Not a Competitive Sport

Writing is not a competitive sport, nor, as my son likes to say, post-timed SAT essay test, should it be undertaken to the tick of a stopwatch. You play a sport, you are playing by rules. You write, and what is often most glorious is the rules you break, the tenses you re-make, the guideposts you ignore to pull your readers close. You play a sport and you're hunting trophies. Writers hunting for trophies, by and large, are disappointed, which leads to disillusion, which spells either silence or sourness, which is the paired malaise writers must fight hard to avoid, if not for themselves, than at least for the sake of those who love them.

I go for elisions in writing. For bridges and breakaways, slides and stutters, repetitions. I write books that break form, dodge categorization, mess with genre, and if I had to think of myself as going head-to-head against some other writer, as match-worthy, race-wise, suited up, I don't think I'd get far. I think I'd shut down, fall back on what has already been done.

What is already known.

Can you teach writing? It's the age-old question. I think the better question is: How can we clear more space in which writers might work? How can we help them honor their own imaginations?

P.S. A thank you to the ever-gracious Maureen at my local Barnes & Noble for holding the event that enabled some of us to talk about some of this, yesterday.