Horseracing and writing

You’ve all heard me say it. “Someday I’m going to write a book called, ‘Everything I’ve ever learned I learned from horseracing.’”

But what, exactly, does that mean?

The Imperious Lady Barf says: “Who cares?”

Lady Barf notwithstanding, I’ve always been a strong believer that the things you learn in one discipline are transferable to another, that the wisdom you gain over the years is always applicable to the next career, kind of a like a two-for-one coupon.

So I thought I would explore a few tenets of horseracing, and how these apply to writing novels.

Don’t change a horse’s running style. Most horses have a racing style that suits them; frontrunners run in front, stalkers follow the frontrunners, and come-from-behind horses drop way back and make a big run at the end. For me, because I’m not a particularly fast or nimble writer, I can only write one kind of book. I know where I’m most effective, and that is as a writer of police-procedural/thrillers. That’s my running style. My comfort zone.

Forget immediate gratification. In horseracing, you breed the horse, you work with him a bit as a yearling, you school him early as a two-year-old, you run him in a prep race or two, you aim for one of the bigger races in the late summer or fall, and you plan your way to the the classics. (We’re talking about the elite here. And why not? Don’t we all want to be elite?)

Writing a book takes time. For me it takes a year, although at some point I’ll have to shorten that up a bit. It takes time to produce a book, so you’re usually waiting. There is no immediate gratifcation in horseracing or writing. Which leads to:

Patience. This is not my strong suit, but I try to have it when I can. You’re going along on the backstretch, waiting for the pace to pick up, waiting to make that one run, or waiting for the hole to open in front of you. The publishing business is like that. You’re waiting, waiting, and waiting some more. With that first race, you don’t know if you’ll get there or not. You’re just hoping for a good showing; maybe second or third (which means a modest but good sell-through). You know there will be other races. There are always other races. Unless:

Injury happens. One morning you go to the barn, and the horse who just won the Arkansas Derby, the horse who is the favorite for the Kentucky Derby, has heat in his ankle. Game over. As simple as that. All those months, those years of training, over in that one moment you put your hand on the horse’s leg and feel heat. Your next thought is, “Surgery?” And your thought after that is, “Maybe we can point for the Travers.” (The Travers Stakes is the “Midsummer Derby”, a few months down the line.)

Anybody who saw Barbaro break down in the Preakness knows what it’s like to be going for a Triple Crown one minute and just hoping to stay alive the next.

In writing, injury can be a number of things: bad reviews, bad sales, being orphaned to another editor, or getting cut by your publisher. You’re just galloping along at a good pace, you think everything is great, and suddenly you’re on your ass in the grass blinking up at the sky and saying, “What happened?”

Like horseracing, writing is a tough game. There are no guarantees.

Conversely, great things can happen. Where there’s life, there’s hope. You’ve got a horse in your barn, nice bloodlines, didn’t do all that well as a two-year-old, but suddenly he’s coming right at just the right time. He’s maturing. He’s a different horse. He’s grown up.

Writers grow up, too. Sure, they’re in optional claiming races and they haven’t done much, but sometimes those horses get good, really good. And you want a horse to have a good foundation, a few races under his belt. A good publisher, like a good trainer, gives his horse time to develop, time to find his footing. Maybe the horse has been unlucky. Maybe the distance was too short for him and he will do better later. If he’s a turf horse, maybe it was soft going and he doesn’t like soft turf. So the trainer rethinks his strategy. Maybe he makes an equipment change—adds blinkers, gives him a different jockey, shortens him up or runs him longer. Maybe this is a horse who needs two turns—maybe he likes distance. Maybe the trainer puts him into hardcover with a good advertising budget.

Horseracing is big business. In both horseracing and publishing, there’s more of an emphasis on business these days than love of the sport. Sometimes they like to flash the cash just to make a big splash. Some of these mega-corporations would rather spend all their money at the yearling sales or at the two-year-old-in-training sales on horses that might never run a race. We’re talking millions, just the way publishers pay for celebrities who will probably never make back their advances.

But, this is where the paths of writers and racehorses diverge.

Writers live longer than horses do, generally speaking. We can always start over if we have to. We’re not handicapped by the name on our Jockey Club papers, either. We can use our experience to become better and better, so that we finally find our stride and start winning races.

There’s always room in the writing biz for a dark horse, no matter where he came from. There’s always another chance.

So here’s the question: what have you brought to the writing life from another discipline, and how does that affect what you do now?

And if you’re not a writer, have you ever had experience in one field that you applied to another one?