In Writing and Skating, It Hurts More Never to Try At All

I started skating in fifth grade, in 1985, but only at age forty-four did I decide to get serious about it. People often call kids “fearless,” while adults are supposed to become risk-averse and brittle with age, but I have never skated so well in my life. Fear controlled me as a kid. I avoided big ramps because I didn’t want to get hurt. Skating street, I tried tricks like shove-its and kickflips, but my skills plateaued quickly because I didn’t push myself. Dabbling was easier than committing, but only persistent people improve at anything. By forty-four, I was still scared. I doubted myself. But I went for it. I’d been writing seriously for nearly twenty years, so I knew what it meant to be afraid of something but to do it anyway.

I grew up drawing for several hours a day, meaning I was a serious visual artist. As I read more books and the world grew more interesting to explore and think about, language started to resemble a more capable medium to capture it than I could visually. In college, I found authors who wrote the way I wanted to write, but I had trouble emulating them. I journaled, but when I tried to write first-person essays, they read more like journal entries than narratives. I tried to examine environmental issues and other big ideas by combining them with personal stories, but those pieces resembled meandering philosophical screeds more than Edward Abbey’s or Terry Tempest Williams’s writing. I didn’t expect to write well as soon as I tried it, but I didn’t practice much either.

Only at age twenty-six did I finally test myself: Create a daily writing routine or move on. Every day before work, I’d sit at my laptop, drink tea, and type. It was miserable—the labor, the repetition, nothing coming out right. Occasionally I’d finish a whole story. After two years I wrote my first nonfiction-book manuscript. The sense of completion was better than the material itself, but that sense carried me through the next project: I could do this.

After a few years, I started completing more cohesive, nuanced narratives that I submitted to literary magazines. Mags declined them. This was frustrating too—all that work only earned rejections—but enduring a sense of rejection is a valuable literary practice, and one acceptance is all it takes for your writing life to feel like it’s finally started. That’s the universal story: Keep at it. We skaters might say that if you go for it, you’ll nail it. When I got back on my board at forty-four, these hard-earned lessons from writing were what most informed my skating.

Skaters are constantly trying new tricks, testing our boundaries to expand our abilities. We often get hurt in the process, but we try until we land that new trick, and then we aim for another. Similarly, when starting a new writing project, writers often aim for a new plateau: more beautiful lines, more concise sentences, more ambitious narrative structures. As with skating, there’s a lot to fear: What if we run out of creativity the way a well goes dry? What if no one publishes what we finish? What if we can’t finish at all? You write despite these fears, just like you skate with them.

Only in middle age did I learn that the point isn’t to banish fear entirely. It’s to hold on to our fear while doing the scary thing and to see how much we will allow it to influence our future activity. This approach has earned me cracked ribs, bruised hips, broken toes, a broken finger, torn shoulder ligaments, olecranon bursitis on my elbow and knee, bleeding butt cheeks, and what would have been two serious head injuries if not for my helmet. When I resumed skating, I’d sometimes hit the concrete and spend days limping. One hip injury left me groaning while lowering myself into chairs for a week. My hips had permanent long bruises on them that summer, and I had to sleep on my left side for two months until my right shoulder ligaments healed, but eventually I’d pull a new trick. Because I tolerated constant injury, I’m better than I ever was.

Only in middle age did I learn that the point isn’t to banish fear entirely.

In three years, I’ve learned to do 50-50s, axle stalls, rock ’n’ rolls, rock to fakies, fakie rocks, feebles, long grinds, and short board slides, and even how to come back into the bowl fakie, meaning backward, which used to scare the shit out of me. Having these tricks in my repertoire isn’t about looking cool. It’s about experiencing new shades of joy as well as the pleasure of improving. It was writing that taught me that lesson: The more I challenge convention, the more I experiment and let go of perfection and expectation, the more interesting my work will be, and that keeps things fresh. Learning new tricks can feel like finishing new pieces: Each one is different, each demands new capabilities and exhibits new styles—some bold, some subtle—and when you can look back at what you’ve done, it fortifies you to weather the challenges that inevitably come.

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The world gives writers many reasons to doubt ourselves. Magazines decline our submissions. Agents ignore our queries. We may never win a prize. Readers leave scathing comments about our work online or, worse, barely notice that we published something at all. Writers put our hearts and time into our work, but there are too few readers, too few paying markets. Then there’s our internal struggle: Why can’t I write faster? Why can’t I finish this draft? I have literally never won a fellowship, a grant, or a residency. This used to get to me. But I never let it keep me from finding ways to write anywhere I could find space and time: kitchens, cars, libraries, campsites. Like skaters’ physical injuries, writers carry scars that can undermine our resolve and even sideline us.

