Excerpts from The Believer: No One Gave It to You

Four conversations with writers and artists about the role that athletics and training play in their creative lives, featuring Marcus Burke, R. O. Kwon, Alexis Madrigal, and Daniel Alarcón

During my senior year of high school, a guidance counselor who had it in for me gleefully noticed I was missing a semester’s worth of PE. I still have the paper on the Cupertino High School letterhead, informing my parents that I was in danger of not graduating. Under “Notes,” the counselor wrote, “Jennifer must pass bowling.” So extreme was my distaste for sports and physical activity that of the three options given to me, which included regular PE or weight lifting, I had chosen the third: driving to Homestead Bowl at 6:30 every morning of that semester.

Other than during a brief period, in my twenties, of braving the elliptical machines at the Embarcadero YMCA in San Francisco, and drunken dancing at a party called Sweater Funk, this distaste did not wear off. If anything, it matured into something more sweeping: Exercise, gyms, and sports in general were like parts of a video game that failed to render. They just didn’t exist to me. Relatedly, I was uninterested in what my body, with its cryptic aches and pains, might have been trying to communicate. I remember politely nodding but privately balking at a therapist whom I saw for a short stint, because she kept asking me where I felt emotions in my body. Why would she say something like that, when we all knew emotions happened in your head, the only place that really mattered?

Then, about two years ago, I started going to a personal trainer down the street from where I lived. I was nearing forty and getting assailed by articles about how my bones were about to deteriorate. But I was too scared to go to the gym, which at this point felt like picking up a book in a foreign language. I thought my trainer might be like a kind of translator, easing me into it. And she was, patiently directing me toward various contraptions and monitoring me for bad form, overexertion, and, more important, despair.

Some months later, feeling emboldened, I took my derelict Bianchi to the repair shop, and contemplated riding it into the East Bay Hills. A friend had suggested Old Tunnel Road. But what they hadn’t mentioned was an unforgiving slog along Broadway before you even get to that road. On the hot September day when I finally tried this ride, I found myself gasping for air, and felt like my brain was being squeezed between mattresses. Because of the topography and the adjacent freeway, the route is something of an optical illusion: It seems flat, and Old Tunnel in the distance looks far steeper than it is.

An old, dependable inner voice saw its cue. Look at you. You’re not even at the hard part and you’re tired. This is embarrassing! Don’t ever try—or even speak of—this again.

But then, to my genuine surprise, a completely unfamiliar voice shouldered that one aside. OK, but what if we try just making it to that stoplight? If you get there and you really don’t feel good, we can turn around and go home. But I bet you’ll be fine after a little break.

This foreign encouragement was so jarring that it took me a moment to recognize what it was: my trainer’s voice. And it wasn’t just on this ride that I heard it. Whenever I felt overwhelmed by the scope of a book project I’d taken on, or daunted by the unfamiliar things it required me to try, my old self-berating perfectionism would give way to something new: an inner monologue that not only didn’t think I was a complete moron, but also was attentive to my body, my brain, and their interface. Thanks to my trainer, when I finally went off to the gym by myself, my workouts continued to be object lessons in a kindly self-awareness and the slow but sure nature of training that, on an everyday level, shares so much with the process of writing a book.

I’m hopeful that my bones are deteriorating at a slightly slower pace, but what I found by entering this world was so much more: a different kind of self-conception and self-regard, a broader definition of intelligence, and a general respect for the world of athletics. (I even own an Oakland Ballers hat now.) I also became interested in talking to other artists and writers about the way athletics informs their own creative lives. Were there any surprising translations between the two contexts, as there had been for me? What did a sports practice allow them to do or think in their writing practice that they couldn’t have otherwise? And if we were to dissolve the false dichotomy of art and sports, what would it allow us to see?

—Jenny Odell

MARCUS BURKE
[WRITER]

• Athletic activity: Basketball
• Practiced from: 1995–2010
• Preferred hours: At night when the world felt quiet
• Frequency and duration: Almost every day. Even if I didn’t play, I’d dribble the ball outside my house.
• Accomplishments: 4 years of college basketball; starter senior year
• Highest scoring season: Senior year, I averaged 9 points and 5 rebounds.

MARCUS BURKE: I was a college basketball player during the four years I worked on my first book. So I would have to write in strange places. There’d be times I would be writing in the back of the bus on the way to games. My coach just couldn’t put it together between me being a writer and also an athlete. If I messed up a play, he’d just be like, “Marcus, this isn’t a draft. You don’t get another draft of this play.” [Laughs]

THE BELIEVER: I mean, there is a difference between practice and performance, right? Like in sports, what I see as a spectator is all performance, but I imagine that from the practice side of things it’s incredibly repetitive.

