Reader,
As a kid, I played in a Christian softball league that refused to keep score. I can't remember the rationale for this rule. There were outs, and there were runs, but officially, there were no winners or losers.
Unofficially, of course, all of us kids knew the score. Every now and then, a coach would mildly encourage us to simmer down. But that did little to dampen our energy: we wanted to play with something on the line.
12-year-old me wouldn't have known what to do with this quote from Leonard Cohen (found on Austin Kleon's blog):
I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….
Honestly, most of my selves would have been annoyed by this quote. I'm a competitive person who plays to win, whether it's hockey, kickball, or solitaire.
In recent years, however, I've discovered that this competitive spirit gets in the way of my creativity. It's downright paralyzing. Sitting down to write loses its sense of wonder. Instead, I'm plagued by various anxieties:
- "Will this be good enough for X?"
- "Will I say something better on this topic than Y?"
- "Will my next essay be better than my last?"
I'm not proud of these thoughts. But they're there, and when I let them take the metaphorical wheel, the metaphorical car doesn't even get out of the metaphorical driveway. These hypotheticals leave no room for the presence and curiosity I need to write.
What's striking about this Cohen quote is that he's not denying the reality of competition. Some books are better than others. Some sentences are inferior to others. But trying to create from a place of "I must be better than [blank]" won't deliver your best work.
When we sit down to write, our job is not to be "better than." Our job is put words to what we see. That's the only way we can say something worthwhile, and it's the crucial first step to recovering a sense of play in our writing. By shedding those expectations and imaginary measuring sticks, we give ourselves permission to let loose on the page and see what happens.
A prompt, for those who want it: When you sit down to write, who and/or what are you competing with?
Keep your stick on the ice.
Frank.