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HOW I LEARNED TO WRITE [1]

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Date: 2022-07-06

I was in middle school and high school and making a fatuous mess of all of it. Being an Aspergian, I had trouble with what child authorities call “interpersonal relationships.” Nor are Aspergians good at playing sports. They can memorize baseball statistics, strategy, and stories, but they lack the physical skills to grab the bouncer to the right side and make an accurate flip to second to start an inning-ending double play. When they try to ask out a girl, they get either laughed at or smacked in the face. They are the class freaks, weirdos, dummies, and re-tards, and never mind their high grades – youth and adults alike rate intelligence on social skills and conformity, not book-learning.

Most Aspergians are good at mathematics. For reasons I would rather not rehearse and revisit, I was not. I got the lowest math grades in the history of my high school – for a student who was not high on drugs when he took the final. To this day, the only math I can do involves making change (I can see coins floating in the air) and baseball. Looking back, I realize that if I could have solved for X, my life would have turned out different…and better.

At the opposite end of this extreme, I aced all of my English, Creative Writing, and History classes. I read history, so I was ahead of everybody, including the teachers. Even when I was 13, I could write, although I did not know it or think about it.

When my mother went in for parent-teacher conference day with my eighth-grade English teacher, Sarah Hardman, she said to Mom, “That boy is going to be a great writer.”

I was actually shocked, because I had never had an endorsement like that from a teacher before. It was usually, “Pay attention, Lippman,” or “Do more math, Lippman.”

I had not thought about the idea of writing very much. To me, English classes focused on many absurdities. We read novels like Down These Mean Streets, in which young folks in the ghetto fought their way out of poverty in 1941. I did not live in the ghetto or in poverty, and we were reading it in 1976. The book’s author, Píri Thomas, abused and sold drugs, did time for attempted armed robbery, and then did rather well for himself after that as a cultural leader and international lecturer. I did none of the three, either. The only parts I liked, being a teenager with raging hormones, was when Píri made moves on very receptive teenage girls. Most of the girls I met were unreceptive, because I was a scary Aspergian.

We read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne fought for her voice and her own power in 1600s Massachusetts. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, on the same subject, was really about McCarthyism and why all good men and women had to stand up to arrogant, overbearing tyrants, regardless of the century. We also read Lillian Hellman’s memoir Scoundrel Time, written directly about how McCarthyism ruined her life. Only we later found out that her tales of woe and defiance were vastly overstated. All these books urged readers to stand up against totalitarianism of any kind, and for our consciences.

Then we were told: sit down, shut up, do the test, no talking, keep our eyes on our own paper, quiz next Friday, term paper due next month, and don’t argue with anything, be it a mimeographed memo from the Principal’s Office or President Nixon saying, “I am not a crook.”

We read Jane Eyre. While the girls – who all identified with the poverty-stricken girls’ school student and tutor – rolled their eyes in sympathy with poor ol’ Jane and sighed heavily over her, I wondered why Mr. Rochester did not toss his lunatic wife out of the Thornfield Hall tower and ride off into the sunset with Jane. He was an English Regency gentleman…they could get away with that behavior. I could not stand the book. Luckily for me, I had the Classics Illustrated comic version, which told the bulk of the story in solid cartoons. However, this abridgement deleted a side plot that added little to the original book but length.

The ending was also a dirty trick on the reader, with some solicitor turning up to tell Jane that her uncle had kicked the bucket and left Jane his entire estate of £20,000, which is $2.24 million today. Nice deal. Jane then heard Rochester’s mysterious voice (through the curtains, I guess), hopped on a horse, and rode to Thornfield Hall to find the building burned down, and Rochester minus a hand and vision. Apparently his nutball wife started a fire and Rochester braved the blaze to save his servants, at considerable personal expense. Mrs. Rochester was one of the fatalities. What a concept, huh?

Anyway, Rochester proposes marriage to Jane once again, they get married, and a few years later, he regains sight in one eye, so that he can see their newborn son. The 12-year-old girls in my class, all from ultra-chic Greenwich Village’s upper-middle class, moaned, mooned, and sighed over this improbable ending, hoping it would happen to them – that they would meet some dashing, wealthy, handsome man, who was least more mature than their schoolmates, who would sweep them off their feet. Actually, they were right: they met men like that, and the Queen Bee became a bigshot Hollywood producer. By the way, after I wrote this section, I had to reach for an antacid tablet. I think I had to do the same thing at the actual time.

