Michael Steinberg

Note: This is Part Two of the long overdue June 3 entry, #19, Expecting the Unexpected, a post about importance of discovery and surprise in writing personal essays and memoirs. In that post, I left off at the point where I’d scrapped a 300-page draft of Still Pitching, a memoir that was becoming a long, chronologically driven linear story rather than a reflective, exploratory narrative. The arc of that draft begins in the narrator’s childhood and ends when he turns 50. Which, in my opinion was reason enough to stop and rethink what I was doing. Since I took so long to post this one, it might be a good idea to give #19 (6/3/13) a quick look before reading #20.

Blog No. 20

1 Planning For Surprise

It's a myth that writers write what they know. We write what it is that we need to know. What keeps me sitting at my desk, hour after hour, year after year, is that I do not know something, and I must write in order to find my way to an understanding.
--Marcie Hershman

After the big cuts, I was left with some fifty pages on/about the narrator’s childhood and adolescence (ages 7-17). That was all the raw material I had to work with. With no over-arching plan in mind, I was, in effect, beginning over. And this time, literally in a state of not knowing.

The question/speculation that guided the new draft still was, “Is there some deep-seated connection between the narrator’s being a kid baseball pitcher and a mid-life memoirist?” And the answer still was unexamined, still unexplored.

I recalled what Patricia Hampl said to me a while back (a comment I’d mentioned in post # 19). “Knowing your story is the enemy of the developing narrative,” she said. At the time, it made sense, yet I wasn’t quite sure why.

Once I got the new draft going though, I slowly began to figure out what Hampl was driving at. Yes, all of us do know our own stories. But in my case, what I didn’t know was how to write it and what it meant. And when you think about it, isn’t that what we hope to discover through the writing?

Duh! Still another example, I’m afraid, of something I was regularly preaching to my students and neglecting to pay attention to in my own writing.

First, in rereading the remaining fifty pages, I discovered that a former baseball baseball kept reappearing every few pages. He was a gatekeeper I’d written about several years ago. But I hadn’t thought much about him since.

“Why him again?” I wrote in my notes, “and why now?”

Thinking about that coach tripped off other unexpected associations. When I reread the fifty pages a second time, I noticed an abundance of references to Jackie Robinson, as well as to the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees, and New York Giants, the teams I followed as a kid. Teams l'd also written about some time ago.

“Haven’t I already put that stuff to bed, as well?” I asked myself again. Well, apparently not.

That’s when the surprises began to appear; and sometimes in bunches. First, following a hunch, I set the narrative between the years from 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier, until 1959, when the Dodgers and Giants moved their franchises to California. During those years, the three New York teams dominated the game, winning the World Series ten times in eleven years. And it wasn’t lost on me that those years also constituted a good piece of the young narrator’s childhood and the majority of his adolescence.

I wasn’t sure where all this was taking me, but the draft, it seemed, was leading me into uncharted territory. And so, I cautiously followed.

It’s my belief now, that had I not discarded the chronological narrative and confined the new narrative to childhood and adolescence, I wouldn’t have stumbled across the following associations and connections. Read More