Blogocentric Formulations

Sportsing & Audiences

PROMPT: Are sports important.. can you compare sports to any aspect of life? Are sports important in terms of growth and development? Did you participate in sports yourself? Do you agree or disagree? I've heard people say sports today lack ethics, do you think that is true?

Sports, or more generally athletics, are an incredibly important part of a successful life. According to the CDC  , 34.9% of Americans (approx. 78.6 million) are considered not just overweight, but obese. And the estimated annual medical cost of obesity was $147 billion in 2008, which calculates out to an average of $1,429 per year in added medical costs for those who are obsese over those who are not. When you look at statistics like that, I don't know how you can think that physical activity is anything other than one of the most important activities you can spend your time pursuing. And there are an endless number of activities you can participate in. If you're not one for competitive team sports like baseball, football, or basketball, you could participate in a competitive individual sports like tennis, golf ( ugh, I can't believe I'm calling that a sport), or martial arts. Hell, if you're not one for competitive sports at all, there are plenty of types of athletic activity that can be undertaken recreationally without the slightest hint of competition (although competitive versions do exist): hiking, surfing, cycling, running, rock climbing, skating, kayaking, weight lifting, skiing, etc.

But let's forget all that and pretend like "sports" is intended to mean an organized and/or competitive activity rather than something done recreationally or as part of a fitness routine. In those terms, sports are still vitally important to the growth and development of children. First, have you been around a kid who's been cooped up all day? Children have a ton of energy and if they don't have an outlet to expend that energy, it's going to be expended in different ways that you and your home probably won't appreciate as much. Second, a big part of growing up is learning to deal with issues that come up in sports all the time, such as how to handle winning (and defeat), how to come up with and employ a strategy for success, and how to interact with others whether they're on your side or against you. Growing up, I had friends in both the "sports" camp and the "non-sports" camp, and - while it wasn't 100% for either side - the friends who participated in sports or other competitive activities turned out significantly better adjusted to the challenges of the adult world than the friends who didn't have that experience dealing with those issues growing up. I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that sports can be directly analogous to any other aspect of a person's life, but there are definitely skills developed through participation in sports that will serve a person well in a variety of other areas of a person's life, both on and off the field.

That said, not every sports experience is a good experience. I participated in a few activities growing up, notably Little League baseball for four years, and martial arts for about five years. I really enjoyed playing Little League at the lower levels, but I stopped once I got to the point where it was an older group of kids (and parents) who took it much more seriously as the players developed the talent that would hopefully carry them to success on a high school team and in turn let them parlay that success into a scholarship at the college level. I distinctly remember the two events that led to me quitting baseball. The first was, after previously being hit by a pitch and being a little shaky at the plate, the opposing team's coach telling the pitcher to intentionally throw at my head to psyche me out. And the second was, after nearly getting hit in the head with a 70 MPH fastball and being very shaky after that, several of the parents approaching my coach and telling them to bench me so that I wouldn't tarnish the team's undefeated record for their sons who actually wanted to be seriously baseball players instead of someone like me who was just playing "for fun." (For the record, it was a recreational league.)

When sports get to that point, where the pressure or the external influences or the actual activity itself are no longer fun or enjoyable for the participants, I think they lose their value as healthy and positive ways to spend someone's time. Even if you're one of the people looking to build a competitive skillset, it's counterproductive to compete in a way that doesn't build the character and life skills that will make the players decent human beings as well as effective athletes. I don't think it's the sports themselves that lack ethics; I think it's more related to the personal ethics of the people playing. Sports is a very lucrative profession for some people, and there's no doubt that access to that vast amount of money and fame can have a corrupting effect on some. But to say that sports in general lack ethics is inaccurate, as there are plenty of athletes and coaches and managers and owners out there who believe in the the spirit of the game and the principles of fair play.

There was a great Freakonomics Podcast last year where they interviewed Andrew Luck (quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts) and discussed the fact that, through a labor dispute that amended rookie salary caps, Luck ended up signing a four-year $22 million contract as the number one overall pick during the 2012 NFL Draft when the number one overall pick from the 2010 NFL Draft (Sam Bradford) just two years earlier signed a six-year, $76 million contract. The overall number one from the 2009 NFL Draft (Matthew Stafford) signed a three-year $53 million contract the year before. When asked how he felt about getting "legislated out of" potentially as much as anywhere between $20 million and $50 million extra dollars, Luck replied, "There was an initial, maybe half a second pang of bitterness at my parents for not having my earlier. But once I realized that, you know, you can waste your whole life worrying about things you can’t control, right? So I haven’t lost any sleep over it. And actually, as I’ve sort of gone into year three now, and talking to folks in our union and or each other, our teammates and folks at the front office, I realize the thought process behind it all. And I’m OK with it."

