Michael Steinberg

Blog Entry No. 9

Prefatory Note:

Recently, I got an e-request from a writing teacher who’d heard me talk about what a long-drawn-out struggle it was to find the structure for my memoir, Still Pitching. He was introducing his students to the personal essay and he wanted me to summarize a few things I’d said. When I began my reply, I could tell right away that a short email wouldn’t be the best way to go about this. So in a roundabout way, these next two blog postings ( #9, 1 and 2) offer an expanded discussion of what I believe is the single most challenging aspect of getting a manuscript to coalesce.

Part 1

The majority of manuscripts-in-progress I’ve read, both from MFA students and from the many submissions to the journal, Fourth Genre, seem to have one of two problems, each bearing on structure. Either the manuscript doesn't have an essential shape or form, or, it's just the opposite; the work has been shaped too soon-- that is, before the writer has discovered the narrative’s organizing principle (and, I’d also add, its emotional heart). More about that in Part 2.

In writing the early drafts of what eventually became Still Pitching, I encountered both problems. The memoir began as a collection of personal essay/memoirs loosely connected by my having had grown up with baseball in New York City in the 50’s. I was an inexperienced writer at the time; and apart from time, place, and baseball, I couldn’t find a common thread that would (organically) link those stand-alone pieces together.

,i>Still Pitching’s next version, a chronological narrative that spanned some forty years, grew out of a nagging mid-life desire to go back into the past and speculate on what the most important decisions, people, events, and influences were that had helped shape my present self. I wanted to see if I could explain to myself how a teenage baseball fanatic turned out to be a writing teacher and then a mid-life writer, and not, let’s say, a traveling salesman like his father or a pharmacist like his grandfather.

About three quarters of the way into a working draft, I could sense that the narrative was becoming way too long and diffuse. I didn’t understand it at the time, but by tracking that single idea, I’d locked myself into a “this happened and then this and then this,” narrative structure. Something, I know, we’ve all seen (and/or written) before.

At a manuscript meeting, my editor said, “You’re trying to cover too much ground.” She pulled out a chapter and walked me through a particularly dramatic scene, one in which the adolescent narrator is describing what it felt like to be humiliated by his high school baseball coach.

“Write the whole book,” she told me, “with the same focus, intensity, and feeling as this scene has. Write vertical. Isn't that what you tell your students to do?”

As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. After getting over the shock of realizing that I’d have to start over again, I began to think about other ways of shaping this narrative. The scene she was talking about came from the early part of the manuscript, where the young narrator (in contrast to myself, the writer) is reflecting on his struggles with that coach.

It struck me at the time that, of the 300 pages I’d already written, only 50 had been given over to the narrator’s adolescence. What adult male, I asked myself, hasn’t been shaped in some formative ways by his childhood and adolescence? That discovery was the catalyst that led me to rework my approach.

In less than two months, I’d cut the 100,000 word manuscript-- including all the young adult and adult segments--down to about 25,000 words, roughly covering the period of the narrator’s struggles to make his high school baseball team.

Once I knew what the memoir was about; and, more importantly, what it wasn’t about, I began to think about finding an organizing principle that would allow me to dig deeper into the narrator’s childhood and adolescence; to, in other words, as my editor had said, “to write vertical.”

I set the body of the memoir from 1947-1957--bookended between two major baseball/historical events 1947—when the Brooklyn Dodger's Jackie Robinson became the first black player to break the major league color barrier—to 1957, when two of the city’s three professional teams, the Dodgers and New York Giants, left New York for California. Their departure marked not only the end of the narrator’s childhood but also became a marker for a host of future changes in the culture itself.

Those ten tears were also the setting and backdrop for the narrator’s coming-of-age. Like so many adolescents, he wanted to fit in, discover a place where he belonged; while at the same time finding something he could excel at. As it turns out, becoming a baseball pitcher was that something. And so, the eventual title, Still Pitching.

Normally, I’m a slow writer. But by shifting from a chronology of events to a more focused, reflective (vertical, if you will), exploration, I finished the book in six months. As I was winding down, I thought about something a colleague once said. He warned me not to allow a central or fixed idea or a set of events to predetermine the narrative’s shape. "It’ll shut down your thinking," he said, "and it'll cancel out the unexpected associations and surprise discoveries you might stumble across along the way."

Perhaps the most important discovery was the realization that before I could write an “adult” memoir, I (the midlife narrator) needed to more fully imagine and better understand who that confused kid (the younger narrator) was back then. What were his hopes and dreams? What were his deepest yearnings? How, in the larger sense, did his experiences shape the adult writer who he eventually became? And what part did baseball play in all this? All of these were questions I would never had considered had I not changed the book’s original structure.

The answer to those questions, it turns out, was in the adult narrator’s understanding (which came about through the revised writing) that his youthful obsession with becoming a pitcher literally dominated his childhood and adolescent years. And so, by necessity, baseball became, not a subject, but a lens the adult narrator looks through, as well as the catalyst, the occasion, for his subsequent examination of who he was back then and who, over time, he would inevitably became.

But that’s another memoir. And it reminds me that I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the next post, #9, 2), I’ll extend this discussion and illustrate (literally) some specific strategies and techniques I used in order to shape the final version of Still Pitching.