NBA Highlights As Writing Exercises
"Board Man gets paid" - Kawhi Leonard, to teammate, San Diego State University practice
It’s not yet my time off, but I am finishing up a project and 1) anxious to be done with it (for a while), therefore making it difficult to finish and 2) of course looking for ways to get my brain ready for what I start in the new year. In this mode, I am thinking about exercises.
Recently, we here at Shipwrecked Sailor (a division of Lazy & Entitled Productions) made fun of the Mikan Drill, a basketball shooting exercise in which you stand under the hoop alternating right- and left-hand layups. Even though George Mikan—a white guy who won a bunch of NBA championships back when there was an unofficial “no more than two Black people per team” and most humans didn’t grow to seven feet tall and also could’ve gotten Kareem to join the ABA but he forgot to hand him a check—is a hilarious figure, the Mikan Drill is pretty foundational. I warm up with the Mikan Drill.
Sometimes.
Idk, not much.
Life is short, shoot threes.
Anyway, I was going to make this post like five YouTube videos of basketball drills and try to come up with writing exercises. Then I thought: I do not want to comb YouTube for basketball drills. Anyone reading this blog will not want to watch drills.
But who doesn’t like highlights, right?
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First, For A Reminder of What We Do To The Blank Page, Here’s Scottie Pippen Dunking Over Patrick Ewing
The blank page is a lot of things. “Full of possibilities.” “Daunting.” “Terror-inspiring.” “Something to be conquered.” All of those phrases also apply to Patrick Ewing in the 90s.
Another phrase applies to both Patrick Ewing in the 90s and the blank page: “does not get to win.”
Nikola Jokić Reminds Us To Be Irreproducible
Nikola Jokić does a lot of things well on basketball court. He shoots from everywhere, he can dribble, post-up, and he’s real good at being tall. His greatest skill, though, is passing. Not just passing, but passing in ways that break defender’s brains, passing in ways that open opportunities for teammates that wouldn’t otherwise be there, and passing in ways that only he can do or see. No one else is seeing those angles, has that touch with the ball. Jokić affects games in ways specific to him.
Exercise Two: I’m wary of saying “edit a piece to be weirder for weird’s sake.” Bob and I talked about how frustrating “weird for weird’s sake” is to both read and get as a critique on a recent The Line Break, listen to each one we recorded in 2023 to find out which. That said, take a piece you’ve drafted and get into it with Dutch angle goggles on. Verb some nouns, throw in a curveball simile, add a digression that seems unrelated but deepens the meaning when you think about it. The machines—or at least the idiots behind them who think the rest of us don’t matter—are coming for this craft we love. Make your words unmistakably your own.
DeMar DeRozan Reminds Us That Whatever We Add, Don’t Throw Out What Works
DeMar DeRozan is a throwback. His bread and butter lies in the midrange, shooting low efficiency shots from 12-18 feet. This kind of play has been all but banished as NBA basketball has collectively realized that 3>2 in the last decade or so. During DeRozan’s last season in Toronto, 2017-18, he took a career-high 3.7 threes per game. During his time in San Antonio, he was asked to run point a lot. The Bulls have finally allowed DeMar to be himself: midrange maestro, lethal closer, extremely cool. But you can tell he’s added stuff to his game—he’s taken 2 threes per game in Chicago, and the above video shows him becoming the only Bull besides Michael Jordan to post a 40-point, 10-assist game.
Exercise Three: take something you do really well—descriptions, dialogue, action—and right a page of it. Allow yourself to indulge your basest, easiest writing tendencies. Lay out on the page in a way that you’d be embarrassed if someone walked in. Let’s say you’re good at descriptions, write a whole goddamn page of scenery. Now take something you’re not as confident in—let’s say dialogue—and write a whole page of that. What felt different writing each of them? Done separately and starkly like that, do they end up informing each other? Can you mash them together into a coherent story?
Let Victor Wembanyama and Chet Holmgren Allow You To Imagine Bigger Than You Think Possible
Here are two seven footers (7’3” for Wemby, 7’1” for Chet) who have guard skills. They’re spry, they can shoot and dribble, they make defensive recoveries you wouldn’t think possible. More immediately obvious than that, their legs look like they shouldn’t be able to hold their bodies up.
Exercise Four: Try something with form that doesn’t seem possible. I didn’t know novels in verse were possible until I read Anne Carson in undergrad, and didn’t know novels in verse (non-Anne Carson division) were possible until I read Melissa Lozada-Oliva. I didn’t know stories could be crossword puzzles until I read “Vagabond Mannequin” by K.B. Carle, I didn’t know poems could be bingo cards until I read “Microaggression Bingo” by Fatima Ashgar, and I didn’t know stories could be instruction manuals until I read “Soft n’ Sheepish: No-More-Lyes Conditioning Crème Relaxer System” by Tara Campbell, and I didn’t know most of those stories until I took Mac Crane’s Tin House workshop on experimental fiction, so shoutout to them. Try something that seems nuts, see how it goes.
Kawhi Leonard’s Miracle Shot Reminds Us Rejection Is Sometimes About Luck
Look how many times that ball bounced around the rim! That decided a playoff series. So many legacies are (potentially) different with the smallest change in the air. This is your reminder, you writers, that rejections are a part of the game, but they shouldn’t be tied with too much finality. Take it from a reader at a lit mag: sometimes it’s not your piece, it’s the audience. Maybe whomever is reading your submission had a bad day, or simply likes a different writing style. I’m much more likely to accept something that sounds Aimee Bender-influenced than something that sounds, say, Chuck Palahniuk-influenced. Nothing against Chuckie P, I like a few of his books, but his style wore on me before I turned 21. Other people feel differently—other people who also work at lit mags! Don’t be afraid of submitting your work just because of one or two rejections. There are stories everywhere of people, famous people, getting rejected like 30 times or whatever. The homie
wrote about this over at his newletter recently. Keep trying, shooters shoot. Ball’s gotta go in eventually.Exercise Five: take a story or poem that you’ve submitted somewhere and had rejected. Take a good look at it, be brutally honest—like Joan being totally retrograde and superficial at Peggy—and then submit it someplace else.
over at has a whole bunch of submission calls here. I believe in you.Of course, if that shot doesn’t go in, the game goes to overtime. Maybe everything still plays out exactly the way it did: Raptors win the game and eventually the championship. Maybe the world’s fixed exactly the way it is and nothing changes. Whaddya do with that? Eh. Nothing. Right? You’re not going to stop writing. The lesson’s in the last graf. Never give up, or whatever.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Speaking of ML-O, I just started Candelaria this week. Wasn't expecting the book to be THIS but I'm loving it.