MB: That’s where I feel like writing and sports correlate. I have one book out, which means the world has seen one of my works. I put that book out eleven or twelve years ago. Nobody sees the amount of time it takes to actually put all that together. It can look like you’re doing nothing. And I feel like with training, when it comes to basketball, it’s almost like when you have to take a game-winning shot and somebody says, “Oh my gosh, how did you make that shot?” And it’s like, “Because I’ve taken that shot a thousand times.”

With writing, you kind of have to stay in it, in the same way that if you want to be in shape as an athlete, you have to continue to train and train and train. And there are different aspects. For example, I feel like reading is like the weight lifting of writing. Because sometimes it can be arduous. It’s making you better, but you don’t necessarily feel the payoff initially, as you’re engaged in the act. And it only shows up later in this mysterious way, if at all.

BLVR: [Laughs] Right, it might not. I feel like with writing there’s this notion right now—and this isn’t even getting into AI—that you could just become something overnight. There’s this lack of patience and commitment and acknowledgment that it takes a long time, it’s intensely private, and it can be really lonely.

MB: I grew up in a funky situation where the group of kids that were around me—what became of us wasn’t good, you know? And I think back on those times and how I didn’t get lost in the sauce the way some of my peers did. It was because of basketball. I think about a lot of those lonely nights of, like, doing ball handling in the streets. I remember those lonely times when it’s very similar to writing, like you have to love it when things are going on and when nothing is going on.

BLVR: It reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is writerly stamina. And I’m like, What actually is that? I think for me, it’s partially an attitude toward small failures.

MB: With writing, there’s things that give you moments of pause, where you’re just like, Hm. OK, I have a thing. I can change it. Moving on. You kind of have to take a look and keep on thinking.

For me, the transition was dealing with not being physically tired, but being mentally tired, where I haven’t worked my body today, but I’ve worked my brain supremely. It was learning how to get that writerly stamina. I have kids now, and I teach at Texas Tech, so I don’t get to write every day. But I try to as much as I can, just because I feel it’s like a muscle that weakens if you don’t work it. Especially with working on a book, you’re strongest when you’re hitting it every day.

I look at reading season and writing season in the same way I would look at preseason, postseason, and season. They’re like different modes, and they kind of correlate with basketball. When I’m in a reading season, it’s because I need to refortify the fortress, you know? I need to take in some new work, take in some new ideas. See how people are doing it. To me, that’s like the training, right? And then you hit a point when you’re a little full, when you’re like, Now I need to just go do the thing.

BLVR: Do you think a certain love of the game also plays a role here?

MB: To me, the key correlation between writing and basketball is that you have this compulsion and it defies logic, in a way, because you just do it. And it’s going to be hard; it might suck. But nonetheless, this is the hill you’re going to die on. For me, life would be crazy, but I’d always find my way back to the basketball court. No matter what was going on, I could always go shoot around; I could always find my way back. And I feel very similarly about writing now: that it’s a place of both comfort and great anxiety.

I feel like the best place is when you’re in the midst of working and you’re just receiving and downloading your story to your page. You’re not thinking about word choice; you’re not worried about structure. You’re just putting it down.

To me, that’s like game time, when you’re playing on autopilot. You’ve done all the training, you’ve done all the stuff. And it’s just time to go be active in the craft. You go out there and produce because you’ve trained for all the situations and everything. I feel like the compulsion is what really keeps you in the vocation and allows you to show up for those moments of glory. Because they’re so short-lived—it’s like an eclipse, you know? [Laughs] So much goes into being able to say, This book is done now, or We won a championship. Nobody sees you getting up at 6 a.m. to work out. Nobody sees all those late nights and early mornings and just having to weather the emotional storm of it. Because I feel like for a lot of people, you know, that in itself would take them out.

I remember when I was giving my speech to the team on senior night during college, saying to them, “A season’s never a season unless you think about quitting a couple of times.” And everybody in the room, shamefully, was just like resigned nodding. And I was like, “I know you thought about quitting. Don’t lie and act like you ain’t thought about quitting.” But we’re all here because we didn’t quit, you know? I’ve been working on my novel for, like, a decade now. And I think I’m getting close to finishing it. I’m praying I’m getting close to finishing it. But nonetheless, the baseline resolve is: It will be done when it’s done, and quitting is not on the table.

It’s like what I was telling my students: “The training is the training. If you don’t like it, you can stop, and nobody’s mad at you for that.” There are no false kings in the game. You have to sit down, you have to write your book, and nobody can do that for you. Whatever you need to do to game yourself up to do that. There’s no hate from my end, but I guess I like an athletic approach to things. Which is just to say that I look at it like: It’s work. Do it. And the more you give it, the more it’ll give you.

BLVR: Yeah, and it’ll be meaningful because of that, because no one gave it to you. It’s yours.

MB: And nobody can take it.

Continue reading the rest of these conversatiuons over at The Believer.