u/seasidepanther

Probably a lot of you here know of Lauren Groff (author of several novels, including Fates and Furies and Matrix). She's excellent, in my opinion, though not one of my favorite writers currently working, but I am super envious of her process, which is kinda perfect and also totally insane, and it works because of SCIENCE.

What she does is, she has an idea. She lets it swirl around in her head for a while. I assume that she figures out around this time whether it's a novel idea or a short-story idea (she treats them differently, I'll get to that in a minute). Then she whips out a spiral-bound notebook, sets a timer, and gets writing.

So far, so typical -- of a certain kind of analog-first, writing-sprinter type of person. She'll put in 60-minute blocks of time on each major character, but she won't write an outline or otherwise plan anything. Pretty soon, she will write a first draft, start to finish, at top speed.

Then she'll chuck that draft in a drawer. And never look at it again. And after some time she will just ... begin another draft. In another spiral notebook. Without looking at the first draft. She doesn't even read it.

She finishes the second draft, chucks it in the drawer. Rinse, repeat.

She does this four or five times. In the case of Fates and Furies, it was ELEVEN (!!).

Once she's satisfied that she's done "enough" of these drafts, she opens up a word processor and starts typing a draft. (It's not clear to me if she transcribes her last handwritten draft or types a whole new one, but does that even matter at this point?) She doesn't need an outline -- she knows the plot like the back of the hand that's somehow free of carpal tunnel after all this writing. She can finally focus on the language, bring all her attention to the sentences.

A few more revision passes (not full retypes, thank god) come before the book goes off for editing and the rest of the publishing rigmarole. But the fireworks are over.

Why go to all this trouble? Because of how memory and learning work.

The cool thing about human memory is that it's limited: there's too much to remember, and unlike a computer, you can't hold onto it all by encoding it on a stable medium. Instead, your brain has to use shortcuts -- the shortcut of choice being lossy compression.

"Compression", in this context, means "forgetting details". The best way to grasp this is by doing recall practice.

Suppose you're trying to understand some difficult concepts -- e.g., you're reading science or philosophy texts, and you want to make sure you get what you're reading. You can read a chapter, let some time go by, and then, without looking at the chapter again, write out everything you can remember of what you read. You won't remember everything, but that's OK. Forgetting is the point.

You might go back and look at the chapter again, note what you remembered, and what you couldn't explain in your own words, i.e., didn't understand. Then, let a longer interval go by (3-4 days) and repeat the process, again without rereading. You will find that you remember more than last time, but that it's all better organized. Your brain is starting to sort the information into chunks.

Your third and fourth time doing this (again, with slightly longer gaps each time) are where the magic happens. You see, regurgitating all this information is really tiresome. Your brain knows you've already done it. It knows the information is available in the text itself if you'd just bother to look. But you are forcing it to perform this fruitless labor! Why??

Yet it seems you're serious about this dumb activity, this waste of precious calories, so your brain looks after your interests in the only way you let it: by becoming more efficient. How do human brains become more efficient about retrieving information? By chunking. Building conceptual shortcuts. Dropping the damn details.

Forgetting.

Paragraphs of explanation will become sentences. Swathes of context will be waved away. It's like reducing a sauce. And you don't even have to consciously do anything. I mean, you could sit down and think your way through it all, use your conscious mind to distill the essence of the information you're absorbing, but your conscious mind is actually a lot worse at this than your background processes are. Trust your brain.

Groff's process does exactly this for her fiction. Her first draft is wild and free to run off in any direction, indulge in risky business consequence-free. Her second is, too, but some stuff from the first is just ... forgotten, which means it wasn't worth remembering in the first place.

(John Cleese tells a story about a time he lost the script of a sketch he'd been writing with Graham Chapman. Panicked, he gave up searching and wrote it out again from memory. To his surprise, he "remembered it all". Later, he did find the original script, and to his surprise, he found he'd forgotten a bunch of lines that didn't matter and improved a number of those that did.)

