Sport

Sport writing works when it assumes the reader might care about the game and might also care about what the game is attached to. Money, bodies, towns, broadcasting, class, and the strange seriousness people bring to an activity that is, in the end, a game. You can write tactics for a knowing fan, or a story that a person who has never watched the sport can follow. Doing both at once is possible if you explain the thing once, clearly, and then stop explaining.

Access helps, and so does a point. An athlete's life is not automatically a book, especially if the life is a list of victories with childhood hardship at the front and gratitude at the back. Find the complication. A change in the sport, a decision, a rivalry, a body that won't cooperate, a club that means something to a place. Match reports are a craft of their own and a book needs a longer line than a single afternoon, unless that afternoon genuinely rearranged everything around it. Write the play accurately. Fans forgive a lot, and they do not forgive a writer who wasn't watching.