How the Day After the Super Bowl is Symbolic for Writers

tyunglebower ♦ February 2, 2015 ♦ Leave a comment

It’s possible to be a writer and also watch football. I am such a person. As such, I am still annoyed that such an atrocious call was made by Seattle at the end of the game last night to cost them the championship. (Which it almost certainly did.)

Yet this is not a football blog. (No kidding.) So I won’t delve into my complete feelings on the matter. I will, however, use the Super Bowl as a symbol for optimism to the writer.

You see, as soon as the clock ticked down on last night’s game, the NFL season was over. As I do most years when the championship doesn’t involve my own team, I put out over social media last night, “At least the Ravens are in first place again.”

You’ve probably heard sports fans say that for all kinds of sports. In baseball, everybody is in first place as soon as the World Series ends. Take your pick from the other championships in this country, the point is the same; even if your team has no shot whatsoever at winning it all in the following season, you can console yourself a bit by saying that everyone is mathematically on equal ground in the off season. Plus, once the season starts who knows?

What’s this have to do with writing? Just this; every new project you start is a best seller.

Think about it. That very first keystroke or written word or outline of a project represents unlimited potential. You could be in the first stages of that novel that brings you fame, or gets you that residency. Maybe the article you only just started sketching out today will be the one your favorite magazine accepts.

As with sports, writing success on a grand scale is against the odds for most of us. We writers look back on all of the things we’ve written that did not get selected for publication, or did not sell at all. We also look back on the things we abandoned, or the things that we finished, but with which we did nothing further. Those works did not make it to the proverbial championship.

But we start again. We begin something new. And while our project is still known only to us, within the frayed pages of our notebook or the unseen memory of our hard drive, that project is a best seller until it proves otherwise.

I don’t like that my projects haven’t gained the audience I wanted. That still saddens and frustrates me at times, just as I was frustrated last night that one of the teams I dislike most won the big game. Just as I was upset that my own team did not make it to said big game. But that disappointment, though still present, is halved as soon as a new season begins, as it has for football as of last night. And I can temper some of the disappointment of previous writings not taking flight by remembering that as I start a new project, I may be in the first stages of creating a work that eventually leads me and my career to a whole new ball game.