Chapter 54: When Writers Choke

We know athletes choke because writers tell us they do. For all long as games have been played, choking has endured as the default explanation for every dropped pass, missed free throw, unforced error, botched putt, misplayed ground ball – for every athletic failure committed when the stakes are highest. Choking can, among the less charitable pressbox wags, indicate a lack of character, of inner resolve, or what for decades was called “intestinal fortitude.” Read: weakness. 

Athletes fail for many reasons but it is the emotional, rather than the physical, that invites criticism – think of the harsh treatment of the great alpine skier Mikeala Shiffrin especially on social media after her struggles at the Winter Olympics. Emotional explanations provide fresh material for the story line: What got into your head, champ?

Because when things go wrong for athletes, it is often a matter of stray thoughts slipping into their consciousness. Once that begins to happen, the single mindedness that allows the best athletes to screen out the noise evaporates, leaving them with a thousand or so unwanted thoughts which generally end with the thought of failure. 

Tanya Luhrmann, the Stanford anthropologist whose name and work has appeared in earlier chapters, wrote a terrific piece in Harpers recently about the process through which athletes work to keep their thoughts to a bare minimum to avoid thinking about the great risk they are assuming of, say, attempting a triple axel at the national figure skating championships.

“The sheer capacity to perform is not the issue,” she wrote: “it’s whether athletes can get their scattered, hyperventilating, nail-biting minds out of the way and just do what they are capable of, or whether they will be like the rest of us, who cannot.”

Tanya is not an athlete but she is a writer, and knows a thing or two about how what she describes is not limited to those on the playing field: “Writers find their mouths go dry, their palms slightly damp”…before, she adds, “their words flow out into the world.”

So, yes, the dry mouth and damp palms. If you write you know those sensations, and worse. You know the acid stomach, the tapping feet, the shaking hands – all those physical manifestations that come when you are about to write and can’t. Call it writer’s block. But better, I think, to call it choking. Because if you do, there are ways to make it go away. Just like athletes who you might have even once characterized as a choker.

Tanya has done groundbreaking work on the voices people hear – whether it is the voice of God, or voices we might associate with madness. This time she was interested in the voices of coaches. She spoke with eighteen elite athletes, many of whom spoke about the power that a word or phrase uttered by their coaches had in keeping those stray, unnerving, and potentially catastrophic thoughts at bay. One runner told how her coach told her to “slam the door” as she turned a corner. Another’s coach told him, “let your belly go.” On their own, these expressions can sound like gibberish. But as Tanya learned, to the athlete who hears it from their coach, it can be a mantra. It flips the switch from on to off – meaning that what’s left are those words and nothing else. 

Sadly, I watch my students choke all the time. They have the story; it’s thought out and reported; they have the goods. They’re ready to write. They start, or sort of start. They hit a wall. And over that wall, like a band of marauders, come thoughts. Not thoughts about the story but thoughts about…them. Their limitations, their insecurities, their families, the teachers who didn’t think they had what it took, the boyfriends or girlfriends who broke their hearts…You take my point. As Tanya wrote, “How do you get the self out of the way?”

What’s more, how do you push away counterproductive thinking when, unlike athletes, what you are doing as a writer is thinking?

It does not help to suggest you think less. 

Instead it means thinking like an athlete. 

Consider that like athletes, writers have developed muscle memory. Athletes perform the same task again and again in practice and competition. Physically they know exactly what to do because they have done it, oh, a million times. Even so, they need to remind their bodies; note how some athletes will in the moments before they compete, swing a bat, or mimic a free throw, or take racing stride in slow motion. It’s as if they’re saying to their physical selves: remember this, pal? You got it.

Writers’ muscle memory also comes from practice – and performance – in writing combinations of words that become paragraphs that eventually become stories. They have, over time, acquired a skill set. Their writing, daunting as it can feel, is in reality not an end in itself, but a means for conveying ideas, observations, insights, tales. 

Like an athlete, you cannot just tell yourself you can do it, or even smack yourself in the face a few times to get your head in the game. Instead you want to slow things down, to remind yourself – your mind, and by extension your hands, the sensation of writing words. Any words. A letter to yourself helps: Dear ______, what do you want to say in this story? 

This is also one reason why writers love deadlines, even when they complain about them. A deadline is a writer’s equivalent of “talk to the hand.” It’s not about you anymore. It’s about something apart from you – the deadline, and the editor enforcing it. It’s not so much that deadlines deny you time to think. Rather, it’s that they deny you the luxury of thinking about anything that stands in the way of meeting that deadline. 

The process – the tricks – of screening out extraneous, self-defeating thoughts serves the same purpose as the coach’s voice. It forces you to respond to that cue, that mantra, that trick of the mind, which can almost instantly overwhelm those thoughts that actually have no momentum of their own; they’re just sitting there waiting for you to leave the door open.

As it happens, I was an athlete in college. I was a fencer, a just okay fencer. I had one, count ‘em, one great bout. It’s the only one I remember, and not just because it was my first. We were in the middle of a heated match against a team we badly wanted to beat. Fights were close to breaking out when my coach, trying to mix things up, put me, a sub, in. 

I had no time to think. I had no time to ready myself. I was in and there was another fencer at the end of the fencing strip with an epee that he was going to hit me with. I kind of went a little nuts. I just went at this guy who was a lot better than me. I scored the first point and then the second. I don’t know if it came on either of the next two points but from someplace that for the life of me I did not know existed, I performed a move in which I flat out ran straight at him and slipped the point of my epee into his side as I flew past. I was up 4-0, a point from winning.

I did not win. Maybe someone called time or maybe the fact that I was on the verge of winning got me thinking. And I was finished. He made quick work of me. Afterward my coach, an intimidating former French Olympian, said “that was a beautiful move.” It was the highpoint of a very modest athletic career. I tried that season and next to replicate the move, and the sensation of that bout. It never happened.

My coach, talented as he was, was not the mantra type (when he called time out he’d approach and say something along the lines of, there is a move you can make here to beat this guy but you don’t know it). From that bout on I stumbled along, and with each loss, the thoughts essentially took up permanent residence in my subconscious, like relatives who show up and sleep on the couch forever.

I tell this story because it endures for me as a single, crystalline moment when I, worrywort that I am, discovered what I could do if I didn’t think – what I could do if I simply allowed myself to do what my demanding coach had taught me to do, and with it the muscle memory I had achieved. 

I try to remember that when I write and my mouth gets dry and my palms get damp.