Each subsequent draft gets more compressed as the inessentials boil away. Structure and organization improve organically as Groff's brain builds shortcuts to make the recall more efficient. At no point is she handcuffed, as so many prose-sensitive writers are, by the exact way she phrased something when she first wrote it. And she comes to know her story, world, and characters so well that later drafts come out feeling super layered, like the writer has full command of past and future events and their resonances. Which, of course, she does.

Now, I'll admit that Groff herself claims she chose this process because she's "OCD" (her word) about prose to the point that if she tried typing a novel and let herself fiddle with the sentences she'd never get past the first paragraph. But a lot of us are like that to some degree, and even in Groff's case, the "first paragraph" thing is surely somewhat hyperbolic.

I've benefited from experimenting with these practices in my own writing; I wonder if others have found something similar. And while there's no "right way" to write, the Groff way does make a hell of a lot of neurocognitive sense.

I've been wondering how other writers relate to writing analyses -- close-readings, structural studies, other kinds of deep dive, etc. -- of the "what makes this good/bad" variety. So much of the content (both text and video) around the writing craft appears to be: one writer closely examining the work of another for an audience of writers in general and deriving certain craft principles, or: discussing certain craft principles, then using some specific other writer's work as an exemplar of how to use them well. Writers are hungry for content like this, and the algorithms duly serve it up in mindboggling quantities.

What tends to disappear in this dynamic is the most important principle: the benefit of close analysis accrues to the person doing it.

In other words, there are only so many principles/frameworks/theories, and most of them are just the same few ideas endlessly recombined. The people who peddle this kind of material (and I number myself amongst them) might package it in a novel way or bring genuine insight to the work they're analyzing, but as the consumer of such content, you are not really learning at all. Writing is a practice -- something based in procedural memory (how to do stuff) rather than discursive memory (ideas about stuff). This means that, yes, you learn to write by writing, but also by studying other writers ... directly.

The slow, boring, laborious, difficult part is the point. It's the practice. Someone can study Hemingway and tell you about his prose style, but this is not going to teach you nearly as much as sitting down with a page of Hemingway and taking it apart yourself. It might seem kind of pointless because other people have already read Hemingway and distilled him into "craft advice", so you might think you are wasting your time, that there's nothing in there you don't "already know". But knowing is the problem in a nutshell: you might know, conceptually, why Hemingway's technical innovations/refinements were important to the modernist movement, and you might have read him yourself and thereby experienced the effects of those choices, but to slow down and take the thing apart for yourself is an irreplaceable education.

Don't get me wrong, I've learned a ton from reading other people's close-readings -- e.g., a book by Francine Prose called Reading Like a Writer gave me a model for how to go about the process -- but that's the best thing you can get from reading an analysis: a model for how to do one yourself.

Often, you will find yourself deeply absorbing, for the first time, things you believed you knew. For instance, I am very familiar with Kafka's short stories and with critical discourse around their structure. But putting all that aside and reading "Josephine the Singer" with the aim of understanding it from the inside out brought home to me how truly weird it is, and in what way it's weird, which another critic's insights could never have done.

Just as with any other domain of learning, your own insights lodge in your brain and take root and grow there better than anyone else's. They are fit for your own purpose, adapted to the habitat of your mind. Your own ideas suit you like the bugs in your microbiome; they thrive where outsiders can barely get a foothold.

And once you start doing this, you start generating questions that are too specific for anyone else to answer. For instance, my analytical habit has led me to the point where I need to know how Alice Munro structures her long short-stories -- how does she make them so capacious? She will start from some incident relating to a character, then cast forward and back over decades, sometimes generations, to encompass that person's entire life, their place in the world, the meaning of their experience. How does she control this movement? How does she know when to summarize and when to drop into scene? How does she use details to evoke entire periods of a person's history in the space of a sentence?

If someone were here to tell me how she does all this, I'd definitely read their analysis. (I'm only human -- what if they've found the secret??) But I wouldn't get from it what I can get from doing the work myself. And if you consume a lot of craft advice, you might want to consider doing some analyses, too.

