6 Habits Writers Can Learn From Athletes

A lifelong athlete, I used to think that my dedication to sports and my passion for writing were incompatible. I wasn’t sure how to integrate the two activities that seemed to engage fundamentally different parts of my brain. To make matters more complicated, at the time when I made the commitment to writing fiction, my sport of choice was rowing—a sport that demands lots of sleep and requires pre-dawn training. If you want to stay up at all hours to serve your muse, how do you get up before sunrise to train hard for an hour and a half every day?

(Romance Retellings of Literary Classics)

But the choice I’d set up for myself between my two passions was a false one. In fact, some of the best advice I’ve gotten about how to organize the writing life has come not from craft manuals or master classes, but from sports. Athletic pursuits can not only combine with writing but can also enhance it. Whether you do any kind of sports or not, there is a lot any writer can learn from the habits of athletes and the mental principles that guide them.

Once, in the middle of a rowing sprint workout, I asked our coach why one teammate in particular kept beating me, when we agreed that I was stronger and had better technique. “You’re too chicken,” the coach said. As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. My teammate ignored warning signals like pain and nausea just long enough to get ahead of me. When I felt those signals, I backed off.

Even knowing I was fundamentally safe in my boat, I was too afraid of the pain to endure it for just a few more seconds. That fear was making me slow. The same was true in my writing. Fear of failure was making me seek the comfortable route. I was protecting myself by not trying too hard.

To really improve as an artist, you need to push at the edges of your comfort zone. You have to find what it is that scares you the most—is it a subject matter, a process?—and tackle it little by little. Set yourself drills the way an athlete would so you can master the very thing that is holding you back now.

A bad day at the keyboard can stick in your head for a very long time. You’ll conclude that you suck, that it’s time to pack it in, that you probably never should have tried to be a writer or a musician or an artist in the first place. But have you ever noticed that people rarely do that same dance of dejection after a bad day at the gym?

If you feel sluggish or clumsy, you get through the workout (or not, which is fine) and go home. The next time you go to the gym, you don’t carry any sense of failure, but just go get your workout done. Why not do the same with your creative work? If you have a bad day, treat it as an isolated incident and let it go the way you would with a slow run or an uncoordinated Zumba class.

We writers are very good at humility. At times tortured humility. There is almost an unspoken rule that if you do achieve success, you might want to be a little embarrassed by it, or at the very least not explicitly pleased. There is a lot to be said for a particular kind of humility—the kind that’s mindful of the privilege of having time to just sit there and make things up, the kind that’s mindful of all the other worthy claims on a reader’s time.

But let’s not overdo the humbleplaint (which I’ll coin as some sort of opposite of a humblebrag). When we do something well, we should own it. Take a page from an athlete’s book and assess yourself honestly. If you’re killing it, be proud of that.

As you would with a gym workout, give yourself credit for showing up and doing the work, even if it wasn’t your best. At the end of each writing session, take a minute to identify the one thing you did really well, the one thing you’re pleased with—even if the only good thing you did that day was write one perfect word in a crummy paragraph. The confidence you can take from this will motivate you for the next session. Writing is a massive head game. This is one way you can create your very own positive feedback loop.

Athletes don’t just go out and do the same kind of running or swimming or cycling day after day. They plan for a variety of training intensities, sometimes pushing themselves and sometimes dialing back. But as writers, we tend to just. keep. going. at whatever project we’re working on, often becoming fatigued, bored, and frustrated in the seeming sameness of our work.

Like an athlete, you need a training plan that you can put into your calendar, one that includes some creative variation. Identify the tasks that fit best at different training intensities. What can you do for a long time without growing frustrated? What kind of writing—revision or writing sex scenes?—can you do only for short bursts, like a sprinter doing interval training? Look at your schedule and plan your creative work to make the best use of brief time windows and longer periods. Balance the work out among the different intensities to preserve freshness and avoid fatigue. And write your plan into your calendar—a nice colored block of time that says “Write” is hard to delete and ignore.

A don’t forget cross-training. Just as a runner will spend time on a bike to build complementary fitness skills, a writer working in one genre can dip into another one to exercise different creative muscles. Consider adding cross-training to your creative workouts: If you’re an essayist, for example, try poetry or short fiction. Or shift to another artistic medium altogether. Take a break from writing and pick up that ukulele you bought when everybody was buying ukeleles. Grab a sheet of scrap paper and make a pencil sketch. Working in a medium other than the one you’re used to can help you return to your book with new understanding.

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If athletes don’t rest on purpose, they’re likely to end up resting by accident. Overtraining leads to illness or injury. Granted, writers don’t generally suffer physical injuries while they work (except for carpal tunnel or back strain). But writers are prone to the most powerful injury of all: guilt.

When life gets busy with job commitments or family or social obligations (or fun), it’s easy to beat yourself up about how you’re not able to keep working on your project. You might make valiant promises to yourself—I’m going to work every day during this family vacation! I’m going to take time every morning during Thanksgiving week to get more done!—only to feel awful thatsurprise!you couldn’t pull them off.

So, take a planned rest. Build it into your training schedule. With planned rest, you won’t have the guilt-inducing experience of trying and failing to get something done. You’ll be deliberate about your time off. When the rest period is over, you’ll return to work with more confidence and energy.

The final lesson is about setting goals. Athletes constantly adjust their goals to match their training, and vice versa. If you’re running an eight-minute mile, you’re not going to run a marathon in under three hours, so train with a more realistic time in mind.

Take a good look at what you want from your writing. Be as specific as you can—and be realistic about the elements that you don’t control. Sure, I’d like to write a blockbuster novel, but that’s not entirely up to me. What’s up to me is writing the best novel I can write. Look at what it’s going to take you to achieve that goal. Are you willing to do it? If not, adjust. Be realistic. And whatever you decide to do, be confident in aiming for something you have a chance to achieve.

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