What Writers Can Learn from Baseball Players

Writers and athletes might not seem to have much in common, since one occupation is mostly cerebral, while the other is very physical. I do think writers can learn a lot from athletes, though. Athletes are also absorbed in a quest for excellence. Like writers, athletes are performers whose goal is not a performance, but a career-long struggle to do their best at their craft.

Baseball is the sport that I know better than any other, and there are two things about playing baseball well that seem valuable for writers. One of them is adjusting. To succeed at baseball, you have to make constant adjustments, sometimes in the space of one at-bat. When Barry Bonds was playing, I watched him hit many times at the San Francisco Giants’ beautiful waterfront ballpark. 

Part of Barry’s success was that he could adjust to a pitcher’s strategy incredibly quickly. If a pitcher got Barry to swing at a ball that was low and outside early in the count, Barry would just act cool, as if he had no idea what the pitcher was up to. Then, maybe after Barry had fouled off a pitch and taken a couple of balls, he would know what the pitcher and catcher were setting him up for. He knew they were hoping to sneak that same low, outside pitch by him for a swinging strike three. Barry just casually inched closer and closer to home plate with each pitch, so his bat could extend a bit farther, and the next time that pitcher threw him the same pitch Barry had hopelessly missed earlier in the at-bat, WHAM!—home run.

So, what does that have to do with lyric poetry? A lot, in my opinion. Just as batters have to adjust to what the pitchers are throwing them so they don’t make the same mistake twice, artists have to make constant adjustments. It doesn’t work to write the same book twice, or the same poem, short story, memoir  or essay, no matter how good it was the first time. The reader is already expecting a certain type of character, a certain tension, a certain ending. Writers have to continually vary the sounds, images, situations, characters, settings, tones, and/or points of view in their work. Otherwise their writing becomes stale, predictable, tired.

Another way that baseball and writing are similar has to do with confidence. If the same two teams play one another with the same two starting pitchers on the mound, the outcome can be completely opposite on two different days in the same baseball season. What is the difference? Many times, it has to do with confidence. The vital importance of confidence in baseball is something I’ve learned from listening to the San Francisco Giants’ broadcaster Mike Krukow, a former major league pitcher. 

Kruk, as he’s known to fans, always talks about how winning builds confidence in a team. That confidence allows them to play loose, relaxed, and with enjoyment. This prevents a hitter from pressing during an at-bat, trying to do too much, feeling the weight of expectations. The result of confidence is often success.

Again, what the heck does that have to do with writing the twist at the end of a short story? Well, it does have to do with writing—I think that when a writer is enjoying the process of creation, that fun can be reflected in the reader’s own enjoyment of the finished product. But this also has to do with reading one’s work out loud. So much of reading aloud has to do with confidence. If you stand in front of an audience and feel assured that your work is going to please and engage, that is a crucial part of giving a good reading. If you’re so nervous you could die, you’re not going to be able to connect to the audience of readers. But how do you gather confidence as a reader of your work? I think it’s a largely question of practice, and of writing work that you believe in, that you feel is important for you personally to deliver to an audience, or that you have fun reading to an audience.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 4: The Order

I was sitting at the San Francisco Giants baseball game the other night with poet Judith Serin, and we started talking about the order of poems in a book, and almost lost track of the outs and balls and strikes on the field.

“You have no idea how many problems it solved just to change the order,” Judith enthused, discussing a series of poems she’s writing based on dreams and how they illuminate her waking life.

Writers are generally a rebellious bunch. “Order” is something we like about as much as a hard drive crash. But the order of pieces in a book is as important as the batting order of a baseball team, or the order of dishes in a meal. In baseball, you don’t want to have your power hitter bat first, where no one would be on base when he hits a home run, or your pitcher hit leadoff, where he’s likely to start the inning by striking out.

Writers assembling a collection of poems, short fiction, or essays for the first time are drawn to putting the selections in the order they were written. This can work in certain limited cases, when the writer is telling a linear story and begins at the beginning and ends with the story’s conclusion. But that’s rare outside of the novel or a book-length work of nonfiction.

For a collection of short stories, poems, or essays, it’s best to let go of the chronology of when you wrote the pieces. You wouldn’t serve the dessert before the appetizers, even if you’d baked the cookies the day before the meal. When you're serving a meal, you consider the experience of the diners, not your preparations. Similarly with a manuscript, think about the reader’s experience of your book, not your experience writing it. What is the story the pieces tell as an ensemble, rather than individually? How do the pieces fit together to create the curve that shows that a transformation has taken place, from the beginning to the end of the collection?

When I have a fairly good idea of which poems I want to include in a book manuscript, and I’ve got a reasonably finished draft of each poem, I go back to the old school way of choosing an order. I print them all out, and lay them down one by one on the floor, where I can see all of the pieces at once, or at least their first page.

Oddly enough, the pieces begin gathering themselves into groups almost on their own. They choose companions they have something in common with, like kids on a playground. These groups are fluid—they can shift around. One way of looking at the overall arrangement can produce a very different order from another. Make sure you’re telling the same story that the pieces are telling.

Once the pieces begin forming into groups, it’s much easier to see the way the groups want to line up. And within each group, there is also the question of an order. But that’s a much easier problem to solve than an order for all the poems or stories or essays. Once you see the arc of the whole collection, the order of the sections is much clearer, since each section needs to move the story forward.

By the end, it’s like the final step of a card trick. You’re sweeping up poems or stories or essays quickly into bundles, and collecting the bundles into one sheath.

There could be an individual piece that doesn’t fit into any of the groups. That suggests to me that the piece may not belong in this collection at all. It could possibly stand apart as a prologue or an epilogue, but that requires a certain tone, an introductory or conclusive note that very few pieces are likely to have. Consider saving the piece that doesn’t advance the story for a different project, even if you like it on its own. No, don’t just consider it, do it!

In my next blog, I’ll discuss the beginning and endings of book manuscripts.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer