The Challenges of Writing Sports (and Tips for Dealing with Them)
Like I imagine is the case for many people right now, the Olympics has become my default “on in the background” content since it started. Not because I’m particularly passionate about any of the sports involved—more the opposite, in fact. There’s something very intriguing and entertaining about watching sports I normally don’t think about, or seeing things I’m only familiar with from family picnics being played at an exceptionally high level.
Something else the Olympics makes very clear: sports are omnipresent in just about every culture of the world. This has likely been true for thousands of years. From the original Olympics held in ancient Greece to the ball game of the Aztec and Maya, just about every culture we know about had some kind of sport.
Despite this, I think it’s safe to say that sports are among the most neglected aspects of society in creative writing. You can definitely find examples of sports in fiction and poetry, but not nearly to the same degree as other cultural touchstones like food, music, religion, or fashion.
And, to be fair, I kind of get why. Writing about sports can be difficult for a number of reasons, something I know because I’ve tried my hand at it a few times with varying degrees of success. So I figured I’d put together a post on how I deal with some of those pitfalls of writing about sports for anyone else watching the Olympics and feeling inspired to try their hand at it.
Challenge 1: Large casts of characters.
When I write about sports, I tend to write about team sports—specifically hockey, in my case. At any given time in a hockey game, there are 10-14 people just on the ice between the teams and refs, not to mention the other players on the benches, the coaches, the fans in the stands, and so on.
This is mostly an issue for those writing fiction, primarily short stories, where it can easily lead to the story being overloaded with characters. It’s a tricky balancing act, especially when you’re writing from the POV of a player. That individual would know everyone’s names, so it can feel unrealistic and inauthentic to omit them. On the other hand, if you include them all, you’re likely to lose the reader in the litany.
Now, if you’re just writing a story about people who play this sport and aren’t showing any in-game scenes, you can avoid this problem the classic writerly way: by just focusing on your handful of characters central to the plot and emotional arc, and ignoring the rest. That doesn’t work once there’s game action, though, and not just for issues of realism. Think about your typical in-game commentary:
Crosby takes the puck over the blueline and passes to Malkin at the point, one-timer blocked by Marchand but recovered by Letang who carries it across the right circle then passes it back to Crosby…
…in that kind of play-by-play, the names are anchor points that help the listener (or, in this case, reader) know what’s going on. Without them, it makes the sequence of events much harder to follow, and that can steal the momentum from what should be a fast-paced, active scene.
There isn’t an easy solution to this one, but I have found a few helpful workarounds:
- Selectively name only the characters you want the reader to focus on. This is one of those places that realism needs to be balanced against readability and storytelling. Just because there are 10+ people involved in the action doesn’t mean the reader needs to know each of them individually. Selectively naming characters both avoids confusion and helps the reader identify which characters are the most important, giving them something to focus on that can help them navigate the narrative more smoothly.
- Give the characters nicknames. A nickname conveys more information about a character than their given name, which can help the reader keep the characters straight when you need to use a lot of them for a scene to function.
- Use teams and positions rather than names. For readers who are familiar with the sport, they can tell what’s going on in a line like “the Penguins left-winger shoots a one-timer from the point, blocked by the Bruins forward but recovered by the Penguins defender…” –it’s a bit clunky, compared to the with-names version, but lets the reader get through the in-game action without getting hung up on exactly who everybody is.
Challenge 2: To name-drop or not to name-drop.
This one is mostly relevant for folks writing about well-known sports, the type whose star athletes are celebrities and whose major leagues get national or international news coverage. Even for smaller real-world sports, though, it’s a question you’ll need to address at some point: To what extent is the world of your story aligned to the real-world? There are a few different levels you can exist at:
The story is straight pulled from reality and all of the players, including the main characters, are real people.
In this form, you’re essentially writing historical fiction with a sports focus. Generally speaking, you’ll only want to do this if you’re looking at least a few decades into the past, anyway—writing about a living real person can be hairy from a legal standpoint, even if you’re not writing with any kind of malicious intent.
From a writing standpoint, these stories require mostly research and very little independent character development or worldbuilding. The advantage of this is that you have a ready frame to hang your story on, without needing to construct any parts of it. The flip side is that it could be limiting, requiring you to paint inside the lines unless you’re going for a full-on alternative history. For example, you could write the story where the miracle on ice never happens and the USSR win gold. Even so, though, you’ll want to keep most of the details the same to give the reader the full impression of that alternate history playing out.
The story uses real-world players as background figures, but the viewpoint/central characters are fictional.
While you still do need to be careful with how you handle the real-world figures, you’re less likely to run into potential legal drama if they are background characters only mentioned in passing. Using fictional foreground characters gives you more freedom to write the story you want to tell, though you’ll still need to do your research to make sure you’re putting real players on the right teams at the right times and similar details are consistent.
