Writing as “Rotisserie” Fantasy Baseball
Baseball season is upon us here in the United States. With it, (often) is my jump into fantasy baseball.
For those unfamiliar with fantasy sports, (into which I never sink any money), the concept is simple enough. You join a league, usually online these days. You draft real Major League players onto your team as does everyone else in your league. You score fantasy points based on what your players do in real life, vs what the players “owned” by your opponents do.
That, in essence, is all there is to it.
How does one win?
That depends on the format you’ve selected. There is no need to get into detail about that here. In the broadest of terms, some formats emphasize what happens week-to-week against a single opponent. Others, like the format I am trying for the first time this year, emphasis an entire season’s performance of your players. Whoever accumulates the most points by the end of the real-life season is the winner. “Rotisserie” they call it, having nothing at all to do with seasoned chicken.
It is early yet, but I think I may already enjoy this marathon approach as opposed to the sprint approach.
Most writing is like this rotisserie style fantasy baseball. Accumulative. Slow. Deliberate. Plenty of time to make course corrections if things start to go South.
True, not everything we write gives us the luxury of such a distant deadline. But even shorter works, outside of daily journalism which is indeed a sprint, can benefit from this marathon approach.
We set a goal, brainstorm how to obtain it. Some of us outline at some of us don’t, but then we move into first drafts. Round of revisions. Edits. Next draft, and so on. Perhaps a beta reader or two for some of us that offers thoughts. More revisions. Your milage will vary but that’s the gist of it.
You can have a bad day or even a bad week or two in “roto” fantasy baseball and still end up on top by October. You just have to be willing to look at who/what is not working, and adjust accordingly. No need to rush or panic. Like a manager look at the big picture and do what you think it best to fix things.
Writers have the advantage over the fantasy baseball manager in one key aspect at least; there is no time table by which to perfect the work. Again, there are deadline-based exceptions, naturally. Yet writers, especially indie-authors such as myself have the luxury of moving the “season” into November, December, the following January, however long it takes to pace the marathon of our writing to get it to its best possible outcome.
Fantasy football is almost always a week to week battle with little room for error. I hate it and love it for that. As far as writing analogy goes though, roto fantasy baseball is most applicable.
There is plenty of time for you to write the best version of what you want written. Use all of it.
Writing and “Respiration”
People are built to breathe. Literally.
You’ve heard the old warning; a person can go two weeks without food if they have to. Two days without water at best. But two minutes without air. (Broad estimate, but it sounds better with all the twos.)
Nothing works without breathing. Allow me to be morbid for a moment when I mention that even if a person is dying from suffocation, their unconscious body will still go through the motions of breathing in its final moments, even if there is nothing to inhale.
In other words, people will attempt respirate reflexively even when hope is lost.
We can however hold our breath. People can make the conscious decision to pause their respiration, even if only for a very limited amount of time. And of someone fights off the urge to go back to breathing long enough to pass out? They start to breath the moment their lose consciousness. (One reason that wise parents never did/do fall for tantrums involving breath-holding; it literally cannot cause permanent damage to the brat in question. The body and brain will not allow it.)
Enough with the macabre extremes, though.
People can hold their breath for safe controlled periods of time as well, most often for the purposes of swimming.
Adept swimming is basically founded on knowing the best times to breathe, and to choose to stop breathing, with minimal pain and maximum effect. Swimming well is about knowing the need to breath will always be there, but having the intelligence, the bodily awareness to manipulate the unavoidable need for respiration to one’s advantage.
Only a deranged person would attempt to swim with the assumption they can dismiss altogether the need to breathe.
It makes a solid analogy for writing.
Writers must swim. Some will merely bob around in the family pool. On the other side, there are the elite: the Micheal Phelps types. Most fall in between. Except the writer’s unavoidable reflex is not breathing in this case, but validation.
I opine that virtually every writer that produces more than a private diary at some point at least wants some validation that their work is appreciated. More than 99% of writers likely want to impact and/or influence a readership of some size. The desire is not going to go away anymore than the need for breath.
Yet it’s vital that we acknowledge this, and train ourselves to “swim.” That is to say, habituate the conscious choice to create written work while suspending our natural desire for validation for as long as we can before admitting in, immersing ourselves in it a while, and then drawing another breath to continue the swim.
The problem is that validation for any given writer is far less abundant than the air we all breathe. The good news is unlike the air we breathe, we can suspend this reflex for extended periods of time under many more circumstances.
