Adrian Markle: What kind of research on boxing did you do for the novel, and how did that impact the writing process? Did you feel a particular fidelity to the facts or experiences you gained in that research, or were they always only in service to the greater narrative?

Steven Heighton: All my life I’ve been in too much of a rush—sometimes a matter of creative excitement, sometimes just standard-issue impatience—to follow the path of the apprentice and learn the skills I’ve needed. I’ve written eighteen books now using just a couple of fingers (well, mostly just one) because I couldn’t be bothered to take a typing class in high school. At sixteen I taught myself to fingerpick guitar with just two fingers instead of learning properly. I taught myself to skate at eighteen and quickly internalized all sorts of wrong techniques.

Likewise, on starting The Shadow Boxer, I threw myself into the project and didn’t worry that the only boxing I’d done was a bit of amateurish outdoor sparring in the pine woods at Jasper Park Lodge, in the Alberta Rockies, where I worked as a dishwasher and then waiter in the months after finishing high school. I and the other boys had no idea what we were doing. Various undignified minor injuries were sustained. That half-assed experimentation turned out to be useless when it came to drafting the novel’s boxing scenes. Naturally I barged on anyway. I figured if I simply recalled the feeling of being in our pine forest ring, then extrapolated and imagined while deploying lots of muscular verbs, I could build scenes that felt real.

But when I reread the novel’s first draft, those scenes felt dead on the page. The language seemed lively but some crucial spark was missing. So I learned the hard lesson every stylist has to metabolize: you can revise and polish your cadences forever, but if that X-factor is lacking, you end up with nothing more than an exercise in fluency and euphony.

In this case the X-factor was, I guessed, actual bodily knowledge and experience of the ring. So I joined the Kingston Youth Boxing Club and over the following year and a half redrafted and repeatedly revised my boxing scenes while working out and sparring at the club. I loved it there. The place had been in operation for some thirty years but it felt and smelled as if it had been around since the 1920s. The coaches were gruffly, avuncular, like the cornermen in old boxing films. In due course I got my rib cracked by the Canadian junior heavyweight champion, a 200-pound 16-year-old named Alex White, to whom the coaches injudiciously fed me one night after he’d tired out or maimed all his other, usual victims.

The scenes I drafted while training at the club wrote themselves, as they say. I could feel a live current flowing through me as I drafted them, my palms sweating, heart speeding, body fully engaged. To some extent I still felt it even as I rewrote them—and when passages continue to feel alive to you, so that the repeated revision doesn’t seem like mere chore-doing, you know they have a pulse and legs.

As for feeling a fidelity to facts/experiences—no, never. I’ll unapologetically change facts, dates, quotes, etcetera, to suit the stylistic or thematic exigencies of the work.

AM: At one point Sevigne talks about the thematic and experiential similarities between boxing and writing. Could you talk a little more about that comparison—where it holds up and where it falls apart? And, just for fun, if your experience of writing this novel was a boxing match, how would you describe it as having played out?

SH: Fun answer first. Novels are impossible. All novels fail at some point or on some level, first novels especially. In this case I’d say the author lost the fight in a split decision, having taken a beating in the middle rounds, but he went the distance and scored a couple of knockdowns, especially in the early and late rounds.

As for parallels between boxing and writing, I think really we’re talking here about the similarities between boxing and life; the sport is not just like writing, it’s like any activity that involves strife and struggle, conflict with others/oneself (especially, always, oneself), self-doubt, self-destructiveness, fear of failure, failure, tests of stamina, and brief moments of triumph (a lousy word here but I’m going to stet it). Consider this: How many key adages or turns of phrase has soccer, the biggest sport in the world for a century, lent to our language? Few if any, because soccer (like hockey, or basketball, or baseball) is nothing like life. It’s artificial, its rules arbitrary. And there’s nothing wrong with artifice; to play tennis, you need lines and a net.