Years ago, my agent got me on the phone with editors from two major commercial publishers about my first nonfiction proposal. Finally, I thought, I’m going to get that big New York publisher money and quit my day job to write a book! Neither editor bought the book. It took me half a year and tons of reporting to write that proposal—even trips to New York City and Japan—and I spent months carrying a gloomy sense of defeat as I considered what to do next. Rather than treating this as the end of my dream, I decided to abandon that book project for others, which I had to write around my day jobs and would eventually publish without an agent.

I’ve had other writing wounds too. In 2014, I did some reporting for a short web piece about agriculture and drought for The New Yorker. We signed a contract. They eventually killed the piece. It felt like I had one of publishing’s shiniest golden rings within reach—a magazine whose italicized name in my bio would open doors for the rest of my professional life—and they yanked it away. That disappointment, coupled with the book defeat, ate at me for months. I told my girlfriend I couldn’t take it anymore. What was the point when the hill had no summit? Instead of giving in to my disappointment and concluding “Fuck The New Yorker!” I analyzed my material to see what did not work. Then the pain subsided enough for me to feel passion again, and I decided to sit back down at the computer to work on something I used to love. That “something” ended up becoming my favorite book of the ones I’ve published, about California. Every time I see its cover, I feel grateful I moved through the darkness. The thing you create after your biggest fall may be your new highwater mark.

As the years pile up and your once-lustrous hair turns gray, your body of work accrues and patterns emerge. You can recognize which moments led your life in which directions, see how your routine behaviors deprived or empowered you, and observe the ways your confidence grows with age. It’s weird. While your favorite clothes become dated and you start to look outdated yourself, you can often feel increasingly cool inside. This surprised me. So many forty- and fifty-somethings I know also say they’ve never felt as good about themselves as they do now. We may want a twenty-year-old’s resilience from a hangover or a thirty-year-old’s enthusiasm, but we don’t want to be those ages again. For those of us whose twenties and thirties were plagued with self-doubt, self-sabotage, and uncertainty, middle age is often the time when we most fully become ourselves. For me, that’s because I have two activities that feed my confidence and bring me joy, offsetting the other inherent changes that age brings.

It’s possible that, as you age, the things that once excited you can lose their allure. The glowing edges of life itself can start to dull, as you weigh the ease of staying at home in your pj’s on Saturday night compared to staying out late at a concert. But, for me, skating keeps everything luminous, including writing when it grinds me down. When I feel like I just want to take the easy way out—stay home, not get dressed, not get injured or invest months in an essay—I remind myself how good it always feels after I skate or write. Writing can be miserable. So can falling on your back, but leaving the skate park glowing from exertion feels as good as working on a new piece. That glow enlivens everything else in my life, like a good rain soaking the thirsty ground. That’s true even when I fall.

Another of skating’s greatest lessons: Many of us can learn to tolerate more discomfort than we think. In fact, the day I wrote that last sentence, I fell at a skate park and cracked more ribs. They ache three weeks later, as I revise this—I wince every time I sneeze—but the pain is worth it, because I pulled tricks that day that I never had at that park before. I call this “the pain calculation.” Skaters must make peace with the inevitability of injury. Wearing pads and a helmet means you’ll get hurt less often and less severely, but the pads don’t cover everything. If you want to skate at a certain level, you need to figure out how much suffering you’re willing to endure to enjoy those moments of bliss when everything clicks. A skater’s personal pain-to-joy ratio is just a cost-benefit analysis. Our threshold for discomfort, like our priorities, changes over time. I’ve broken my elbow skating. Am I willing to break something that requires surgery, though? If I end up having surgery, my calculation may change.

Writers ask ourselves similar questions for the duration of our writing lives: How much debt, doubt, criticism, disinterest, struggle, sexism, racism, low pay, lack of employment, and frustration is this writing thing worth? Test yourself—you might surprise yourself. The next time the magazine rejections roll in, file them away and submit that rejected piece somewhere else. The next time too many agents say your book is great but not commercial, thank them and start searching for the indie publishers who find niche markets outside the mainstream. Skate the ramp from a different angle. Injury can change our strategy, but it doesn’t have to stop our activity. You still may discover your limit, and that’s healthy.