Sarah Hardman was very puzzled as to why I had the whole book memorized except for those few chapters, and did so badly on that section of the test. I shrugged my shoulders and told her the truth.

She nodded her head. I guess she realized that a guy who was fascinated by Chindits in Burma and Christy Mathewson with the Giants would have no interest in a Victorian-era romance involving the idle rich and the idle poor. I got an excellent grade anyway.

As it turns out, apparently Charlotte Bronté added the chapters I never read because, like most novels of the time, it did not come out in a single book, but was serialized in three volumes. It was supposed to end on thus-and-such a date. But Bronté got a note from her agent, Seymour Percentage, which was the period equivalent of this: “Bill Thackeray went on a bender and punted the new book he’s supposed to start on February 29th. Can you stretch Jane Eyre out to the week before? I’m sure you can. Who loves you, baby?”

Therefore, Ms. Bronté, after popping a few antacids herself, dreamed up some unnecessary chapters, and shrugged, saying that at least she would earn more money from a book that only overheated teenage girls in middle-school English classes read centuries hence. Wikipedia says the book has important messages about Victorian society, religion, and feminism. Apparently it has spurred sequels and spinoffs. Why not? Star Trek is a whole industry, complete with Klingonese.

Meanwhile, we were hit in class and on tests with questions about that and other mandatory reads, like “Why do you think Jane Eyre fell in love with Mr. Rochester?” Maybe because he possessed more money than the Rockefellers have and boasted chiseled abs.

“Why did the Martian colonies fail in The Martian Chronicles?” Because Mars has no oxygen. And Elton John sang “It’s cold as hell!” Next!

“Why did Píri Thomas reform his life after doing seven years in prison?” Maybe he did not want to go back to prison for seven more years. Who would want to?

“Why is Captain Ahab so obsessed with the Great White Whale?” Because Moby Dick bit off his leg, which is unlikely, as whales eat plankton.

Disgusted with Herman Melville’s anti-environmentalist tone in Moby Dick, its immense length, and three chapters on the biology of whales, I rooted for the whales, including Moby Dick himself, and was very happy when he wiped out the Pequod and its crew.

My favorite scene? When a whole bunch of whales snuffled up to a small rowboat out of curiosity, and Second Officer Stubbs said, “He wants his back scratched,” and did so with a harpoon. It made the whales far more lovable than the violent and aggressive humans. After that, I drew happy whales on tests, quizzes, and to this day, meeting notes and memos.

Poetry wasn’t much, either. Edna St. Vincent Millay was tolerable. The Great War poets had an eye for history and horror. We also did e.e. cummings every year. As far as I was concerned, the guy was either lazy or had a broken typewriter. You’re supposed to have working capital letters, fella! I didn’t “get” Lewis Carroll and his Jabberwocky, either.

Except for Rolfe Humphries’ Polo Grounds, on baseball, I neither understood nor remembered most poetry. The Mighty Casey was kind of irritating, in a different way. I tell people that in the next game, the Mighty Casey went three-for-four to drive in three runs to win the game, and make a great running catch in right field. But nobody wrote a poem about that. That’s baseball. One day a hero, next day a bum, and vice versa. Hans “Germany” Schaefer discussed that in the greatest baseball book ever written, The Glory of Their Times. Teachers asked me what I thought of some poet or poem, and I shrugged my shoulders. I still do.

I was not impressed by “great novels” or “great poetry.” They had nothing to do with the evacuation of Dunkirk or Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

Yet, I suddenly began to realize that when I wrote an essay or a term paper for school, my paragraphs ended with a hard snap that increasingly felt – to me at least, as a baseball fan – like a slider exploding in the strike zone and nicking the corner or a 100-mile-an-hour fastball in the zone. Either way, the reader – the hitter – was frozen at the plate for a called third strike and could only shuffle back to the bench, muttering curses about how he should have taken me downtown, while I turned around and ignored him. It was something I saw, but not something I noticed. I had other stuff to deal with. My English grades shot up. My English teachers – Sarah Hardman was only the first – gave me more respect. I started saying, “Hey, maybe I have something here.”

Two powerful forces made me the journalist I am 44 years after graduating high school, and four powerful forces made me the writer I am. I only needed one powerful force to become the historian I am.

