The Sport of Writing

I have always been fond of sports metaphors and quotes in casual conversation. However today I decided to write a blog comparing writing to sport. It is not far fetched. Sport requires talent, diligent practice, discipline, and will. I could be describing a good writer. The difference lies in the fact that the reader only sees the result of the writer's performance, not the performance itself. With sport, the game's the thing. It is an interesting difference.
Within the writing community, some do appreciate the game itself. We are aficionados of the writing game and it has been characterized as such. Writing is our sport however the reading public sees it and they generally see it in much more grandiose terms. An elegant sentence is the equivalent of a three point goal in basketball. No more. No less. When one is blessed or burdened with a deep understanding of the process of pen across page, it is an incredibly rewarding experience to get all the moving parts moving together like a Rolex and make that three point goal, write that elegant sentence.
Sports, however, are played against other players and here the metaphor gets a bit thin. Any self-respecting writer does play against a canon of similar talent. They wrestle in their own weight class but they do wrestle. I am no Hemingway or Nabokov but I do have writers in mind that I would like to match or better. To me and, in practice, other writers, writing is a sport.

The Fiction Narrative as Product

When I began conceptualizing the novel I am now writing, I first imagined a superb (Indie) bookstore and visualized the shelf on which I was trying to place this book. In other words, this novel is market-driven. Books are written to be read and writing with any other criteria then unit sales in mind makes no sense to the union of pen and paper. I do engage in writing exercises to hone my craft and develop form but always with an eye to saying something worth saying well enough for it to be read and enjoyed.
A generic book is a product in the same sense that a painting is a product. While the category, books by the pound, exists just as the product category, motel art, exists, the defining attributes of vision and talent select certain books for certain shelves in the book market, the universal bookstore.
Unlike some other writers, I appreciate Amazon's business model for the creation and marketing of books as products. They do make mistakes such as treating books as a commodity by lowering unit prices to increase volume of sales but, as it becomes obvious that this is a mistake, they will change their model. Theirs is a pragmatic, heuristic approach to selling more books and, since I want my novel read, I support their approach even when they make mistakes.
I will say that the Amazon search engine, which constitutes the shelves of that bookstore, is mysterious, even enigmatic. In my personal experience, it has behaved brilliantly in presenting certain books of interest to me and in a fairly mediocre fashion at other times. Writing for a search engine is a totally different concept than writing for a physical shelf and I admit that I am struggling to master it.