Gills, as it were, would be wondrous. To swim under the water for as long as we wanted without coming to the surface for air. Just as writing would take on a whole new meaning for most of us if we never once had to face to innate desire to have people enjoy our work. That too would be a powerful paradigm shift in the world. A handful reach this magnanimous relationship with the reading world, no doubt.
Also no doubt? I am not one of those elites. I do have to acknowledge my desire for people to enjoy and appreciate what I create. I do have to accept that thus far very few people choose to do so.
Yet I remain a pretty decent swimmer for the time being.
Creating Off Course
It’s important to keep writing through some difficulty. While it is no sin to start many writing projects never to finish them, if you want to get anywhere in regards to a work that others can enjoy and possibly pay for, you obviously have to finish. And finishing means, as I said, a good amount of pushing through when it is not exciting.
To be blunt, writing, even if you love it, can be a pain in the ass. But a pain in the ass a writer must be willing to face, I dare say, more often than flee.
Add to this my personal preference to not abandon something once I have started, and you get someone who avoids project hopping as though it were a stinging insect buzzing around his thoughts.
I was well into adulthood before I even allowed myself to DNF a crappy book I was reading.
All that praise for consistently and preference aside, there comes a time when we creatives have to be flexible.
I don’t mean to be willing to take a plot in an unexpected direction, or compose a song that is more upbeat than one initially intended. This is flexibility within a project, and it is crucial to creativity of all kinds. The flexibility I am referring to here is a flexibility of one’s plans–one’s overall focus.
This is where finishing what I start comes in.
I have only ever “iced” two novels in my life. Both times it was only after much deep consideration as to whether they were going anywhere, and whether I was in the head space to complete them. I stand by my choices to back away from those projects, one of which I had spent years working on. Yet the choice bugs me to this day in the back of my mind because, again, if I say I am going to do something, I do everything I can to do it.
Every now and then, though, it is either clear that something is not working and will never work, such as the two shelved novels I have mentioned. But on occasion, a new idea begins to eclipse your current idea for a project, and you cannot ignore it.
Well, I don’t think one should ignore it, when it speaks loudly and regularly every day to a creative.
That is what is happening to me for the moment. And while I cannot fully express the nature of the idea/project that seems to be eclipsing some of my plans for the next year or so, I can say that to pursue it with the vigor it deserves would (probably) mean putting some of my other writing plans on hold. (In this case, not a full cancellation though.)
This is a bit of a tight rope for someone like me. If I am not careful, I could be as I was during my childhood and teen years, which is running this way and that starting many things that pooped into my head finishing none of them. Now I’ll repeat what I said at the start of this post; if you are a writer who gets joy from writing the beginning of something and never ending it, than this is better than not writing at all. Goals vary. Speaking for myself however, I know that if I am to ever present a fully formed project to the world for its enjoyment, I have to err on the side of stubborn and finish what I begin.
That is why, as with the iced novels I mentioned above, I maintain even now some degree of regret for starting something I could not finish.
However, to be a creative is not only hard work and no play. If we are not open to the playing our imaginations are attempting to conduct with us, we lose a large portion of what it is to be creative in the first place. Work and plans are eventually required for most of us, but if we rely too heavily on them, adhere with a rigid tenacity to a previously announced plan at the expense of all other things, we kill the spontaneity that drives art. I do believe we can lose that within us if we entirely ignore it for too long.
You will again have to forgive me for my lack of specificity at this time. I am only just pulling the eclipsing idea together myself. No doubt it is a little frustrating, a little off putting, especially for an Autistic dude who likes to live on plans. Yet if this new potential project accomplishes what I hope to accomplish for the people I hope to reach, it will be worth a delay of some of my other things.
Indeed, it may not even require a delay at all. I will not know that for a while yet. Yet to paraphrase Hamlet, “the willingness is all.” And I am willing this year to be taken somewhere else in my writing than I set out for at the start.
I hope if you are an artist of some kind, you too are willing to be taken off course for a while, if a siren song calls to you. Unlike that Greek myth though, it need not end in tragedy on the rocks.
Best Advice to Build Better Writing
Above all other advice I have about improving one’s writing, I embrace a triumvirate of tips far above all others. Two are talked about often in writing and editing circles.
The first being to read. Read especially within the genre you wish to write in, but any reading on a regular basis is helpful. You need not study per se to improve your writing tendencies and instincts as you read. The mere status of reading regularly will through a sort of literary osmosis improve the quality of your own work.
Which brings up the second obvious requirement; to improve as a writer, you just write.
Not as obvious as it sounds.