It helps to learn how to fall. In skating, that means learning to “run it out”—where you manage to stay upright and on your feet while your board flies—or learn to slide on your hips or kneepads down a steep slope. If you want to publish something you believe in, you learn to fall too: to endure a battered ego, to feel the skin of your self-assurance scrape off along the literary pavement, to maintain your vision when too many commenters are yelling about how your writing should sound and what your piece did “wrong.” Publishing and skating are scary. I get nervous about what readers will think of my work, and I get nervous whenever I drive to a skate park. I try not to overthink it. I just get in and go. My skating motto is “Think less, do more.”

Overthinking is tempting, though. How can you not think about the fact that you’re about to ride your board down a six-foot-high concrete surface that’s almost as straight as a wall? But overthinking interferes with what your body needs to do. If I think too much on my board, I might not do it in the first place, because that shit is crazy. Of course, writers have to think, but again, don’t overthink. If I thought about how long it would take to write my last book, about the 1994 album Deconstruction, I never would have started it. Interviewing underground rock legends that I grew up listening to? I was completely intimidated, but once I interviewed one band member, I had to interview the other member and then interview others involved with the band. I always start without assessing the lift—how long a project will take, how much reporting and transcription it will demand, all the work required after our daughter goes to bed—then I back myself up against the proverbial wall, trapping myself so I can only get out by doing the work. I know that it will irritate me too much to have started something promising but never finished it.

I’ve also done the opposite. After trying to write about California’s rural center for over a decade, I nearly gave up. When I finally took a self-funded two-week reporting trip through the region in 2014, I only transcribed a fraction of my source interviews when I returned home. The project’s scale intimidated me. Shaping my reporting into chapters that weaved in research and historical recreation took So. Much. Work. I already had a full-time job. I eventually published one piece of that reporting as a story. Then I let the rest languish. My notebooks, photos, and digital recordings just sat there, neglected, but they also haunted me. After a few years of that, I accepted I’d wasted enough time and I furiously started transcribing interviews, shaping notes, organizing research. Once again, thinking too much had stalled me out. I needed to put the board on the coping and drop in. When my wife and I successfully conceived our daughter, I had the ultimate deadline, so I definitely couldn’t stop then. In a sense, age is another built-in deadline: Do it now or risk never doing it. We never have as much time as we think! It’s riskier to neglect your projects than to pursue them, because abandoning them guarantees our disappointment. Taking chances by making something at least offers the possibility of reward.

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In writing as in skating, we have to take risks. What’s the worst that can happen if you submit your fiction to the Granta or your book manuscript to a big indie press? They say no. No right now can mean yes later. Pitch Harper’s. Pitch Poets & Writers. Query the biggest literary agents. If they decline, no harm done. If you land one, you never would have succeeded if you’d talked yourself out of trying. Take risks in the work itself too. Learning a craft takes time. You can always throw away your drafts. But as you experiment, you will create exciting sentences and generate fresh ideas and make surprising creative connections, and you can’t do that if you avoid risk. Instead of telling yourself you can’t do something, set your literary bar high and try to rise to meet it. Chances are, you eventually will. It may just take a while, and a lot of falls and Band-Aids.

I put lotion on my turkey neck. I moisturize my wrinkling hands. And I try to live a creative life according to my own vision.

Even as younger generations of smarter, hipper writers with smooth skin edge my Gen X ass into the margins, I still feel good about my abilities, my place in the culture, and the writing I create. I put lotion on my turkey neck. I moisturize my wrinkling hands. And I try to live a creative life according to my own vision. Of course, I prefer positive reactions to my writing, just as I like when I skate a good run and people at the park go, “Woot!” It’s just that, ultimately, what I publish is good enough. I know my writing is flawed. Like me, it always needs improvement. Other writers win the awards. They publish books with big commercial publishers. We’re different kinds of writers with different voices, walking different paths. Another writer would probably write this better or analyze a certain issue more critically, but this is the best I can do at this moment, and honest effort is the ultimate measure of my performance. I am rarely the most able skater at the park, but I am usually the one smiling the most, because when I skate and when I write, I am always my first audience.

There’s this idea that artists do their best work in their youth. It’s not always true. If we keep challenging ourselves, keep embracing fear and pushing through self-doubt, we can make better art over the course of our lives. Writing is both a craft and a mode of existence. Creativity isn’t just about the art we make. It’s a way to engage with the world and solve challenges. When you’re creative, your life is as much your art as your medium. I know I’m going to skate until I can’t anymore, and I’m going to write even when no one wants to hear me anymore. I’m going to look pretty banged up as I do, but it just feels too good not to, or put another way: It hurts worse to never try at all.

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