I learned my journalism skills first from my father, who was one of the world’s great advertising copywriters – in addition to being America’s leading typewriter historian. When I was age four, he told me, “Dave, unless you want to shove racks of clothes up and down Seventh Avenue in the rain, you’re going work in an office. That means you have to type, and that means you have to touch-type.”

Therefore, he taught me to touch-type. I got pretty good at it. By the time I was enduring typing tests at personnel agencies after I graduated from NYU, was doing 110 words-per-minute, hacking through ghastly sentences like “I wonder what Jack would think if I asked Major Crag for some more work” and “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.”

More importantly, he taught me how to write headlines, how to use as many different verbs as possible, avoid using clichés except in headlines, and most of all…when I’d written something, put it aside – for a day if possible – and look at it then with a clear eye. “It’s impossible to edit your own work, particularly right after you finish it,” he said. “You have to give it time.”

In the summer of 1980, I began a four-year internship and lifelong friendship with legendary hockey and subway writer Stan Fischler, his wife Shirley, their two sons Ben and Simon, and their dog, Chase, who was large, friendly, and spent most of his time lying directly where people were walking. This fun crew all lived and worked in an apartment on West 110th Street in Manhattan. I learned a lot there about deadlines, professionalism, AP structure, and many other realities of journalism. Shirley taught me a lot about women’s issues as the first female official scorer in ice hockey. I taught Ben and Simon how to read. Even though Shirley died years ago of breast cancer and Stan is retired and living in Israel with his son and grandson, I can still hear their voices when I tackle news stories, sports stories, and now, press releases.

The historian was and still is Dr. Elihu Rose, a major New York developer who became the world’s leading expert on military mutinies, writing a terrific paper on the subject that wound up with him lecturing on the subject at major military academies and conferences, as well as getting the nickel tour of our forces in Afghanistan. Between the lectures and the developing, he had plenty of time and resources to visit such incredible places as the Somme, Normandy, and Corregidor.

He also found time to teach the only class I actually really enjoyed in my four years at New York University: “The Anatomy of War.” The class was not a history of wars and warfare. It was a class on how wars worked; training, organization, morale, mutiny, even the “laws of war.” It was astonishing to discover that it is perfectly legal in war to climb into a fighter aircraft and shoot your enemy in the back, while it is illegal to shoot him in the front of the head with a “dum-dum” bullet. We all watched the movie Breaker Morant, in which a British officer and Australian officer (Edward Woodward and Bryan Brown, respectively) stand trial in a British Field General Court-Martial for a variety of offenses their unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers, had committed on his orders. The movie included every subject the class had discussed, except mutiny.

Morant and his merry men fought Boer commandos who were mostly civilians carrying out acts of sabotage, some while dressed in British Army uniforms. There were questionable orders about whether or not to kill civilians. British troops placed Boer civilians in open cars in front of trains to prevent Boers from blasting those trains; captured Boer commandos possessed dum-dum bullets; a captured Boer broke from his buddies to attack an Australian officer; and a neutral German missionary was ambushed and shot, possibly for carrying military secrets from Boer PoWs to Boers in battle. At the end, who was responsible, and who was being scapegoated? What defined a “war crime?” It was the kind of movie that every Sandhurst or West Point cadet should have to watch.

My paper was about how the British mobilized to fight the Falklands War. It got an A, but something more important, which I’ll discuss in a minute.

More importantly, it was the first time Elihu Rose taught that – or any other – class. As he went on, he taught a class on the history of the Second World War – after I graduated. The attendance in that class went from 10 students to 150, and 35 years later, he still does it. The class opens with wartime music, except for the one on the invasion of Normandy. That shows the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Anybody who thinks war is glorious and fun should be forced to watch that.

Anyway, after I took the class, got the A, and moved on, I pitched the Falklands mobilization article to the US Marine Corps Gazette. They published it. I was astonished. Those folks print articles by high-ranking officers in the Corps or professors at Annapolis or some other think tank. Compared to them, I was a nobody. It made me think that I could, if not make a complete living from writing about World War II, supplement my modest journalism income by writing about World War II.

By now, two names had made my writing stronger. The first was one of the few schoolteachers I have great regard for: Frank McCourt. That Frank McCourt. Creative Writing, two-and-a-half years. Many students took his course because he was an easy grader. I took it to learn how to write and avoid diagramming sentences. To this day, I do not know how to or why you “diagram” a sentence. Nor do I use the term “split infinitive,” but I know when something’s wrong in a sentence when I see it. English teachers call it a “split infinitive,” “misplaced modifier,” or a “dangling participle.” I just look at the sentence for a while and say, “That looks horseshit,” and clean it up.