Though I used to have patience with people who said, “I wish I could write, I could never do what you are doing, I have no time/energy/intelligence for it,” I find myself bristling more at this notion.
You have to write in order to be a writer. There is no choice and there is no excuse. The direct literal act of writing on a regular basis, if only for one’s self will oil machinery within your imagination and your brain that is not only useful but absolutely vital to your success. (Having nothing to do with sales or marketing.) If you have even the slightest respect for the work and creativity of writing anything you will either cease this pointless lament, or redouble your efforts to write something on a regular basis so as to improve. Practice may not make perfect, but doing nothing will make working writers annoyed with you.
My third piece of highest tier advice as not unique to me. Nevertheless it often gets caught up and lost in the shuffle and noise of methods and how-tos, personalities and plans and so many other aspects of the popular (and for some profitable) world of writing about writing.
It is this: You must be willing to be better.
That’s a silly thing to advise. If I didn’t want to get better, I would not even be asking the question.
But consider the statement again. You must be willing to be better, not merely get better.
That is to say, in short, if you are not willing to admit to yourself and the world at large that you both want and need to evolve as a writer, no other advice will matter in the end. You can craft and methods yourself into oblivion trying to make better writing, to catch up to the expectation of “good,” but you will never chance your powers as a wordsmith unless you can openly say, every day, “I can always be better.”
Now there is a dark side to this all important truth that you must avoid. This cannot be a self-flagellation technique. The road from this important wisdom to, “nothing I ever write is any good,” It is a short and steep one. Do not fall down it.
For to accept there is always something more to learn after each project or attempt is not to dismiss your current or even your past work. How insufferable the artist that proclaims a distaste for their own work because it falls short of the angels or some other delusion of grandeur. Believe in your work, and believe in your right to produce it. Just always be willing to ask the question, “how can I make the next thing better still?”
Once again, it is such an obvious-sounding approach it’s easy to overlook how many people actually reject it. They want to improve their marketing, their sales, get better at copying the masters or raise an eyebrow at their local NPR station. All of that may be wonderful ego fodder, and not bad in its own right. But it is not striving to improve. It is striving to be seen.
Hell, I want my work to be seen more than it is. If you’re a writer you probably do as well. Recognition is a fair, understandable desire for a writer. But if you stop evolving before you can say, “I am better doing this now than I was a few years ago,” what is being recognized?
I continue not to know where my career and status as a writer is supposed to be going longterm. Yet I am willing to be better along the way. At least, that is what I am trying to do.
Writing Advice From the Trenches
Much of what I post here is for writers or those curious about writing. No secrets there. But it comes with this caveat; I am a foot soldier in the trenches of the writing landscape.
Is this a war? In some ways, but it’s not the ideal metaphor. I use it in the sense that writing is not only a fight or a struggle of sorts, but one that by. many metrics I am neither winning no losing per se. I am just an unknown doing his very best to get over an increasingly muddy, challenging hill. Firing at me constantly are lack of connections, notoriety, resources, fame and so on. You know, many of the things people expect from a writer in order to care in the slightest about their advice.
I am no general in this fight. I am not even an officer for that matter. A volunteer, yes, but one that offers the only perspective he has for you for the time being–that of someone plugging along with many many others en masse as we hope to obtain the same goal of increased readership and recognition. And because we are not officers, we can only dig, climb, shoot, duck, repeat.
We blog. We post to writing websites. We publish and market out own work as best we can. We steel ourselves against the potent discouragement of not getting where we want to be while continuing to insist on attaching our names to quality, memorable work. Work that perhaps one day will transcend the life in time in which we toil for appreciation and recognition of any consistency.
Oh, my advice and thoughts on the craft will parallel much of what the “generals” would say. The influencers and the viral sensations sometimes attain their rank through such endeavors and knowledge. Yet while some may have forgotten, (or never knew) the essence of subjecting themselves to the proverbial barrage of ignored or forgotten writing, or at best small-to-modest readership, I live that life every day. Year after year in most cases I gain not miles, not even feet, but inches over challenging terrain. Inch by exhausting, discouraging inch.
My advice and offerings spring from that experience. And if you too feel like you are still fighting in the lowest, hottest, dirtiest parts of the writing battlefield, not wanting to give up everything and still hungry for how to improve your craft if not your lot, what I say and consider here may be for you.
I can offer you honesty even if I cannot offer you glamor. Mind to word, word to page, page to book, I have opinions and warnings to share.
Are you also enlisted personnel fighting for every inch?
Ty Unglebower 