Novel Writing and Running an Ironman

When you run an Ironman, whether as a pro or as an amateur, and regardless of the time you want to finish in, there is a specific set of proven steps in the training process. There are a few different approaches, but they all follow the same pattern: you start with a smaller run, swim, and bike based on your current aptitude for each and your individual physical fitness. Your increase distance and intensity over a directed period of time, often as long as a year in advance, and then a couple weeks before the event, you “cool down” your training, get plenty of rest, and manage your nutrition a certain way, so on the day of the event you are truly ready to compete. 

The event itself has three acts, just like a lot of stories, and similar to the writing process itself. It’s a story with a beginning, a long middle, and a glorious ending, provided you are successful. But much like writing a novel, without going through the process of the phases of the event, you can’t finish. Unless you go through the process of writing a novel, the finish is, well, not always great. Let’s look at how this works. 

Training to Write a Novel

There are all kinds and shapes of bodies competing in Ironman triathlons: I saw people my age with my body type, young men, older women, and everything in between. I’ve also competed in competitive gravel cycling events, and the mix is the same there, but every competitor has the same thing in common: they have trained specifically for this event. 

That means they have practiced all three elements: swimming, cycling, and running. Not one of them enters the water without at least having swum that distance multiple times before. No one swims some laps at their local pool and thinks that is enough: these are all outdoor, open swims, and most athletes try to train in conditions similar to those they will be competing in, if possible. 

How does this relate to novel writing? First, because you can write great poetry, short stories, or even legal briefs, environmental reports, or other long form content, that does not mean you are capable of writing a novel. This is not because you lack talent and skill, but because you lack training at the equivalent of an endurance sport. Not only is the structure different from that of a short story or a non-fiction piece, but the idea you start with must be larger, because the story must be longer and be able to hold up for a distance. 

Story fatigue will kill your novel. Story endurance is essential, and you must train for it. There are no shortcuts. You might be a naturally talented athlete and embark on an Ironman and finish, but it is nearly impossible for you to finish well without proper training. It could happen, but lightning can also strike a specific tree in your front yard. 

But you would not bet on that or build a career on it. 

In order to write long form fiction, you need to train to write it, and while there are different approaches, structures, and types of instruction, doing this job without training is not only nearly impossible, but trying can be extremely frustrating. 

Pros make competing in a triathlon look easy because of training, not in spite of it. Writing is the same. That pro, writing 3-5 K words a day and 4-6 novels a year, makes that look simple. But the likely story is they have trained for years to be able to do that at all (and the marketing and other career aspects are another story yet).

So how do you train? First, there is always a formula, and it starts with knowing your own writing talent (an honest evaluation) and your current level of experience in a few aspects of writing long-form fiction. (That’s another post for another day). You also, if you want to move from amateur to pro, likely need some education and professional coaching. 

Education is easy, and usually I do not mean college. There are all kinds of courses and instructors out there, and some will speak to you more than others. For most writers, this does not mean college. A bad MFA program has ruined the voices of more authors than it has created author careers. There are a few good ones around the country, but most of them are pretty crappy, to be honest. 

Coaching is a little different, but you can find good information out there. My son, who is taller than I am, had a professional bike fitting and other coaching along the way, and after the race, plans to revisit it again. For writers, this can be akin to evaluating your process, how you remain accountable, and more critical elements of the “bike” you ride to create long-form fiction.

But no one can do this alone. A trainer needs to spot you, look at your form, give you advice based on your goals, and help you set up the tools you use so you can have the greatest success. 

The Event: Writing the Novel

Once you have trained for writing a novel, and you feel you are ready for “race day” it’s time to get started. Much like the novel itself, the process of creating one will have three main parts. (There are more, but again, that is a detail for another day).

The first thing a triathlete does it set goals for each stage of the event, based on what they have learned during training, their weaknesses and strengths, and their overall goals for the event: to simply finish, to match or beat their personal records, or to place, be an “early finisher” or for the pros who are truly ambitious, to win. 

