn't count--how many writer friends have, at one point or the other, said "I'm packing it in. I can't take it anymore." I was there two years ago. For about a day. I was fighting with my agent over my headshots . . . and it just hit me that I was sick of the whole thing. I wrote him that I was done. Done with writing, with headshots, with rewriting, with all of it. I didn't answer the phone when he called me 500 times in the next few hours. And finally I picked it up and said, "Yeah . . . I'm over my little meltdown already." Eight hundred blog posts, give or take, later, I am still at it.

Okay, so writers don't quit. We doggedly pursue dreams. Fine. But I can go back even further. When I was 21, I wrote a poem. The first line was . . .

My grandmother has hate tattoos carved into her arm.

It was about the Holocaust--and about internal family holocausts. By the time the poem was done, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a poet. So I started submitting poems to snooty literary magazines. And at the time, my feminist, apocalyptic sort of poetry wasn't in vogue. Perhaps it's still not. I kept little index cards of each poem's submission adventures. I often got back personal rejections, "We loved your poem, but it's not the type of poetry we publish." I think I sent it to Ms. magazine. Anyway, I had this little tracking system with checkmarks for my rejections. And while THAT poem was going out, I wrote more poems. Soon, it was rather fun. In any given week, I was sending out a half dozen polished poems that even all these years later, I think are actually pretty good. Then I wrote a short story. It combined a specific dialect WITH my poems.

And lo and behold, I got an acceptance letter. From them. Then, like a trickle turning to a stream, four or five of my poems were published--mostly in literary magazines long since folded. But still. There they were . . . in print.

I toyed with writing enough poems for a chapbook, but ultimately turned my attention to writing novels.

And now, when I look back, I realize it wasn't ONLY this inner voice sort of blindly, accidentally leading me to writing. Something inside me was determined to get my words into print. It was the cliche, a fire in my belly. Me . . . who back then was so introverted . . . was determined that this voice find print. Absolutely determined. I almost don't even feel that same way now. Now, I see it as business. Some books get bought, some don't. But back then . . . it was different. I was filled with a sense of purpose.

Thoughts? Thoughts on one word: Determination.