Write Like a Black Belt

On December 6, 1998, Lee Sprague tied my very first black belt around my waist. It was a life touchstone moment for me, on the list with receiving my first check for writing, adopting my oldest son, and holding my youngest in my arms moments after he was born.

That was 27 years ago as of this writing. I’ve earned other black belts since. I’ve written as my full-time living for about 17 of those years, and there’s one aspect of earning my black belt that helped with the writing thing more than any other.

It’s About Goals

“Well, sure,” you’re saying. “Tell me something I don’t know, that I haven’t heard from a thousand other people giving writers advice.”

You’re right to say that, but here’s advice i’ve never heard from those other folks, and i’m betting you haven’t heard much either. It’s what a black belt teaches more than anything else.

When you first set your goals — when you take your first intro class and put on that white belt, or when you get jumped on by inspiration to write that first novel — you’re excited. Arguably too excited. You set the goal of getting to class three times a week, and practicing for an hour a day, and watching YouTube videos to improve your technique every night. You promise yourself you’ll write a chapter every day, and do market research every evening.

You do that cos you’re excited. You’re full of fire and ready to do the thing.

And for a few weeks you do exactly that. ‘Cos you’re still full of fire and you’re doing the thing! It’s exciting, and for a while it’s self-reinforcing. But it doesn’t last.

Eventually, something knocks you off the rails. You get sick, or hurt. Or a friend with an emergency needs you when class is scheduled/during your writing time. The important things you haven’t been doing to make time for this new goal come back to roost like angry, judgy chickens and suddenly you’re putting out fires.

And those promises you made to yourself about how much you’d do? You break them. And you lose heart. And, more often than not, the whole thing just sort of fades into something you think about doing more than you actually do.

Sound familiar? Even if that’s never, ever, ever happened to you, you can understand that it’s very common. The entire health club industry bases its profit margin on how common this is among human beings.

After a while, we sort of teach ourselves that it’s the natural life cycle of goals. We stop believing in them, because we set those short-term standards too high and consistently fail.

Okay, Fine. So What?

The difference with martial arts training, if you stick with it, is once you reach that point, you have a sensei to tell you to come back to class. So you come back, maybe just twice a week and you practice for half an hour on the days you don’t go to class. You find a way to make it work with your life.

And you keep coming to class. After a few months, you get a color belt to put around your waist. It energizes you by giving you that sweet, sweet dopamine of having accomplished a measurable benchmark in your journey. After a few years, that belt is black.

Which i’m here to tell you, is pretty darn cool.

It doesn’t happen because you maintain that frantic, manic pace of inspiration you had at the beginning of the journey. It happens because you make small, reasonable steps towards it consistently over time.

And so it is with writing. That novel doesn’t happen in weeks of binge-writing. It happens a page at a time over weeks and months and years. You don’t wake up and have a client base that pays your mortgage after five days of trying really hard. You build it a contract at a time until you can quit your day job.

Success in martial arts and writing isn’t about accomplishing single, unreasonable goals in astonishing bursts of energy and inspiration. It’s about accumulating reasonable steps until the sum total amounts to something many people consider impossible.

That’s what becoming a black belt taught me, and that’s what being a black belt contributed to my writing professionally for the better part of two decades.

Whether or not you share my passion for kickpunchery, you can still apply the concept to your writing goals.

Start today.

You’ve got this.