This approach is predominantly research with a smidge of independent character and worldbuilding. It can be an efficient way to tell a character-driven sports narrative, particularly a short story. Readers are instantly grounded by the real-world setting, letting you devote your focus and pagespace to building your characters instead. The disadvantage is similar to the approach above, which is that your creative freedom can be limited.
The story uses real-world leagues, teams, stadiums, etc. but all of the people are fictional.
This is the approach I normally take when I’m writing about professional sports. The main advantage is similar to the above: the real-world teams are a shorthand for the reader, letting you auto-fill some of the setting so you can focus on telling your story. You get a bit more freedom in this, too. Teams stick around a lot longer than individual players so you’re not as locked in to specific seasons or years when you don’t namedrop actual players.
This approach requires a blend of research and worldbuilding, and you will need to establish a few more details in the text to ground the reader. Even so, you get a good amount of freedom when it comes to what takes place in games and their outcomes, giving you more control over the narrative arc.
The sport is the only thing pulled directly from reality, and the teams as well as the players are all fictional.
I would say this is the best approach if you’re writing about sports at the non-professional level. It can also work for professional sports, but it can mean a lot of unnecessary work. Sports are an intrinsic part of the culture, so if your setting is “the real world, but now the MLB is the Baseball League of America”, that can be a bit confusing for readers—they might expect more things to be different, too, so you’ll need to do more work to keep them grounded in your story’s world. If your made-up league is clearly the real one with the name changed, that can be distracting for the reader, leading them to wonder why you bothered coming up with a whole new thing.
You’ll still need some research into the sport itself in this approach, but the rest is worldbuilding and character development. This approach gives you the most creative freedom, but is also the most susceptible to info dumps. It requires restraint and careful writing to give the reader all of the information they need without boring them with background details.
Challenge 3: Jargon and terminology.
One of the things I love about sports is how each one has its own language. This becomes like a secret code for the initiated—but for those who aren’t, it can make discussion of the sport absolutely nonsensical.
You might be thinking “well, then, I’ll just leave out the jargon”—but that’s not always the best move, either. Just like with names, these terms are a shorthand that allow people to talk about the sport in a concise way, which is critical for keeping the pace and tension for in-game scenes. Sprinkling in that terminology also imbues the story with authority and authenticity, so you don’t want to omit it entirely. That said, you also don’t want to go Moby Dick on your reader and explain the entire rulebook and glossary of the sport, especially if you’re writing short fiction.
The first question to answer here is one of audience. If you’re writing about a sport that’s well-known in your audience’s culture, you can use more niche terms without needing to explain them. For instance, if your audience is in the US, you can count on them to know American football terms like touchdown, quarterback, or field goal, but less so to know rest-of-the-world-football terms header, red flag, or nutmeg. That would be reversed for an audience in the UK.
Even if you’re writing about a very niche or obscure sport, or about one that you made up in a sci-fi or fantasy world, there are some general sports concepts that you can probably expect your audience to know—things like defender, attacker, score, foul, etc.
For other terms, you can handle them in three ways:
Omit the niche terminology and instead explain it in words your audience will definitely understand. This is the best option for clarity, but loses some of the authenticity and spirit of the sport you’re writing about.
Explain the terminology to the reader before using it. This lets you keep the reader fully immersed in the world of the sport (and therefore the story), but slows down the pace and can get boring or tedious if it’s done too often.
Use the terminology without explanation, in a way that makes its meaning clear from context. In this strategy, you’re approach the terms basically the same way you would a foreign word. This can be a very smooth way to maintain immersion, but should be employed sparingly and carefully to avoid losing the reader.
Normally, I use a mix of these approaches when I’m writing a sports story. Some things I’ll explain; some words I’ll just use unexplained; some things I’ll re-explain in a different way. As far as how I decide which is which, I’ll usually start by considering the story’s themes and which concepts from the sport best reinforce or convey those. Those are the words I’m most likely to linger on and explain in-text.
The ones I’m most likely to drop in without context are terms that either aren’t super important for the reader to understand, or ones I think they’ll be able to interpret from other contexts. A non hockey fan may not know what the “blueline” or “redline” signify in the game, but they can at least picture where those are on the rink, so it won’t yank them out of the story to see them in passing.
One final thought before I wrap up: in my view, writing about sports is difficult in a lot of the same ways as writing battle scenes. Both cases involve large numbers of characters engaged in fast-moving action, often using very specific equipment and techniques. I mostly bring this up because you’ll find a lot more examples of war and military action in fiction and poetry than you will sports. Studying those can be helpful to get a sense for things like pacing and how to balance sensory details and physical descriptions with more logistical movements of the characters. There’s also a lot more targeted advice already out there of how to write battle scenes well, and you can apply a lot of the same concepts they talk about to sports scenes.
While it can be challenging, I definitely encourage writers to try their hand at writing about sports. The sports world has a lot of storytelling potential, with built-in stakes and ticking clocks that can build very effective tension and conflict when used correctly. Hopefully the tips in this post help you to do that with your next sports story!
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