As a novelist, you must set realistic goals for your fiction as well. For your first sci-fi novel to win a Hugo award is a lofty goal, but that means a lot of different steps that most first time novelist don’t have the talent to complete, not to mention the cost for editors, cover designers, sales to get the attention of the right people who manage and even nominate the awards, and more. 

But to finish your first novel and achieve modest sales goals, maybe even break even, is not unheard of. That, with the right training and business coaching at the same time, is possible. 

For most authors, just like for most Ironman triathletes, their first race or first novel costs them money. In fact, most novelists and most triathletes for that matter, never make money from their pursuit. They pay to compete, and the rewards they receive are intangible, like self-confidence, personal physical and mental fitness and toughness, and more. This does not mean they spend any less money on equipment or any less time on training. It simply means they understand, unless they cross the line into being a pro, they will never make money by competing. That’s not the goal. 

Why is this so important to writing? Because much of your mental health depends on setting expectations, and those expectations will help you endure when you don’t land that publishing deal or become the self-publishing sensation whose manuscript gets optioned for film by Ridley Scott. 

If you start with the right expectations, it will be much easier for you to finish. In fact, the better you understand that every first attempt, or first draft, will be terrible and need a lot of work. Every Ironman is run in a different location and environment, and those factors can mean that even the pros struggle, and that sometimes they don’t even finish. 

We’ll talk about that in a second. But starting with the right goals and mindset will help you be successful, because milestones will only relate to things you can control, and stop resting on things you cannot. 

Beginning

Then you must start the story. For many triathletes, like many novelists, the start is the hardest part. Many great cyclists and runners struggle with the open-water swim that is a mile long, even though it is the shortest distance in the race and also the fastest. Many pros finish under 30 minutes, and many amateurs finish quickly as well. The swim, as the opening of your novel, is more like a long sprint. You need endurance, but there are no aid stations in the water. There is nothing for it but to as my son says, keep going. 

There is one key to open water swimming, and it is called sighting. At the start, and in the water, it is easy to put your head down and swim but not look up to see where the turns and buoys are that keep you on course. This can cost a lot of time. 

This is the same for a novel. Knowing at least enough about your characters and places, and the general direction the story is going, is vital. Stopping from time to time to “sight” for the next buoy or marker is critical to staying on track and setting the foundation for the rest of the race. 

Transition 1

You don’t wear the same thing to ride a bike as you do to swim. Depending on the temperature of the water, swimmers wear a wetsuit or even a dry suit. Most wear one that is designed for a triathlon, which means it is easy to remove so they can take it off and transition to bike gear. Most have their biking “suit” on under their wetsuit. 

As a writer, we know there is a transition from the first act of a story to the second. In the first we have had a hook (what got the reader reading in the first place), an inciting incident which is the point at which your protagonist cannot turn back from their journey, and then a moment of a “break into two” or the movement into the second act, where the journey the character will take in this book actually begins. 

The Middle Portion

The bike, like act two of a novel, is the longest part of the triathlon, and at this stage, having a plan for nutrition, or feeding your story in a novelist’s case, is essential. Otherwise, you can either lose energy in the middle, which slows the athlete (or your story) down, or you can use up all of your story energy in this part of the book and have nothing left for the ending. 

How do you feed your story and your story energy? Well, that is also another detailed post for another time, but it is not Mountain Dew and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It does mean feeding your creativity, which can mean anything from poetry to music to consuming story through reading, listening, or even watching, although arguably reading is the best, since readers are the audience you are targeting. 

Think of the middle, or act two of your story, like a buffet. You are trying to get to the next course, the next bit of nutrition, the next bit of the story. Even if you are a discovery writer, you may not know what the next bit is, but you know what it looks like. You’ve trained your mind and planned for it in your muse. Now is the time to do what you have practiced.

Transition 2

Just as you don’t wear the same uniform to swim as you do to bike, you also don’t wear the same thing to run. There are two key things you are going to change: your footwear and your headgear. While bike shoes are designed to clip in and secure you to the pedals, giving you more power through the course, running shoes are designed to both cushion and support your feet as you drive toward the finish line. You wear a helmet on the bike, but you swap to a hat or headband for the run, one that is breathable, but moisture wicking to keep sweat out of your eyes so you can still see where you are going.