What I learned from McCourt was to observe detail and ritual. He required students to report every day on what they had for dinner last night. Who cooked it? Who set the table? What kind of tablecloth? What was the initial course? The main course? Did anyone say grace? Who cut the meat? What was discussed? Who cleaned up the table? Who did the dishes? It was learning to observe details and then render them…to paint pictures with words.

Every Friday, we had to read stuff we had written. It was the usual mixture of teen angst and cynicism. One girl in our class was very annoyed that her boyfriend was failing to relieve her of her virginity. I did not know what to think about that one – if her boyfriend didn’t want to do it, I was happy to do so. However, she seemed to have no interest in my offer.

After the students were done, McCourt himself read his own material, handwritten on yellow legal pads. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first draft of his Pulitzer-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. When it came out and I saw the exact lines I’d heard, it chilled me to the bone.

We never forgot each other. When I applied in 1999 for my MFA Creative Writing program at the New School for Social Research, he wrote me a letter of support. He thought I was that good.

The second writer that made a deep impression on my writing was a man I never met, but whose books I have, the historian Walter Lord. I guess you can say he was both a historian and a writer, but it was his writing that held me. He wrote A Night to Remember in 1955, which set off world fascination with RMS Titanic, a great and highly accurate movie with Kenneth More (talking in a manly way to the chaps as he does in his World War II movies), a more famous and ver annoying movie called Titanic, and his own career as a master of narrative history.

Lord’s writing style fascinated me. It moved at a high rate of speed, covered a lot of ground, and used a lot of literary colors and palettes to describe people and places. He focused on two things: the behavior of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and the use of time. He could speed time up to enhance the action, or he could slow it down to freeze the moment. I saw this most clearly in his book Day of Infamy, about the attack on Pearl Harbor. One entire chapter is devoted to the Japanese planning the attack and sailing to Hawaii, which goes over several months. Another chapter is devoted to the mere five minutes between 7:55 a.m. and 8 a.m. on December 7, as Japanese planes swoop down on the unwary Americans.

I was also struck by his organization. The last segment of every chapter in A Night to Remember is about the ship that stood still, RMS Californian, ignoring the developing horror a mere 10 miles away from the foundering Titanic.

In Day of Infamy, most chapters ended with the bizarre and hopeless ordeal of Lt. Kazuo Sakamaki in his midget submarine, which resulted in him becoming U.S. Prisoner of War No. 1. It kept these stories in the book, in their place, but without interrupting the main plot.

He had unique ideas on how to end his books, too. He would wrap up the “big picture” of the historic event at enough length to give the proper perspective and analysis – in Incredible Victory, he describes the reasons why the Japanese lost and the Americans won at Midway. However, after that, the very last paragraph of the book illustrated in a human touch how close the battle was, with the skipper of the submarine USS Nautilus not knowing how the struggle came out until he peers through his periscope at Midway Island and sees Old Glory still flying over it.

Then there were his sentences and paragraphs, the nuts and bolts of his chapters and books:

The Dawn’s Early Light , describing James Madison: “(He) was anything but forceful in driving home his opinions. He had none of that quality that would later be called charisma; he was only five feet, six; always dressed in black with old-fashioned knee britches. Unkindly but not unreasonably, Washington Irving called him ‘a withered little applejohn.’ Yet he had a good head – Jefferson said there was none better – and his good head told him that with Napoleon out of the way, the British would be coming in force.” (I have always liked how Lord tosses a phrase in the middle of a sentence to amplify the subject, like someone interjecting a point in a conversation.)

Same book, describing Joshua Barney’s sailors and Marines attacking the British on land at Bladensburg: “Through the smoke they could see that most of the British had taken cover behind a rail fence. There was something familiar about that. With cutlasses raised, they swarmed over the rails shouting, ‘Board ‘em!’” (A neat piece of imagery, personal experience for the American sailors, and a touch of light humor.)

Day of Infamy , “Ensign Bill Ingram climbed into the high side just as the ( Oklahoma ’s) yardarm touched the water. He stripped to his shorts and slid down the bottom of the ship. As Ingram hit the water, the Arizona blew up.” (I liked the highly dramatic split in the final sentence between two barely related concepts.)