P.S.: It's fun!

Hello all, first time posting here.

I've been writing basically my whole life (fiction, essays, poems, plays) and have even gotten a modest amount of recognition in the form of a fancy award, a bit of niche publicity, etc.; I hesitate to call it "success" because that's not how I define success -- it's just a dash of institutional approval. I've also taught writing on and off for a number of years, and as a self-taught writer, I spend an unreal amount of my free time thinking about writing pedagogy and what I like to call the phenomenology of writing -- what's happening in people's brains when they're producing prose.

And it seems to me that a lot of the people who struggle to improve as writers -- regardless of their proficiency -- struggle with the same roadblocks. Needlessly so: I believe writing "talent" is a lot more common than we're led to believe, and the gap between mediocre and proficient writing can be hopped over with a subtle shift of mindset.

What got me thinking about this was comments sections. Even the lowest form of comments section -- the one under a YT short, say -- contains intelligent people articulating their thoughts with care, concision, precision, and even elegance. Many of those same people, statistically speaking, wouldn't call themselves "writers", let alone "prose stylists". But in the internet age, almost everyone is producing thousands of words of prose a week in the form of comments, text messages, emails, etc., and they all manage to make themselves understood.

They communicate effectively. And writing is communication.

Of course, proficient writing isn't only effective communication, or throwing a rock at someone who's annoying you would be a poem. Proficient writing is defined by the writer's choices. So when I look at a piece of writing, I ask myself: What choices is this person making, and how do those choices help or hinder them in achieving the goal of their writing?

That's a poetics. And workaday writing, which almost none of its practitioners even consider to be writing, unarguably has a poetics. People instinctively, intuitively apply stylistic rules to their communications: they put full stops/periods at the ends of lines to indicate seriousness/gravity. They use abbreviations and contractions to convey lightness of tone. They drop their capitals to be casual, bring them back to be more formal. They break statements into multiple lines for emphasis -- i.e., they're aware of lineation and prosody, and intuitively deploy these tricks to finetune their message.

Zoom out, and you can see how sensitive people are to the demands of their form re: compression & elaboration: someone will tell a story in a YT comment and ruthlessly omit excess details because they know how much is too much to ask of their readers; the same person will tell the same story in a Reddit post and go on at much greater length (as I'm clearly doing).

They also -- and this subject is probably worthy of a separate post -- get up to all kinds of interpersonal complexity through these missives. They flirt and reject advances. They try to sell each other things. They try to look cool or pathetic. They ask for help and offer it. They give each other good advice and bad news and tough love and encouragement. All of which entails choices, choices, choices! At the line level, the paragraph level, the structural level. Knotty rhetorical problems are routinely addressed by "non-rhetoricians".

I think if you can show that people are making choices that work, and making them over and over, and changing the choices when the context demands it, you can call this skill. There are skilled writers EVERYWHERE.

A key point here is that almost none of the people who possess and practice these skills all the time are aware of their choices. And maybe that's the snag I see so many aspiring writers get caught on. You don't need to know the ins and outs of a skill in order to be skilled; in fact, it's better not to! When you've mastered something, you basically never have to think about the details of doing it -- it's procedural memory, fully automatic; you look to your goal and move towards it, letting your unconscious take care of the how. Sometimes you come across a problem that demands conscious attention & deliberate care, and you have to slow down and work your way through it stepwise, but the vast majority of the work of writing isn't stuff like that.

The difference between writers for whom writing is a struggle and those for whom it's just a thing they do is: the latter treat writing of all kinds as if it's a comment or text message, and the former treat "writing" as capital-W Writing. Of course the stylistic requirements of an essay or a book or a short story are wildly different from those of a work email, but humans are very skilled at switching codes for various contexts. What they're not good at, sometimes, is recognizing that the "code" they're using for this context is self-defeating.

