Spotting: On the Art of Weight Lifting and Writing

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“What’re you doing today?” my husband asked. It was Saturday, he had practice and some recruiting calls to make. As a college baseball coach his work never ends.

I have a lot of free time on the weekends.

“I’m going to write some comments on my classmates’ work,” I said. He knows how much I’ve been enjoying my online writing class. “It isn’t required but….” I sip my coffee, once again struck by how much better I am with writing what I want to say than actually stringing words together verbally. “I like the people in this class. It’s hard, writing something alone and wondering if it is any good, wondering if anyone would care to hear it.”

I’m reminded of a Flaubert quote and search it up on my phone. I read it to him.

“None of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows:  and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

We both take in the beauty of that quote for a few moments.

“Sometimes it is nice to hear what you did well, while you are tapping the crude rhythms,” I add. “When we give comments in class it is great, and very supportive, but I thought it would be nice to add something written.”

He said, “Oh, you’re being a good spotter.”

My husband has been coaching for over thirty years and spends a lot of time thinking about how to lead and teach his players.

He said when you are lifting weights by yourself you have to stop when you are about to fail. You have to anticipate failing because you can’t afford to fail with the bar across your chest.  You might have enough left for one more rep but you might not and you can’t take that chance. But with a spotter you can work through the failure and go beyond.  If you get aid when you only have 90% of your strength left or 80% or 70%, with only a little help from the spotter you lift the bar again. And maybe even again after that. And that is how you get stronger.

Yesterday he was doing pull ups in our back yard (our pandemic gym) and was able to do 5 on his own.  Then he got our son to spot him and he did 3 more reps with his help.  Today when he did pull ups on his own he did 7.

Then he asked me, a person who cannot do one pull up, to spot him. And I did, for 3 more reps. You don’t have to be a weight lifter to spot someone. You don’t have to be a great writer to tell someone you got the feels from their twist in the plot.

He teaches his players to be good spotters on the baseball field. When they see a teammate failing or close to failing, he tells them to support them, invite them out to practice more, help them work past the failure to get stronger.  In his program failure is not punished, in fact he actually encourages failure, encourages his players to train over the edge of failure because otherwise they aren’t getting better. Otherwise they just keep practicing what they are already good at, which is not a formula for growth.

For too many years I wrote alone. Completely alone. Just dabbled. Didn’t get any spotters. I didn’t put anything out into the world. I didn’t even think of myself, really, as a writer. But then I found a writing group and with their encouragement I submitted, I blogged, I finished and self-published two novels. And now I am in this class and writing even more, daring even more.

I look at the members of my writing class and I don’t want anyone to waste time like I did. If someone is called to this odd, lonely, enthralling thing called writing, I want them to find the spotters that help them keep going.

This is what a good tribe of writers can do for each other. Spot each other: point out the good sentence, the cool metaphor, the lovely image. Encourage the rewrite, push for more, help someone live in the vulnerable place a little longer. Remind each other that pushing past failure is the way to get stronger. And the next time you sit there facing the empty page, you have a little more muscle for the task.

Maybe not melting the stars, but maybe, just maybe, melting a heart.

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