No Perfect Laps, No Perfect Drafts: Jade Song on What Swimming Taught Her About Writing

When I was a teenager, the holidays meant hell: Hell Week, the aptly christened time between Christmas and New Years, entailed up to six hours daily at the pool and weight room, whatever waking time left spent eating and stretching. My teammates and I went through hell in the hopes that our aching muscles would heal in time to perform excellently at later competition swims.

To survive Hell Week, I had to turn off my brain and stop thinking. I could not think about the pain: the sore muscles, the burning lungs, the chlorine itch. I could only trust my muscles to move, and that if they moved correctly, I would eventually come out stronger. Whatever results I wanted would only come if I blotted out the pain of the effort.

And this is how I write. This is how I make art.

I believe the athlete and the artist have much in common.

When I write, I can’t think about if what I’m writing is “good” or “bad.” I can’t think about if anyone will read it, or if it’ll be hated, loved, or never published at all. If I do, I freeze. The first draft of Chlorine, my novel featuring a competitive swimmer named Ren, was vomited out rather than thoughtfully pondered through.

When I’m writing, I stop thinking. I only trust my feelings. That they will lead me to The End.

But after the intuitive first draft comes revision, which does, unfortunately, require some thought—each sentence must be mulled over, each meaning tweaked precise. Yet even the thoughtful process of revision reminded me of what I’d learned from competitive swimming: the discipline of repetition. Ren’s endless laps swam in practice, back and forth, mirrored the endless retyping of that very same sentence describing it. As Ren repeated the same movements to perfect her swimming technique, I rewrote that same sentence, with minor variations each time, to reach a perfect structure.

I use the word perfect, but athletes and artists both know there is no real perfect. Perfection does not exist. What might feel perfect at the time reveals later room for improvement—every end is a beginning. In swimming, any best time becomes a time that must be beaten. In writing, a believed final draft turns into the fourth, then the fifth, then the sixth.

I never had a perfect race, and I will never have a perfect book, essay, or story. There is only the effort, made in the hopes that the bitter sweat and aching feelings poured into the water and the words will transform into something meaningful. Even when I fail.

And I am okay with failing. My time as a swimmer taught me how to make home within the devastating confines of failure. I’d spend months going through hell only to come out of it with seconds gained during a competition race. What was the point of experiencing hell if I had nothing to show for it?

I distinctly remember at sixteen years old, being so sad at my failure to get a best time at an important swim meet that I could barely eat for three days after, subsisting on my own tears, spending lunchtime in the cafeteria crying, my classmates awkwardly sitting next to me pretending like everything was fine.

I know now I had been so stupid—or rather, so young—to collapse into sorrow upon failure. So silly to believe that a failure to perform well in swimming was the end of the world. And I survived that minuscule yet all-consuming blip in my life to become an artist who has failed writing many unfinished stories and been rejected an uncountable number of times from literary magazines, retreats, fellowships, editors, and agents.

None of these No’s have caused me to spiral the way I did at sixteen. Thanks to swimming, I am immune, and I am comfortable with, and I accept, the failure that is inevitable for any artist and writer. I’ve already been devastated enough, and I will not be devastated again.

So. If perfection is nonexistent, if failure is inevitable, then why even try?

Because the trying is the point.

Nobody but the writer cares about the unwritten manuscript. And no one but the teenage swimmer cares about a high school athlete’s swimming results. Yet those words and those races are all that matters to the artist, to the athlete. The trying is what makes them, them. And me. And you.

Who would we be otherwise? Perhaps normal—someone who works their job, hangs out with loved ones, and falls asleep without distractedly obsessing over something as inconsequential as a plotline for a novel that doesn’t exist yet. I would like to be normal. To spend my time as time goes, naturally and carefree, instead of weighing every activity as an opportunity cost of time not writing, not swimming.

As a teen, I spent mornings doing laps at the pool before the school day started, and as an adult, I hunch over at my laptop trying to eke out another paragraph before the workday starts. If I was normal, perhaps I would just be relaxing in bed. Instead, I was cursed to grow up an athlete, and then to become an artist.

But like the princess who finds adventure outside her sheltered castle when she embarks to break her curse, the curse itself is what gives the journey meaning. The curse becomes the story, the quest, the life. And I’ll be here, making my art, even if it’s hard, even if it’s pointless, even if I’ll fail, because it’s not that the hard effort is worth the result—it’s the effort itself that is worth it.

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Chlorine by Jade Song is available in paperback via William Morrow.