They have all these abilities, all these finely-tuned antennae for what words can do to readers. They are sensitive to the fine details of prose and capable of manipulating the details of their own prose for incredibly specific effects. And then they write CHAPTER ONE across the top of a Word doc and freeze, agonizing about whether they can do it "properly". They bring conscious attention to their sentences and their imagery, they bring judgments about what's good and bad from books they've read, and all the craft advice they've gorged on over years of longing to be "real writers" comes thronging up into the echo chambers of their minds. And they don't do what they're capable of.

And ... that's my point. What I believe, these days. Am I wrong? Am I oversimplifying? Am I blinkered by my own experience and failing to imagine what it's like for others? Please let me know if this jibes with your own development as a writer. And thanks for reading.

Intro/Caveats

With Sinner's dismantling of Zverev in Madrid, the field has never looked bleaker for anyone not named Sinner or Alcaraz. The last time two players dominated the rest of the tour like this was the Fedal era, before the rise of Djokovic and Murray as legitimate threats. This got me wondering: Had Djokovic never broken through, how many majors would Fedal have wound up winning? And what might that alternate universe tell us about the future of Sincaraz if a new challenger doesn't come along?

A caveat. I'm going to assume Djokovic did constrain Fedal's slam count. Silly to say otherwise. More reasonably, you could claim that Djokovic's brilliance spurred Federer and Nadal to play longer, get better, and ultimately win more majors in their 30s than they'd otherwise have done.

But I don't think this holds: Fedal might have spurred Djokovic to become greater than he would've been otherwise, but the reverse isn't true. I don't think Fed stuck around into his mid-30s because he wanted to prove he could beat Djokovic; I don't think Rafa needed Djokovic to push him to win a gazillion French Opens. I don't think either of them believed they had a realistic chance of "catching him", so to speak, once he'd matured; however deep they dug, Novak had more, and they knew it. Not to say they expected him to beat their slam counts, but from 2015 onward at least, they knew he'd be top dog more often than he wasn't.

Given this, I am going to add titles to Fedal's total in my alternate universe. (And as a bonus, to Murray's.) So: Federer starts at 20, Nadal at 22, Murray at 3, etc. We go through the seasons chronologically, but for simplicity's sake, I add to the count retroactively, with 20/20 hindsight.

Another caveat. You could also claim that Djokovic acted as a gatekeeper for some of his career and thereby boosted Fedal's slam count, i.e., the "Ferrer effect": that in at least some of their title runs, Fedal benefited from Djokovic's elimination of a lower-ranked player who might have beaten them. This seems probable in theory, but having gone through the draws of all the majors held from 2005-07, it just isn't the case (the closest is Novak's defeat of Hewitt at Wimbledon 2007, but do we really think the version of Hewitt that lost to Novak in straights would have beaten Rafa?). Once Djokovic matured, he lost to Fedal so rarely at majors that it's hard to make the case he ever eased their path to victory. Special cases will be treated in passing, as reaches/hypotheticals.

The most important objection, as I see it, is that you can't assume Fedal would have beaten whoever turned up in Djokovic's place, and that's what my little "study"/thought experiment is going to test. In every match Fedal lost to Nole at a major, who would have taken his place in an alternate universe, and what was that player's chance of beating the GOATs that weren't quite?

2008 Australian Open: Federer d. Tsonga?

Right away an intriguing one. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was unseeded, ranked 38th in the world, heading into the AO. He beat a 9th-seeded Murray (!!) in the first round and, as often happens when a high seed loses early, got to move through a 9th seed's draw. But it was a monster run: he beat GG Lopez, Gasquet (8th seed!), and Youzhny (14th!) before crushing Nadal in the semis. (Nadal's form wasn't great, but he had breezed through the draw.) Tsonga was playing unreal tennis and wasn't overawed by the occasion (beat Nadal in front of 15,000 people, took the first set off Djokovic in the final).