There was also a moment during the currently-running 2014 Australian Open where Tim Smyczek, ranked 112th in the world, played Rafael Nadal (world number three and one of the greatest tennis players of all time), had an opportunity to gain an advantage that could have won him the match. After pushing Nadal for five grueling sets, Smyczek was only a few precious points away from taking out one of the best players in the world. It would have been a career-defining victory. And yet, in the very last game of the match, when saying nothing would have brought him one step closer to victory, Smyczek insisted that point be replayed after a shout from someone in the crowd caused Nadal to fault on his serve. Despite being within his rights to continue playing (the distraction wasn't his fault after all), Smyczek wasn't thinking about his own competitive advantage at that moment. He was thinking the fair thing to do for his opponent - who was clearly agitated at the disruption and resulting serve error - was to ask that he be allowed to replay the point.

I think that as long as there are guys like Andrew Luck (who also repeatedly reiterated how happy and lucky he is to be able to do something he loves for a living) and Tim Smyczek out there, it's inaccurate to claim that there are no ethics in sports. Is there corruption on some level? I'm sure. But have all ethics left the profession? Not hardly.

PROMPT: "My story was a complete success. The audience was a failure." ~ Ashleigh Brilliant. When you sit down to blog or write a short story do you consider what the audience expectations are? How important are each word, sentence when it comes to your target audience? If not, who are you writing for?


For me, audience consideration is an important part of the writing process, but not ultimately who I write for. I write for myself. My only barometer of success is how happy I am personally with the resulting story. If other people like it too, that's wonderful and certainly what I'm hoping for ... but it's just icing on the cake rather than the reason I'm baking in the first place.

Weighing audiences expectations and opinions is a path that leads you along a very rapid descent into neurotic writer territory. It's hard enough trying to make something that pleases an entire audience on a macro level, and damn near impossible on the micro level when you're talking about individual word choice and sentence structure. It can be challenging to ignore all the different voices weighing in on the work you're creating, but consider that an audience is supposed to be comprised of spectators (which are, by definition, watchers or observers) rather than participants. Coaches of sports teams don't go into the stands and solicit football plays from the fans. Companies don't call up television viewers at home and ask whether they liked the commercial or have any thoughts on how to better advertise their product. I think we have to take a similar approach as writers (i.e., creators of a product) where our obligation is to provide the content, which audiences can enjoy or avoid at their discretion. A writers' job isn't to write to audience expectations; it's to create the best work you can, and that work will hopefully live up to or even exceed the audience's expectations.

Understanding your audience, though, is an incredibly important part of being a writer. While you shouldn't write differently to chase their expectations, you also have to be aware of what it is they do expect and be realistic about whether you can provide that to them or not. I know a lot of writers who have dreams of being a big, successful novelist like James Patterson but write stuff that's more like Chuck Palahniuk. Or they want to be a big-time screenwriter like Aaron Sorkin but write material that's closer to something from Roger Corman. If you don't understand your audience, your own expectations are probably going to be drastically off-base. And that's not even getting into the issues of genre conventions and how a writer needs to provide what an audience expects if they're going to write in a particular genre. A romance novel with no sexy stuff and all period drama and history is probably not going to sell very well. Neither will a mystery novel where the who, what, when, why, and how are never in doubt.

While I find the Ashleigh Brilliant quote to be very amusing, it's also, to me, one of the worst ways to go about being a writer. If you think about writing approaches on a bell curve where the largest middle chunk is what's successful, at one end of the curve back where you only have the occasional errant success, is the type of writer who spends too much time trying to please everyone and ends up never writing anything uniquely theirs because so much effort is being expended trying to write what they think other people want. But at the other end of the curve are writers who think like this quote and figure, "Hey, my work is perfect. If you don't like it, then there's something wrong with you." Either extreme is very dangerous if you want to have a healthy and successful/lucrative relationship with your audience.

When it comes to my own writing, I consider my audience and their expectations at the outset. When I'm first thinking up a concept, or developing a premise, or drafting an outline, I'll often ask myself whether a particular character or narrative beat is in line with something the audience would expect or appreciate. That's part of the process of writing commercially; understanding what your audience wants. But that's where the audience consideration ends. Once I've finished the outlining and I pretty much know what I want to write, the how of it is up to me. The books of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs and Janet Evanovich and Sue Grafton are all essentially the same "what" (female character investigates a crime) ... but they're each bestselling authors in their own right because the details and the "how" are all different. When it comes to genre fiction in particular, if an author has an obligation to meet a certain set of audience expectations, the audience has an obligation to let the author meet those expectations in his or her own way. After all, the "how" is what distinguishes one author from another.