Surfing and Writing: Two Practices, One Discipline
Why a lifetime spent paddling out at dawn quietly taught me almost everything I know about finishing a book.
Surfing is mostly waiting. This is the first thing it has in common with writing.
You sit on the board, the horizon lifting and falling, and most of what passes underneath you is not the wave. You learn to read the water. You learn which sets are worth turning for and which are only the sea being generous with its rehearsals.
A book is the same. Most of the sentences you write are not the sentence. They are the sea rehearsing. The discipline is to keep sitting there, keep watching, and to know the difference when it finally arrives.
The second thing surfing teaches you is dawn. There is no version of a serious writing life that does not include a quiet hour before the world begins its noise. Whether the noise is meetings, or children, or a phone that has already begun to buzz — the writer who owns the dawn owns the book.
The third thing is humility. The ocean will remind you, at least once a season, that you are a guest. So will the page. Sit down anyway. Paddle out anyway. The wave, and the sentence, are always closer than you think.
