God hands you a football. No shit, it's the size of a football and wrapped and shaped like one, and striped even — red, white, and blue in the hospital nursery blanket — and it's slightly soft and deflated the way Tom Brady and the Patriots cheatingly arrange things in their favor. Life is not without sad, unnecessary cheating. Your 'football' is only minutes old and you wonder if poor parenting is to blame for this kind of honorless cheating that you yourself have probably perpetrated too often and rationalized away with no regard for karmic consequence. Whatever, now’s not the time. Forget all that and play football! There is noise. Lots of it. Inside your head, as always, but the game around you is loud; there is grunting and impressive crying. And there is great support and suggestion. Or is it criticism? The football, don't forget the football! It's in your hands, hold it, but gently; don't drop it. And advance it! Advance and protect the football! That's it, the goal. Very simple. There is exhilaration. This is a big play, and you're the guy. Thank God you have teammates and blockers. They aren't perfect and neither are you; you’re highly flawed and this has the feel of a thing that highlights flaws. Awesome. Yes, things start happening that weren't considered when the play was drawn up. There is untidiness and chaos. You feel threatened, and though your instincts flare, and time slows momentarily, you sense it speeding up again. There are opponents; they are big and moving fast. Things blur. Thank God you're wearing a helmet and pads. You're wearing a helmet and pads, right? And don't forget the play. Fuck. The play? What play?! You look for a hole to run through, and then... the football is gone. What happened? You didn’t fumble it; you didn’t pass it; you aren't sure, but you know it's still here, somewhere, the game, the play, it isn't over....
Oh man, I failed; that’s 330 words. I always overwrite. And it's football season; my imagination wouldn't go further.
Here's some advice from John McPhee: "Writing is selection. Just to start a
piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than
a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your
next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You
select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have
only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in — if not, it
stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. ... Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material — that much and no more. Among the three or four dozen pieces that Woody Allen has contributed to The New Yorker,
the first one seemed to his editor, Roger Angell, to contain an
overabundance of funny lines. He told Allen that even if the jokes were
individually hilarious they tended cumulatively to diminish the net
effect. He said he thought the humor would be improved if Allen were to
leave some of them out. Sculptors
address the deletion of material in their own analogous way.
Michelangelo: 'The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.'
Michelangelo: 'Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is
the task of the sculptor to discover it.' Michelangelo, loosely, as we
can imagine him with six tons of Carrara marble, a mallet, a point
chisel, a pitching tool, a tooth chisel, a claw chisel, rasps, rifflers,
and a bush hammer: 'I’m just taking away what doesn’t belong there.' And
inevitably we have come to Ernest Hemingway and the tip of the
iceberg — or, how to fashion critical theory from one of the world’s most
venerable clichés. 'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is
writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the
writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as
strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement
of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.'"
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