First, a quick announcement:
For those of you in Amsterdam, I will be performing on Saturday, 25 November, 2023 alongside my good pal and legend DJ/Producer Julien Chaptal for Doka Electronics Live Sessions. I will be performing experimental rituals for peace set to music. Imagine chants that create hypnotic states, koans for mindful meditation, and the conjuring of words that hold the power to effect change.
You can find tickets here!
Now, onto the main newsletter.
A surprising knockdown
Last week, heavyweight champion Tyson Fury faced MMA champion Francis Ngannou in the ring.
Fury is a methodical boxer who, with a perplexing style, confounds opponents with agility and aggressiveness that is surprising for a man his size. He’s considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time. Ngannou, on the other hand, is arguably the most powerful striker in MMA, and though he had no professional boxing experience, he has shown time and time again that he is a fighter adaptable to most situations.
There was a lot of hype leading up to the fight. Fury was the natural favorite to win, given his experience in the ring. Still, there were many who believed that Fury had gone soft—both mentally and physically—and that this match was a cowardly dodge by Fury from facing the true competition of Oleksandr Usyk. Some pundits argued that Ngannou had more than a swinging chance of embarrassing Fury.
Fury didn’t care for the hype around Ngannou and perhaps took the fight less seriously than he should have. Ngannou seemed more than capable of going toe-to-toe with Fury in the ring. At times, Ngannou had Fury running, and in the third round, Ngannou scored a “surprise” knockdown, shocking some critics and pleasing the pundits who believed in him all along.
Fury was shocked. The match wasn’t unfolding according to plan. Maybe there was a bit too much arrogance on the part of the champion? He certainly loved talking trash. Touching gloves at the beginning of the match, Fury used this as a last opportunity to run his mouth.
“I’m going to school you,” he said.
But this had been no simple lesson for Fury to give. Ngannou had proven himself a worthy opponent.
Though Ngannou went on to lose the fight in a controversial split decision, in post-fight interviews, he seemed unfazed. “You’re a bad professor,” he said of Fury after the fight, smiling, knowing that the victory was his all along.
Learning to adjust
I’ve already written a bit about turning failures into victories in a previous post, but Ngannou’s attitude after the bout gave me further pause.
As a long-time boxing fan, I started taking lessons during the pandemic. I had two motives:
First, I needed an alternative to my gym, which was only sporadically open during the lockdown. I’m constantly concerned with idle middle-age spread.
Second, I wanted to figure out why I was so attracted to such a brutal sport. I felt that without experiencing it firsthand, I’d never get to the root of this obsession.
A few years later, I think I have a better idea.
Boxing, I’ve learned, is a sport of adjustments. Sure, fighters come to a sparring session or the ring with a game plan. They know their opponent’s weaknesses, and they’ve trained their bodies and minds to exploit those weak spots. But almost always, the best plans fall apart.
Fury and Ngannou’s fight is a perfect example.
And this is where my attraction to the sport is rooted. It’s a parallel to the writing process.
Boxing, like writing, is about learning a craft. In boxing, you need to learn how to jab, uppercut, and throw a hook with proper form. Then, you need to practice those basic moves in combination to turn their execution into muscle memory. That way, those particular combos will come automatically when the time is right.
Writing is like this. You learn the basics and practice the art of the comma, the gentle shifts of syntax, and the main elements of plot until they too are muscle memory. You want to have those skills in your fingers for the moments that the writing gets hard or an idea reveals its unexpected difficulties.
Like being in the ring, fighting with a piece of writing requires that you’re comfortable enough with the skills you possess to pivot, adjust, and take on the opponent while breathing deeply and thinking clearly.
And while you may not win every fight with the page, even if you have the skills to succeed, the small victories are always yours. The page is sometimes a bad professor, but sometimes even a bad professor has a lesson to teach.
I approach my revisions with this mindset, and this month’s paid newsletter will focus on a loose revision structure I devised around various boxing techniques. Kooky, I know, but I hope you’ll check it out.