What are the biggest differences and similarities between competitive tennis and professional writing?
Q&A With Shay Every Other Sunday
There have been two things in my life that I have worked really hard at over many years, many hours a day, and have a level of talent for. Tennis and writing. I played D1 tennis in college at Tulane University, I lived at Evert Tennis Academy my senior year of high school, and after college tennis kind of faded away. I have barely played in the last eight years and it seems strange when I stop to think about how I used to train up to five or six hours a day for something that is no longer a prominent part of my life. I view tennis in two ways some of the time and I guess you could say one is a negative view and another is a more positive outlook. 1.) I often wish I didn’t put so much time and energy into tennis and that I explored my creative side more from a younger age, and pursued other interests in general. Sometimes I feel like tennis took that from me and that it took away from my life rather than added to it. 2.) On the other hand, tennis may have simply been part of my path and taught me certain skills, helped me form relationships, and did provide me with a form of expression. I also let it go fairly easily right at the time where I was ready to take writing more seriously, but I sometimes wonder if I would have thought about and pursued writing earlier if it hadn’t been for tennis. It almost feels like my tennis life was in a different lifetime altogether and I don’t like to stop and think about it too much because I usually think of my negative college experience rather than the positives, but I was recently ruminating on all the similarities between sports and writing, and of course the differences.
Q: What are the biggest differences and similarities between competitive tennis/sports and professional writing?
A: There seem to be more similarities when I stop to think about tennis and writing together, which is surprising to me, but the differences are notable, so I’ll start there.
DIFFERENCES:
Tennis and sports are outcome-oriented. There is of course the process of practicing and always working to improve. There’s the whole “champions are made when no one is watching” infamous quote, which is definitely true. But look at the beginning of that quote—champions. That’s an outcome. When you are practicing you are trying to give yourself the best possible chance to compete well in matches. Now, the same can be said for writing, you always write to improve, but there are no hard “champions.” Coaches can say it’s about the process all they want, but it’s frankly not true. If you want to be the best then you have to win matches. So, really, it’s about the outcome. There is a process to get to the desired outcome and work to be put in, but the outcome is still the end goal—the winning.
Sports are objective. Maybe they can be somewhat subjective on occasion, but not usually. There are winners and losers of matches or games. There are black and white rules to get to the winning and/or losing. There are rankings that hold true based on results. It’s not opinions when it comes to these outcomes, it’s much more cut and dry, whereas writing is subjective. There are certain rules and guidelines that can tell us whether something is good or bad writing, but beyond that if someone doesn’t like a story regardless of it being a NYT bestseller or an unknown author, they get to have that opinion because there is no actual match with a determining result. Art is subjective, and I really appreciate that about it. I’ve never been a terribly competitive person, which I didn’t realize until I stopped playing tennis. Competitive sports don’t even seem to fit my personality, so the shift to subjective creativity has definitely been the right one for me.
Sports tend to be more self-centered even when they are team sports, but especially individual tennis competition. When you want to be the best and win your matches there isn’t a ton of room to root for the success of your fellow tennis players. This isn’t to say that you can’t, but you certainly won’t be if you’re the one competing against them. But as a writer, there can be endless amounts of other authors and their success does not detract anything from your own. Readers read way faster than writers can write, so there can be endless books out there and it doesn’t take anything away from our own writing process and production.
A lot of emotion comes out as anger in sports. Of course, writing can be extremely frustrating when it feels like something just isn’t clicking or going right. But, for some reason, making mistakes in sports when they are mistakes we feel we “shouldn't” be making because we have practiced a million times before is just a recipe for anger. Not to say the frustration isn’t warranted, but I never felt like it was healthy for me to be that mad at myself when I struggle enough with self-acceptance in other facets of life (I never had these sort of introspections until I stopped playing, though). Even the most seemingly level-headed people exude anger during matches. I’m a very reserved person and don’t express much of any emotion in public, but whenever I played tennis matches my anger was waiting to come out—and it was only directed at myself. (Well, maybe a cheating opponent, too.) That’s another interesting point—in tennis/sports, there are cheaters! I guess, there could be cheaters in writing, but not sure how far they’d make it.
There are age limitations in competitive sports. If you haven’t broken in with your level of success as you get older then your window to “be the best” starts to diminish. In writing, you can write your first novel at eighty years old! That really takes a certain amount of pressure off, I’d say. Sports are extremely mental, more than most of us realize, but you cannot ignore that the physical comes first. Writing does not need any physicality and is entirely mental.
SIMILARITIES:
HARD WORK. This is probably the most obvious similarity, but if you want to be good at something, anything, and improve constantly then you have to put in many hours and lots of dedicated work to make it happen. Sports and writing alike, along with anything else, takes work, effort, and focus.
They can both be forms of expression/release. I didn’t actually think about this until recently. In the last several years I had thought of tennis as something that had restricted me when I was younger, but it can actually be seen as another form of expression and to let go of what’s going on inside for a little while. I was always confident in my playing abilities and that must have been helpful when I lacked confidence in other areas.
Decision-making. It’s clear that there are tons of decisions to be made in writing, and often times it can feel daunting and like too much. Sometimes I wish someone would just tell me all the ways to go about making the writing and book better and seamless, but it’s up to me to make those ultimate decisions. In tennis, the decision-making is way quicker, but you make hundreds of decisions per match. You have to decide where you’re going to hit each shot, if you’re going to come to the net, where to send your serve, if you’ll hit topspin, flatter, or slice, if you’ll drop shot or lob, and so on and so on. This happens for the entire match, but the decisions are made in a split-second. Sometimes I wish they could be made that rapidly when it comes to writing, which is a much more tedious process and you could be sitting on your decisions for years!
Sense of community. In anything that any of us are part of there is a sense of community. Even if we don’t have many friends within our focus, there is always a community there and other people who know what you’re going through. I made many great friends through tennis and we’ll always have an understanding of each other from that part of our lives that other people won’t get. It’s the same with writing. I don’t have many writing friends yet, but I am part of some groups and communities for writers and it is so valuable to have others to turn to who just “get it.” Whereas, with others in my life it’s more me explaining certain aspects of writing to them rather than them actually knowing wholly what I mean and what I’m going through (which I’m sure everyone can relate to in their profession), so it’s a different and important sort of connection to have that sense of community in whatever your chosen field is.
Disappointment in “losses” whether it be losing matches we felt we should’ve won or even not, or disappointment in rejection in the writing industry. There is lots of rejection in writing from agents, publishers, literary reviews, and later, even after you have finally published, in the form of negative reviews. There’s always disappointment in the obstacles and “losses” that come from sports or the creative field, like with anything we are invested in.
Lifelong memories and experiences. Nothing can ever erase the time put into something that was once or still is important. There will always be memories, whether good or bad. There will be connections that were made even if they were since lost. There will be a progression of how this particular passion felt at different phases of life, and the experience will always remain. Everything leads us to who we are and becomes part of our journey.
Tennis may not be much a part of my life anymore and I may have had some extremely negative experiences that came along with it, but no one can erase all the hard work I had put in over the years and I will always have that skill. The same can now be said for writing. Whatever comes of my continued pursuits of writing in the future, it’s now something I have put tremendous time and effort into. Did you used to, or maybe still do, play competitive sports? Have you since progressed to something more creative? What have your experiences been like with each, or something you did when you were younger versus later in life?
