What gets easier when you stop trying so hard?

 

HALLIE EPHRON: For the last week I’ve been in warm, lovely Key West Florida enjoying the company of dear friends and my grandkids who are on school break and happy to spend 24/7 in a swimming pool. 

My granddaughter has been swimming competitively after school, and the first thing she wanted to know was: how many laps would she have to swim to make a mile. It’s a lot.

She then proceeded to swim that many laps, stroke after stroke, skimming through the water, apparently effortlessly. Flip turn at the end of each lap. Pushing off and shooting back.

I watched her in awe.

I swim more like a beached whale, not convinced at all that the water will support me. Struggling and fighting for every stroke. Exhausted by the end of a few laps. Exhausted and bored.

Sometimes writing feels like that. Such a laborious process at times, and so effortless at others when I'm in the groove and can lay down word after word without braking a sweat.

Can you swim like that, at one with the water, as it were? Write like that when the ideas flow?

Or maybe there’s some other activity that you do better when you stop trying so hard?

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Hallie, I love swimming, but it’s a struggle for me (since I don’t like to put my whole face in the water!) Still, there are times when I’m so delighted to just be in the pool, enjoying the water and the movement, that I feel transported, which does also happen in writing.

Back when my knees allowed me to run, I used to compare writing to my regular three mile loop in our neighborhood. The first mile was ALWAYS agony, puffing and panting, my muscles complaining, wondering why the heck I was doing this to myself. Then, right around the start of the second mile, I broke through, and could enjoy my effort and the pace and the scenery around me. The third mile was triumphant - yes! I can do this and I am! It was a great feeling and I miss it.

There’s nothing like the flow state in writing, when it stops feeling like you’re laying a wall brick by brick and suddenly becomes flying. I think it’s those times that keeps us going.

RHYS BOWEN: when I was a child swimming was in an unheated pool. We learned breaststroke, swam a width and got a certificate. We swam in the cold sea on vacation, so I never got proficient.

But then I discovered snorkeling. Put a mask and find on me and I am one with the water. I can go forever, as John will tell you. Once in Grand Cayman I followed the reef out, never looking up or hearing him shout. When I did look up the shore looked as if someone had drawn a pencil line far away. I looked around. Not a soul in sight. Then I had to swim all the way back to a frantic John

Most of my married life we’ve had a pool so swimming is something I do every day. Our kids were all competitive swimmers!

 As for writing: every book is the same. First hundred pages in pure panic mode, convinced it’s never going to work. Then next hundred getting into the rhythm and seeing the way ahead and the last hundred or so rushing at full steam.

LUCY BURDETTE: I’m a good solid swimmer, though it’s never quite effortless. I wonder if I write like that too? I’d like to write like Rhys (except for the pure panic), but for me it feels like the beginning is joyful.

But then the original spark runs out of juice and I’m left wondering how I can possibly fill more pages.

JENN McKINLAY: I like swimming in pools but not laps because…boring. But I love diving games or basketball or volleyball in the pool.

Clearly, I’m not a regimented swimmer. I am not a deep sea ocean swimmer because sharks,,,duh. But like Rhys, I love snorkeling or boogie boarding or paddle boarding.

I think writing is similar to swimming for me only in that if it’s boring, I can’t do it. The second I lose interest in my story a fictional someone is getting murdered or heartbroken or hit by a witch’s curse.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Hallie, you must be having such fun with the kids! I liked swimming when I was a kid but not so much these days. I don’t like getting my face in the water–a big handicap! At least not in chlorinated water.

The few times I’ve been snorkeling I have loved it but I have to be able to touch the bottom. I’m terrified of deep water. Maybe this is why I like to have a road map when I’m writing?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I think absolutely everything works better when you stop trying so hard, the secret being that you have to work so hard and learn so much in order to be able to not have to try as hard. I’m an experienced okay swimmer , and once absolutely caused a gasp from my grandson when I did a perfectly good dive off the side of the pool. I think he thought I was incapable.

But do I love swimming? No. I love floating on a raft in the pool with a book and a glass of lemonade. That’s pretty fabulous. Or walking in the ocean up to my ankles.

Let’s just put it this way. My feet like to swim.

As for writing and swimming. I do a lot of preparation mentally and emotionally, then I dive off the end in a great wave of enthusiasm, swimming swimming swimming until whatever the equivalent of page 36 is.

Then there is a lot of treading water going on. A lot. Of. Treading water.

Then comes the persistence, and when I see the shore, I have a sudden spurt of energy.

But yes, absolutely, those days that I am at one in the writing water, that is the reason I keep doing it.

HALLIE: I do find it's the same way with cooking. When I'm in the groove, I'm not stressed at all and improvising... the food comes out tastier. Ditto Falling asleep: definitely works best when I stop trying.

And that scary feeling when you enter a room full of strangers? Just relax and lean into it. Conversations will flow.

What about everyone else? What gets easier when you stop trying so hard?