But boxing, like running, is less a sport than an adapted form of a primordial activity. Fight or flight: box or run. And since boxing and running embody basic human survival mechanisms, their terminologies are widely applicable—and also now so well embedded they’re all but invisible, which is to say clichéd. To go toe to toe with someone. To stay on your toes. Roll with the punches. Be on the ropes. Keep your chin down. Be in someone’s corner. Throw in the towel. Take it on the chin, then take a low blow. Hit below the belt. Down for the count. Beat the count. Saved by the bell . . . I’ll embrace the clichés here and spell it out: life too often feels like a combat sport, the kind where you’re trapped and fighting to beat the odds while dimly aware of faces watching from the periphery, a few cheering you on, most leering or at least indifferent, none able to save you. And of course we all get knocked down and need to get up again (cue dramatic music) and keep trying. The hackneyed nature of this paradigm is what makes it seem so puerile, but on some level it’s all perfectly valid and true.

And where does the analogy fail? I would say that it falls apart—in the sense of becoming superfluous, irrelevant—only if, after years of disciplined spiritual work, you achieve the wisdom to stop fighting yourself or needing to fight with the world. But even at that stage—which must be so nice—a fight might be forced on you, or you might need to take one on, on behalf of others. Though I guess by that point an enlightened being would know how to respond with aikido instead of throwing punches.

AM: There is a pretty substantial tradition in western literature of “the boxing novel.” Do you consider yours a boxing novel, or a novel with boxing in it, and did that distinction, if you even agree there is one, affect your decision making when writing the novel (re: genre convention, entering canonical dialogue, etc.).

SH: I can’t imagine writing a book that could be called a boxing novel. What would that even look like? A bit like those fluent, entertaining hockey stories for boys that Scott Young—Neil Young’s father—used to write and that I read as a pre-teen? Scrubs on Skates is one title I recall. Now those were true sports novels; they were built around practice, games, scoring goals, getting benched, all that. The characters, as I recall, were flat—mere delivery systems for the exciting sports scenes that many kids of that age like reading. To write an adult version of that sort of book now, focused on any sport . . . I just wouldn’t be interested, let alone obsessed, and obsession is the pathological basis on which a writer has to found an edifice as large as a novel. Without obsession how would you ever finish building something of 100,000 words? (I’m not sure exactly what it is that does obsess me enough to finish my books; I am sure it isn’t my job to describe it.)

Anyway, whether my characters box, serve as sailors and get shipwrecked in the Arctic, work as doctors, mechanics, or bakers, that’s not exactly who they are. Their various jobs or vocations matter, in terms of public identity, but are not primary to their inner lives. Often they’re accidental. (Our lives are often largely accidental.) And what a novel for grownups does is investigate inner lives as opposed to outer identities. In Leonard Gardner’s small masterpiece Fat City—now there’s an almost perfect novel—boxing is simply the medium, the ring, in which the main character learns some of life’s necessary lessons. So while boxing is central to the book, I wouldn’t call Fat City a boxing novel.

In my book, the sport’s role is partly to furnish a useful metaphor for my protagonist’s quarrel with the world and, above all, himself. “To shadow box” literally means to train by practicing your moves against a phantom opponent—and, sometimes, using a mirror, your own reflection—but to me the term also implies the kind of civil war our divided self constantly wages. Our public and private selves arguing; our ego, threatened by change, battling the deeper self that tries to enact same; complexes we inherited from one parent duking it out with obsessions bequeathed by the other. We’re always throwing wild punches at shadowy projections, ghosts, memories, all of which are really aspects of ourselves.

The fact that boxing in my novel serves partly or largely as a metaphor might have been the most important reason I had to enter the ring and experience the sport first-hand. Metaphors in fiction have to be fully embodied and embedded, lest they seem merely conceptual, schematic, superimposed. Once my body and senses had internalized the sport, blow by blow, bruise by bruise, I was able to re-enact Sevigne’s trials and to root his metaphor in the living physical world my novel was trying to incarnate.