Getting Up The Nerve To Tell Your Story

And what to do if you write yourself wrong

- Stephen Kiesling

“A WRITER IS ONLY AS GOOD as his last published story,” my editor at the New Yorker told me. “You’ve wasted one year of your life. Don’t waste another.”

At that time I was a hot young writer—first in my class at Yale to publish a book, which the New York Times Book Review likened to Mark Twain. Writing was a competitive sport and I was an Olympic athlete, unafraid of what I didn’t know. On my first assignment from Sports Illustrated, I sat in the press box at Madison Square Garden watching a Rangers hockey game and leaned over to the TV reporter next to me to ask if he would mind answering questions.

“Where ya from?” he asked.

“Sports Illustrated.”

“Ask anything you want.”

So I watched the men skate around for a few minutes whacking at each other furiously until the black disk ended up in the net at one end of the ice and everyone went nuts.

“How many points you get for that?” I asked the TV reporter.

“You are starting from a deficit,” he replied.