Had Federer not lost in the semis, it would have been his first meeting with the Frenchman. When they did meet later that year in Madrid (back when it was played on indoor hard), Federer won handily, then lost their next match at Montreal 2009. On the whole, their h2h is 12-6 in favor of Fed, and I'm going to give him this one, even though he was struggling with mononucleosis at the time. He was good enough to beat Berdych and Blake in straights after coming through a tough five-setter against Janko Tipsarevic, so I say he finds a way to win against a red-hot Tsonga. RF +1 = 21

2011 Australian Open: Federer d. Murray?

Another toughie. The h2h was 8-6 in favor of Murray. The case for Fed: he had never lost to the Scot over five sets, brushed him aside in 2010's AO final, and won their previous meeting (at the O2 Arena a couple months earlier) in straights. But Murray had won their last two meetings on outdoor hard, Montreal and Shanghai, during an underwhelming summer (by his standards) for the Swiss.

Crazily, Fed and Muzz wouldn't meet at all in 2011; so dominant were Novak and Rafa as top seeds that Nos. 3+4 never faced each other! This makes it hard to gauge where their rivalry would have been at in that season. What tips it for me is that Federer was playing poorly, especially against pushers/defenders: he nearly lost to Simon in R64, dropped a set to Robredo in R16, and (ofc) lost to Djokovic in straights. Basically a coin-flip, but (surprise!) I think Murray had him covered. AM +1 = 4

2011 Wimbledon: Nadal d. Tsonga?

The Frenchman again. Tsonga came back from 0-2 sets down against Federer and won an epic tiebreak (11-9) in the fourth set against Djokovic; remove the Serb, and he has a puncher's chance against Nadal in the final. What's more, he actually beat Nadal on grass in the final of Queen's Club just three weeks earlier! Bo5 is a different beast, however, and Nadal was defending champ at Wimby. He'd lose to another big hitter in Lukas Rosol the next year, but Nadal on fresh, early-rounds grass is a different prospect to Nadal on late-round, sun-scorched grass where the baselines have been pounded to dust.

Does Tsonga run out of gas? Does the 5-2 h2h (at the time; ultimately 10-4) in favor of Nadal outweigh the recency and surface-dependency of the Queen's result? Tsonga arguably played Novak tougher than Nadal did, but Novak was in Rafa's head at the time. I am giving this to the Spaniard out of respect for his finals pedigree (just one loss in a major final to a non-Big 3, and with a bum knee). But it's so, so close. RN +1 = 23

2011 US Open: Nadal d. Federer?

Frankly, this is an easy one. Minus Novak, a Fedal title is assured; we never got a NY match between them, but given the high bounce and Fed's (pre-RF 97) backhand situation, we go RN +1 = 24

2012 Australian Open: Nadal d. Murray?

Was the Scot ready? Given that it took Djokovic six hours to subdue the Bull (after five v. Murray!), I'm inclined to think not. RN +1 = 25

2012 US Open: del Potro d. Murray?

A possible Murray minus. Delpo was rampant till the Djoker stopped him in his tracks. But the 7-3 h2h overall tips this the Scot's way. History holds serve. 0 = 0

2013 Australian Open: Murray d. Ferrer?

It was the honey badger's best year on tour, but Djokovic smoked him in the semi, dropping just five games, before outlasting Murray in the final. Remove the Serb, and Murray has his second alternate-universe AO! You could make the long-shot case that Wawrinka, who lost to Djokovic in the R16 in one of the great five-setters, was playing well enough to go the distance. But that's a lot of speculative tennis to imagine, and the Swiss No. 2 hadn't hired Magnus Norman yet. AM +1 = 5

2013 Wimbledon: del Potro d. Murray?

No. I yield to none in my reverence for the Tower of Tandil, but against that Murray, on that court? No way. 0 = 0

