Post-Fight: On Writing
How words get in the way
I’ve been a long time fan of MMA and I watched UFC 250 last night.
The politics of it were fascinating. But what I continue to come back to is the psychology of the fighters—particularly, how they speak about their preparation. I always end up thinking how similar it is to the way artists talk about their work.
The trick to a fight is keeping two states of mind in balance.
On one hand, fighters need to have a plan. They strategize in deeply complex ways about how their style will respond to their opponents’ style? Should they fight off their back foot? Do they lead with their left hand? Should they grapple?
But on the other hand, a fight is dynamic. No strategy is perfect. So, a fighter must be prepared to improvise. In some cases, they must be prepared to abandon their strategy all together. This requires, not so much a way of thinking as the discipline of not having a thought.
It’s a lot like what the bass player, Victor Wooten said. “Theory is tools. When we drive a car, we keep the tools in the trunk and hope we don’t need them. But they are there if we do.”
A writer has to do the same thing. They must study their sentences, search out brevity, expand their vocabulary. But, in the heat of composition, they often find themselves responding. Their writing surprises them and puts them in situations where rules aren’t so much wrong as meaningless.
Theory is a tool and you only need tools if something breaks.
Leading up to UFC 250 Justin Gaethje, the new unified Middleweight champion, was asked how he feels. He said, “I don’t feel anything. I don’t even expect to win.”
But after he won, he explained himself. He said, “I had to except that I was going to lose; get knocked out. That way I could go to that primal place.”
This kind of strategy—or, maybe, a strategy for not having one—gets at what a writer needs to do. It wasn’t as if Gaethje didn’t spend months preparing, studying tape, constructing an approach. But he knew that over reliance on that information would open him up to what he couldn’t see until the moment it appeared.
And look where he had to go psychologically to achieve that openness. He had to embrace failure—not as a virtue (a sort of everyone gets a trophy thing). But as an inevitability. He had to know that there was nothing he could do but act.
In other words, it was by entering that space—that darkness—that he could strip away his language. Semantics, anticipation, plans, were getting in the way. He knew that the moment would require of him something he could never anticipate.
This perspective, for a writer, achieves a kind of gold standard: writing that feels like it isn’t being read. We’ve all had this experience. We open a book, begin to read, and then look at the clock. It’s been an hour. Where were you?
It’s the kind of writing that transcends reading and becomes a conversation. I suspect that when we encounter texts like this the writer has entered that “primal place.” They aren’t fixing the car. They are driving it.
That of course takes confidence; the ability to face our fears. For this reason we need to be like Gaethje and expect to get knocked out. Words shouldn’t get in the way of a good fight.