Happy almost-spring everyone! St David’s day has been and gone, the daffodils are coming up in my garden, the sun is out (for now at least) and the Winter Olympics have finished. And I want to talk about how I’m getting inspiration for my writing from watching the ice-skating.
Now it’s hard to think of two human endeavours that are more different from each other than writing and ice-skating. Cake decorating and spelunking? Embroidery and mixed martial arts? Anyway, there isn’t an obvious parallel between sitting at a desk tapping out words onto a virtual page and sliding around on some ice with knives strapped to your feet. Nevertheless, I think writers can learn something from skaters, and I’m going to explain why.
First, let’s go back twenty-four years, to the winter games in Salt Lake City, and specifically to the final of the men’s 1000m short-track speed skating race. The video of this event is one of my absolute favourite pieces of media and it never fails to make me laugh. Lap after lap the top skaters vie for position while Aussie Steven Bradbury lags behind. Then, at the very final corner, mere metres from the finish line, the four other skaters all crash into each other and get completely wiped out, leaving Bradbury the last man skating. He sails over the finish line with an expression of utter shock on his face and laughs as the result is confirmed, becoming the first Australian — in fact the first person from the entire Southern Hemisphere — to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics.
It’s an hilarious scene, and also Bradbury is a genuinely inspiring figure. The race result might have been a fluke, but he deserved his place at that final. He’d been skating competitively for over a decade by that point and had come back from life-threatening injury not once but twice. He knew he couldn’t compete with the younger skaters on sheer speed, so his strategy was to hang back, stay on his feet, and wait for something to happen.
And it worked. He showed the world the value of persistence even — especially — when the odds are stacked against you. Also more recently he won a medal for bravery after he saved four teenage girls from drowning. He’s a true hero.
This year, the best drama came from the figure skating, especially the men’s free skate. I was watching live, and saw Japan’s Shun Sato move into top place before the BBC cut away to show Matt Weston win gold in the skeleton. When they cut back to the figure skating, the top place was now held by Kazakh skater Mikhail Shaidarov, who is 21 years old but looks younger thanks to the braces on his teeth.
Then came the routines of the world’s top skaters, including ‘Quad God’ Ilia Malinin (the first person to land a fully rotated quadruple Axel in competition, dontcha know) and the commentators exclaimed breathlessly over how Yuma Kagiyama (in second place after the short program) was desperately trying to compete with Malinin, while the Quad God wasn’t competing so much against the other skaters as against the limits of what is possible for a human being to achieve on ice.
Well. If you don’t already know, you can probably guess what happened next. The top skaters all cracked under pressure, messed up their routines, and Malinin fell on his backside several times. Shaidarov — whose routine the BBC hadn’t even broadcast live — became the surprise gold medallist, and the expression of pure shock on his face was beautiful to behold. As his coach lifted their joined hands in the air in triumph, Shaidarov was blinking in disbelief, like he thought he was going to wake up from this fever dream at any moment.
Unlike the higher-ranked skaters, Shaidarov didn’t let the pressure get to him, because he didn’t think he’d be in the running for a medal. He just focused on doing his own thing as well as he could, and as a result he delivered an immaculate performance. Like Bradbury, he knew it wasn’t about the competition — it was about staying on your feet, and doing the best you can.
The women’s event was less dramatic, but even more heart-warming. The eventual champion, American Alysa Liu, had previously retired from figure skating as a teenager, saying that her relentless training schedule had sucked all the enjoyment out of the sport. Now, she returned to the ice on her own terms, wearing a golden dress, with bling on her teeth and stripes in her hair, and delivered a performance of pure joy. She won gold and embraced her competitors (as in the men’s category, the silver and bronze medals both went to Japanese skaters).
This kind of camaraderie was on display throughout these Winter Olympic Games (except for the foul-mouthed Canadian curler who got caught cheating). We saw skiers, skaters and snowboarders all celebrating each other’s success and commiserating with each other’s failures. Despite everything that is going on in the world (and we had a reminder of that when the Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was not allowed to compete wearing a helmet decorated with images of Ukrainian athletes who have been killed in the ongoing Russian invasion of his country), these Games were a beautiful reminder that human beings are capable of joy and compassion as well as triple-Axel toe-loop combinations.
So. What are the lessons for writers from all this? Well, as previously mentioned, writing isn’t much like skating. Not only are you sitting down and you don’t have blades on your feet (not normally anyway), you aren’t hoping for other authors to fall over so you can win a gold medal. Writing is not a competitive sport, and treating it like one is a surefire way to lose friends and alienate people. Oh sure, there are prizes and places on the bestseller list and film adaptations up for grabs and not everyone is going to achieve all these things, but it isn’t a zero-sum game. If readers enjoy your writing, they’ll probably enjoy the work of similar authors too, and if you pass round recommendations then everyone’s a winner.
It can be lonely, tapping those words out all by yourself, pouring your soul onto the page, and the path to publication is too often paved with heartbreak. So it’s important to take all the opportunities for camaraderie you can get — conventions, writing groups, online support groups, and so on. And yes, sometimes it can be difficult not to feel envious of other writers’ success — but that success doesn’t diminish your own efforts.
All this was brought home to me recently when I heard on a writer — a famous and very talented writer — speaking on a podcast about a new project he was working on that sounded broadly similar to my own work-in-progress. I’m not going to lie, at that moment I felt a sense of despair. He’s so good! He has so many devoted fans already! Nobody will want to read my book if his gets there first. But then I thought — well, I’ll just carry on, write my own thing as best I can, and try not to worry about what he — or anyone else — is doing.
Then, later, I heard him he describe his project in more detail and it sounded… actually not that much like mine after all. So I shouldn’t have worried about it in the first place. But even if it had been similar, I shouldn’t have worried. There’s plenty of room in the world for multiple books with similar themes. Sometimes bookshops and publishers even play up the similarities as part of their efforts to sell more books! Fancy that. And really themes, tropes, plots etc are all just building blocks, a giant box of second-hand Lego we’ve all inherited from those who’ve gone before us. It’s the way you put them together that counts.
So I’m going to try remember this: the important thing is for me to tell my story in my own unique way. And if I should falter, to recall the lessons from my inspirations on ice: find enjoyment and self-expression like Alysa Liu, focus on my own performance like Mikhail Shaidarov, and stay on my feet like Steven Bradbury.