2014 Wimbledon: Federer d. Cilic?

Remove his loss to Djokovic in the quarters, and the 6'6" Croat comes through the semi against Dimitrov, making his first major final two months (and one Atlantic) ahead of schedule. The big-serving, hard-hitting game that would win Cilic the 2014 US Open was in evidence at SW19, hinting at the September to come. But Federer had reeled off two fairly comfortable wins against the even bigger-serving Kyrgios and Raonic, and nearly beat the Djoker, too. Allez! RF +1 = 22

2015 Australian Open: Murray d. Wawrinka?

Brutal. Whatever I choose, someone's being hard done by. The h2h is 13-10 Murray, and 9-4 on hard, but Wawrinka has some big hard-court wins against the Scot: before the 2013 US Open, where Murray was defending champion, there was the 2010 US Open, when Wawrinka was yet to become the late-career monster and 3x major champ. But here it would've been the Swiss defending his title, something neither man managed to do in our universe. I'd say that pattern holds -- judging by their progress through the draw, Stan wasn't quite at Murray's level in Melbourne that year. Parallel Muzz picks up a third AO. AM +1 = 6

2015 Wimbledon: Federer d. Cilic?

Rinse and repeat. Federer was better than the previous year; Cilic, who'd blow Gasquet to kingdom come without Djokovic to once again knock him out in the QF, was worse. RF +1 = 23

2015 US Open: Federer d. Cilic?

Open and shut. Fed was untouchable all summer. Until the Djoker touched him with a burning finger and the Maestro's wings fell to ash. RF +1 = 24

2016 Australian Open: Federer d. Murray?

Let no one say I'm being too generous with Andy Murray in this counterfactual. After beating the Swiss in Melbourne in 2013, when the older man was struggling with a season-spoiler of a back problem, Andy Murray never beat Roger Federer again. Fed had him figured out, and would have come into this match (having sailed past the ghost of Djokovic, who, in our world, outclassed him 3-1 in the SF) on a five-match win streak v. Muzz. RF +1 = 25

2016 French Open: Murray d. Thiem?

This one is a doozy. Personally, I don't think Thiem was ready to win a major title, and Murray had just beaten defending champ Wawrinka 3 sets to 1 in the semis. In our world, Djokovic destroyed Thiem a round earlier, then barely squeaked level at 1-1 against Murray after three hours of lung-busting clay-court tennis, upon which the Scot was truly dusted. This was peak Murray in his best season, when he achieved one of the highest Elo ratings of all time against perhaps the strongest ATP field ever assembled. I will not apologize. AM +1 = 7

2016 US Open: Wawrinka d. Gael Monfils?

Believe it or not, it's what you've got if you remove Djokovic. 0 = 0

2018 Wimbledon: Nadal d. Anderson?

Rafole produced the best fully-indoors match at SW19 ... ever ... in a barn-burner of a semi. If Nadal wins that, does a tall, kick-serving South African get his nerves in check and deny Rafa the big one? Nope. RN +1 = 26

2018 US Open: del Potro d. Nishikori?

The Argentine was 6-2 against Special K, the best pure ball-striker between Agassi and Sinner. But Delpo on Ashe is different gravy. JMDP +1 = 2

2019 Australian Open: Nadal d. Pouille?

Note how much worse the projected opponents are getting. Yes, Lucas Pouille, who beat Nadal at the US Open in 2015, would have met him in an AO final if a wormhole had swallowed the Serbinator and funneled him to another dimension (possibly ours). Fool me once. In reality, this was the most one-sided Rafole final (in favor of Nole) until Rafa returned the favor in Paris. RN +1 = 27

2019 Wimbledon: Federer d. Bautista Agut?

The flat-hitting Spanish counterpuncher was sneaky-good on grass. But Fed was not-so-sneaky-great. Another flat-hitter, David Goffin, has a case for finals contention, having lost to Djokovic in the QF, but the Maestro would've rolled him up and then smoked him. RF +1 = 26

2020 Australian Open: Thiem d. Federer?

The Austrian beat Nadal and Zverev on his way to the final, where he took Djokovic to five. Federer lost to Djokovic in straights in their semi, and the Austrian had his number by this point. DT +1 = 2

