Tennis is frustrating to learn. It’s not the only thing I’m struggling to deal with

My microdrama of trying to learn how to play tennis and how to write fiction continues to wear me down and lift me up (sometimes).

Two weeks ago, I swear I could have taken on Venus Williams in tennis and had a good run. A week later week, I didn’t deserve to be her ball-pick-up person.

As I set up the ball machine to practice on an especially bad day, I ran into an instructor, Lee Galway, director of tennis and a coach where I take lessons. I told him that I’d had such a horrible time in the clinic he taught earlier that I was back to try to redeem myself.

Then he said just what I needed to hear:

“Tennis is a frustrating sport. One day a medium-ranked player wipes out Rafa Nadal, and the next week he’s back down at the bottom. It goes up and down and is never just a solid, consistent upward curve.”

I know nothing about sports, having come to it only through my kids and now as a person of a certain age, trying to learn how to play tennis.

But I do know about learning a language: fast and furious upward curve, then often a plateau, then more upward.

Tennis, though, feels like a sine curve: up, then down, then up, then down … you get the picture.

Lee said, “Tennis isn’t about winning, it’s about improving. Since we realize it’s an up-and-down process, what we coaches try to do is move the whole (sine) curve upward. That way when things are going well, the top of the curve is higher than it was and the bottom part of the curve also is higher, meaning the bottom isn’t as low as it was.”

I’ve said before: I’m a slow learner. This business of not continuously improving bothers me to no end. But I know he’s right. If, on the whole, I’m improving (even with those wretched down-in-the-hole parts of the curve), I should feel good.

And, of course, as fate would have it, I’m having an especially tough time with writing — I’m at the bottom of the curve these days, and frankly, I can’t decide if reading some of the world’s best literature is motivating or depressing me.

Then I thought of tennis: As long as my overall sine curve in writing is shifting upward (and, if I give myself a little bit of grace, I think it probably is), then I’m improving. I’ll never be an Abraham Verghese, the doctor whose 700-page best-selling Oprah-pick novel took the world by storm, but I can at least be a better fiction-writer-in-training.

Nancy Napier is a distinguished professor emerita and coach for the executive MBA program in the College of Business and Economics at Boise State University in Idaho. nnapier@boisestate.edu. She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”