Leave It All On The Page

I like life lessons that are simple enough to apply across the board, and they don’t get much more stripped-down than lessons you can learn from boxing. Win or lose, there’s something every fighter wants to be able to say after a bout: “I left it all in the ring.”

You might have heard a variation of this during last month’s Winter Olympics, from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno: “I left it all on the ice.”

Meaning that by the time the final bell rings, or the race is run, that’s it for you. You’re done in. You don’t have any more left for that day, that hour, the very next minute, and in this moment, at least, the outcome pales beside one fact that can never be taken away:

You’ve given it everything you had.

I don’t think I ever truly, madly, deeply appreciated this until last December, when I took my Krav Maga orange belt test. At first it started out fun. Then it got a little challenging. Then a lot challenging. At about hour five I joined the push-it-til-you-puke club. Came back out and dug in to finish the last 45 minutes as strongly as I could, even though I was afraid I’d blown it.

Never in my life had I been this miserable without food poisoning being involved. Got home and could barely make it up a flight of stairs, two-handing it up the rail, clump-clump, clump-clump, one step at a time. I slumped into a hot bath and … OK, I didn’t pray for death, but if I’d noticed a scythe blade in the doorway, I’d’ve told the Reaper, “Come on, ya moldy bastard, there’s an extra five in it for you if you make it quick.”

Exhilarating, though? Like nothing else. Except for one thing.

The best writing experiences I’ve ever had have left me feeling the same way. The best writing experiences I’ve ever had were the ones that concluded with a collapse. Sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. Sometimes it felt as if it were the rest of the world that had fallen away, and I lingered above it in floating tranquility.

These are the ones I remember in sensory details of time and place. These are the ones that make me wonder where the words really came from. The ones that spit me back into the world with the surreal, stumbling dislocation of a teleporting misfire. These are the ones in which I rode all the way to the end on a wave of jubilant terror that I wasn’t going to make it, but somehow did.

The ones when I left it all on the page.

As creators, we sometimes have a tendency to conserve, to hold back. Maybe it stems from the admonitions we’ve heard since childhood:

• Don’t spend it all in one place.
• Put away a little something for a rainy day.
• Be sure to save some for later.
• Put that back, you’ll spoil your dinner!

All those bits of code designed to program us into obedient, frugal, regulated little models of prudence and moderation.

Fine. Live like that away from the desk if you want to. But if you bring it to the page, it’s like showing up at the pub on Saint Paddy’s Day wearing a solemn face and a T-shirt that says, “Kiss me, I’m Amish.”

This creative reticence comes in two major forms:

(1) The temptation to hold back ideas

Tell me you haven’t been here before: You’re about to introduce a character, inject an idea, or just lay down a nice turn of phrase … and then stop. Not because it isn’t good enough, but because it seems too good for now.

You want to save it for later. Later in the same work. Later in life, for another work altogether.

Don’t. Don’t sit on it.

Introduce it, inject it, lay it down now.

You’ll never have quite this same blend of energy and enthusiasm and freshness again. Ideas left to ripen have a way of going stale, shrinking as the juice evaporates through their skin.

You’re sending yourself a bad message, too: that the well is running low, so you better not drink as deep, or that you’re incapable of coming up with an even better idea when you think you’ll actually use this one.

Ideas are there to be used, not rationed.

(2) The impulse to hold back ourselves

Like an archaeological dig, writing fiction proceeds in layers. When you do it right, you’re doing more than uncovering the intricacies of story and character, the minutiae you couldn’t be aware of during the planning phase. You’re revealing pieces of yourself, too, maybe parts you didn’t know about, or didn’t understand, or were afraid to confront or embrace.

Sometimes it all spills out the first trip through. Other times it builds up little by little, another thin, sedimentary layer with each pass of revision.

Whatever works.

As a reader, the stuff that gets to me, stays with me, makes me want to come back for more, isn’t the stuff that skims the surface. It’s not the stuff that reads like a padded outline or a head exercise with no investment of heart. All top motion. All ripples and no undertow.

Instead, what hooks me are the ones where I get a sense of the writer having dived as deep as she possibly could to get to the truth of her tale, not stopping until she was up to her elbows in the silt at the bottom.

For myself — and from myself — I don’t want the novel, the story, that anyone could have written, given access to the same notes. I want the version only one of us could’ve written. The version pulsing with a feeling that, to the author, every day and every paragraph mattered as much as breathing.

I know — they all feel like they do, at the time. Even the ripple-skimmers.

It doesn’t always translate. Not when it hasn’t been pushed sufficiently hard. Whatever lay behind it, not everything made it all the way to the page. Instead of going for more sweat, tears, blood, and heart rate, somebody settled for his idea of close enough and called it a day.

The orange belt test…

As it turned out, I passed. But I had serious doubts. Didn’t feel one bit good about how I’d done, and they don’t pass you for showing up. They don’t even pass you for finishing.

Just as editors and publishers don’t say yes simply on the basis of your having a completed manuscript. The same way readers don’t love something just because you wrote “The End.”

Instead, Yes and Love are earned through toil that sometimes hurts. A lot. I got the impression I’d earned that new color coding not in the first five hours, but in those last 45 minutes.

It’s true, though — no single work can be everything to everybody. Regardless of how deep you dug or dove, not everyone is going to get it. That’s OK. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how many do.

The surest way to get there? Again, boxing has an answer, in something fighters are always wise to do: Never leave it in the judges’ hands.

Meaning that win, lose, or die trying…

They go for the knockout every time.