This is because you are moving in to act three. Here’s the problem: the middle of the novel or the race is most often where athletes and writers get “off pace.” They lose momentum because it is harder to see where they are going. In the case of biking, there are often hills which produce conflict and try/fail scenarios, where the athlete must dig deep (as your protagonist must) to keep going. All three, the athlete, the novelist, and your protagonist, need a strong motive to keep going. 

The third act is the most fun in many ways (at least for the novelist) but it is the place where pacing and your technical skills and talents are perhaps just as, or more important than the opening. 

The Run to the Finish

The final push is where your nutrition so far in the race is most critical to an athlete. You can only carry so much nutrition with you, there are few aid stations in the final stage, and most importantly what you consume at this stage may not make it through your body in a way that can help you before you cross the finish line. This might be great for the after party, but it’s not going to improve your outcome. 

This is true for the novelist as well. You cannot wait until the final act to feed your story properly. If you do, your story will fall flat and lifeless, and your ending may even disappear. The other critical thing in this final stretch? Pacing. 

The first few miles of the run are at a steady pace. You just need to get where you are going, but then an athlete reaches the final 5K or three mile mark. That mark is when they give everything they have left to the finish of the race. Not a sprint, but an increased pace for sure, and that final mile you give everything to the race, leaving all of your energy on the course. 

Have you ever finished a novel and been both physically and mentally exhausted? This is why. In your run to the finish, you leave everything, your heart, soul, and mind in the story. The story becomes, for a time, the only thing that matters. You might skip meals, sleep, hydration, everything you normally need until the story is complete. Why?

Because you want to finish well. Even if your draft is not perfect, the finish tells us everything we need to know about how to revise the rest. Because not finishing means we don’t know how this story ends. We know how a story ends: we have seen it, consumed it along the way to feed our muse. But we need to know how this particular one turns out. 

And guess what? Just like sometimes even pro athletes do not complete an event successfully, the same is true of novelists. Some books or stories are ones you never finish, and that is perfectly okay and normal. Sometimes you finish, but you realize the story is not the best it could be. That is true of a disappointing time when an athlete finishes a race, too. They finished but did not finish well. 

But we’re done. Time to cheer and celebrate, but now what?

The Debrief, or After Race Review

There is one critical difference between a novel and an Ironman triathlon. It’s this. For us, the race, the event, is a draft, and we can go back and fix what is wrong with it, most of the time. The triathlon competitor can only work on improving before the next race. 

There is certainly a place for that in your author career, but at the moment, we can look back at the work we have created and figure out how to fix those slowdowns in the middle, or starting in the wrong place, or going off course along the way. 

We can even change the ending and make a poor one into a good one. In fact, most drafts, or events, lose in certain areas. We fail. So we must take a moment to change that to success so that failure does not have to be permanent or even public. 

But much like a military or race debrief, we should answer certain questions (this too is another detailed post for another time):

·      What went right? What went well and according to plan? Why did that go well, and how can we duplicate that success next time? 

·      What failed? This is not things that just did not go the best. These are utter failures. If your draft has none of these, you are likely not being objective and critical enough of it, and you need to get professional help. Or, as we will discuss in a course I am working on about the series Breaking Bad, you can still have failure in a work, even a large one, and it can still succeed. You may not even see the flaw until you look back using that wonderful 20/20 hindsight. 

·      What can we improve? Some things may have gone well, or even just fine. But they could be better. We can up our dialogue, for example, or our physical character descriptions, or making more of our sentences in active voice. Some of that we can improve in this novel, depending on our goals and publishing deadlines, and some we can improve in the next book. At this point, we simply make two lists. 

There are several details we need to look at in this area. We often need help at this point: beta readers, critique groups, or even professional book coaching and evaluation. 