2021 Australian Open: Medvedev d. Karatsev?

Remember Karatsev? He made it to the semis. Djokovic ate him. Zverev, who took a set off Djokovic in the previous round, would probably have found a way to lose to the qualifier, who'd blasted Diego Schwartzman, FAA, and Dimitrov to smithereens. But Medvedev would've sucked him into a vortex of meaninglessness. Karatsev leads the h2h 2-1, but both wins were on clay. DM +1 = 2

2021 French Open: Nadal d. Tsitsipas?

I don't care if Nadal was running on fumes and held together with duct tape. He doesn't lose to Stef Tsitsipas's one-hander on Court Philippe Chatrier. RN +1 = 28

2022 Wimbledon: Kyrgios d. Sinner?

And that brings us basically up to the present.

Yes, the Italian, our current World No. 1, was barely out of the egg and yet up 2-0 sets against the (modern) GOAT before losing his grip on the grass and the match. Had he come through that QF, or against whoever would replace Novak (the next-best player in the section was Miomir Kecmanovic...), he would've played Cam Norrie, who was a top player at the time but matches up poorly against Sinner's whirling groundies. Kyrgios, though, was in career-best form, serving out of a tree, and far more seasoned than the 20-year-old Sinner.

Neither Federer nor Nadal would win another major.

Takeaways

So what's the de-Nolefied Fedal slam count? It goes from 42 ... to 54. By my rough calculations, then, Djokovic denied Federer and Nadal six major titles each, meaning the gap between them stays exactly the same: +2 Nadal. Neither can claim to have had their legacies marred disproportionately by the rise of The Third Man. The GOAT, our GOAT, is a just GOAT, of evenhanded justice.

You know who can? Andy Murray. I might be overreaching by giving him a major title over a year-and-a-half ahead of schedule (AO 2011, d. Federer), but even without that, his slam count doubles if you take out Djokovic. Which makes sense: they were born mere days apart, played very similar games, and rose to threaten the duopoly right around the same time, with Murray mostly lagging just behind. Unlike Fedal, Murray's prime was fully contiguous with that of Djokovic; he didn't have the luxury of stockpiling majors before Novak turned world-eater. In an alternate universe, he wins seven, in an era dominated by Federer and Nadal! That's one less than Andre Agassi. Call me crazy, but this makes Murray a better player than Agassi. And I do rate him higher. So does Jeff Sackmann.

Another thing to note is how certain players have incredible purple patches but end up with nothing to show for them. Until Nick Kyrgios, the VERY LAST counterfactual in my list, no new major winners emerged from this process. Correct: I'm claiming that even without Djokovic, all the no-slam also-rans of the 2010s would be (most likely) still on 0. Thiem and Delpo would've added one each. But Ferrer, Berdych, Nishikori, Soderling, Raonic ... no such luck.

Yet they came close. Tsonga could so easily have won a major -- or two. In a different era, Cilic could've won four. When we look back on the Big 4 days, the possibility of these players having such success seems remote. But if you actually look at the draws, they were often a set or two away from history. Yet, over and over again, someone got in the way. The same guys got in the way. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic ... and Murray.

Wawrinka, who's one of my favorite players, broke through in a three-year period when Fedal's grip had loosened and Murray-Djokovic were running the show. What separates him from the almost-greats isn't so much a matter of intangible mental strength or unparalleled offensive capability (in my view) but ... timing. His surge was well-timed. A year or two earlier or later, and he'd have a different, lower, place in the pantheon.

As for Sincaraz .... Look, if you've made it this far, thanks for nerding out with me. I love this stuff. But slam counts are not actually important. They're good for deep dumb dives like this one. What such an analysis says to me is: If things could so easily have been different, is the way they actually turned out really that meaningful? What matters is the tennis itself -- the experience of watching, competing, hoping, dreading, dreaming. As a player or a fan. And numbers -- the real numbers -- don't necessarily tell the whole story.

And I say that as a numbers guy.