This step is critical. If you don’t know how you did, and what success looks like, you can’t move toward it faster. The athlete cannot improve their run time by simply doing the same training, nutrition, and race day routine over and over again. They must always be learning and improving. It is the same for novelists and creatives. 

A Reality Check

I know some of you will be quite relieved that this is the last section in this lengthy article, but here’s a quick reality check: there is one more way that athletes and authors parallel, and it is important to mention and examine. We mentioned it above, and this could also be an article of its own, but here goes: 

·      Being a pro athlete in the triathlon space is as rare as being a full time novelist. Think of it this way:

·      Many people say they want to run a triathlon, just as many people say they would like to write a novel, or a book of some sort. 

·      Of those many people, an extremely low percentage (something under 10% for writing books) actually even attempt it. Of those who attempt it, only a few actually make it to the “event” of competing in a triathlon or finishing a book. 

·      Fewer still make any money at all from their writing or their triathlons. Most novelists and athletes spend more money than they make, making that endeavor a hobby rather than a career. (This is not as discouraging as it sounds). 

·      Of those who do make money, even a little money from sponsors and other sources, only a select few make a living at writing or triathlon competitions. This is about the 1-4% of those who actually complete a book or a triathlon. 

If we look at that total, it means that to be a pro triathlete or a professional novelist who writes for a living is less than a .25% of people who want to write a book, and a tiny percentage of those who actually get to the publishing stage. Does this sound discouraging? It does not have to!

The Cost of Greatness

Not a single person I have ever talked to starts a conversation about editing with, “I’d really like to produce at least a mediocre book, one that some people might think is okay. Can you help me do that?”

No. Every person who approaches me as an editor who is by no means cheap tells me they want their book or story to be great. They don’t even say, although it is often what they mean, “I want this to be the best that I can do write now with the skills and talent I possess.” No. Most of them have an idol or someone they look up to and would love to be like. They want not just their view of success, but the type of success that others will look at and admire them in the same way they idolize their heroes. 

The problem is that to get to that level of greatness requires great sacrifice. It requires time and money spent training and studying. It means investments in coaching and editing, and many revisions of their work, especially if they are just starting out and need to gain experience and training. 

As Yoda said to Luke, “Ready you are not.” Most successful books are not the author’s first or only work. They come 10-12 novels in, some of which are good, others that have potential, and only a few great ones. Because if every story was great, we would just have set a new standard for normal, and something great would have to go beyond that. 

A great triathlete is not born, and neither is a novelist, musician, or any creator. There is such thing as raw talent, but talent left undeveloped never wins a race or the ITW Thriller award. And even then, you’ll need a bit of good timing and good luck to go with that talent and the truly great book you have written. 

Greatness in one area of your life will cost you in others. That’s the simple truth, and that greatness may not even be publicly or widely recognized. You may be the bestselling novelist that no one has ever heard of. 

But in pursuit of excellence (never perfection) even amateur athletes and authors sacrifice:

·      They set aside money for training and conferences. 

·      They spend time in study and practice to make their craft, or their athletic fitness, better

·      They pay editors, coaches, cover designers, and formatters to make their work the best it can be and the most commercially viable. Athletes pay coaches, bike fitters, physical therapists, and others to improve their form, their skills, and their mental acuity. 

·      They show up at events and compete, even when the chances of winning (or becoming a viral internet sensation) are low to non-existent. 

·      They finish, over and over, race after race, novel after novel, and then work to improve, revise, hone their craft and business acumen, public image, and more to attract sponsors (publishers, agents, superfans) and fans (readers). 

The outcome matters much less than the event, the act of publishing or competing, itself. This circles back to the start.

You must revisit your goals, the ones you stated when we started the race. You must revise them to realistic, but hopeful, outcomes, especially related to things you cannot control. 

And then you must do the training and the work needed to achieve those goals. For most of us, a sub-five hour triathlon and a New York Times Bestseller for 12 weeks in a row are both equally out of reach.

But winning is not our job. Doing our best is. Showing up. Competing. Finishing. Training. Improving and doing it all over again. That’s the only outcome that matters.