Same book “Pearl Harbor had no monopoly on hectic efforts to get back to duty. The men who pulled on their clothes, gulped coffee, kissed their waves, and dashed off to Hickam were just as frantic. Master Sgt. Arthur Fahrner couldn’t find his collar insignia, and Mrs. Fahrner didn’t help – she was forever handing him a tie. ‘We’re at war,’ he kept telling her; ‘you don’t wear a tie to war.’” (Here, Lord shows the universal nature of the American military responding to the attack – Navy to Army – along with the incongruity of the Fahrners’ quibble over wearing a tie that day.)

Lonely Vigil , the Americans heading for Guadalcanal: “Admiral Turner moodily thought of a passage written in 1939 by the British military analyst Liddell Hart: ‘A landing on a foreign coast in the face of hostile troops has always been one of the most difficult operations of war. It has now become almost impossible.’” (The commander of the American fleet’s worries about the success of the invasion is rendered, by using the analysis of one of the world’s great military historians.)

A Night to Remember , on RMS Titanic : “All the boats together could carry 1,178 people. On this Sunday night, there were 2,207 people on board the Titanic .” (Shocking facts are delivered in two cold sentences, which stand out on their own. There is no need for further artifice.)

One more, from Day of Infamy, my absolute favorite: “Somebody suggested calling Lieutenant Bill Silvester, a friend of them who this particular evening was dining eight miles away in Honolulu. Monica (Conter) called him, playfully scolded him for deserting his buddies – the kind of call that has been placed thousands of times by young people late in the evening, and memorable this time because it was the last night that Bill Silvester would be alive.” (It’s a very routine and casual description of this incident, but the very ending of it – Bill Silvester’s last night alive – has the force of a slider exploding in the strike zone away from the hitter.)

There are too many of these sentences and paragraphs to describe, but in them, I saw my writing style in his, or more accurately, his writing style in mine. I remembered something Yogi Berra said: “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” This was different. I looked at Walter Lord’s style – if not his writing – and I realized I was copying his stylistic elements…use of time…use of language…study of behavior under stress. But not his words and ideas. Not only could I do it…I was doing it anyway, without knowing it.

There was something else I saw from Lord’s books: he was an advertising copywriter by trade, like my father, but once he sold A Night to Remember, he was off and running. That book has been in print since 1955. When Bob Ballard found Titanic’s hulk in 1985, Lord’s book hit the bestseller lists – again. Then he wrote a second book on the ship, The Night Lives On, exploring its story in detail, trying to solve mysteries about the sinking and address its myths. Suddenly he had TWO books high atop the bestseller lists as Titanic became a mania, leading to the 1997 blockbuster movie.

Even so, with all these tools, I still was not a complete writer by any means. I was just an extremely good journalist. Statewide and regional reporting awards fell on me like pouring raindrops. Those and $2.75 earned me a ride on the New York Subway. Nobody cared about the writing abilities of a guy who banged out editorials, features, and police stories on a daily paper in Union City, New Jersey, which went out of business anyway, despite my best efforts. Neither did the US Navy, although it did send me to Japan, New Zealand, and Antarctica. I directed newscasts (stressful) and hosted a radio show (amusing) in Japan, and acted as a tour guide for the media in 1994 Fleet Week in New York (immense fun for D-Day’s 50th anniversary). In New Zealand, I fired off press releases for our programs and events for a national media that had no news to report (that is how quiet New Zealand is) and produced a newsletter for the unit (100 copies for 58 sailors, because everyone wanted a copy to send home). I also gave tours for local kids (usually very well behaved, compared to New York City).

Then I was done with the Navy. Or rather, they were done with me.

While I was in it, though, I started gradually writing about World War II. It was the 55th anniversary of the conflict.

First it was a daily World War II Plus 55 entry for our “Plan of the Week.” Then I contacted, purely by chance, the webmaster of the battleship USS Washington’s web page, and he offered to host the entries. Then I was getting e-mails and awards from around the world. The page even got into a book called “The Best of World War II on the Web.” Then I saw that WW2 History magazine needed articles by capable and knowledgeable writers. So I started writing for them in 1995. Nearly 27 years later, I still am.

When I came home, it was clear I needed to raise my writing game. I knew my history, knew a lot about how to write, I was writing articles for WW2 History magazine, but it still wasn’t enough. I needed to write right. I needed to know what I was doing. I was still basically writing on instinct and journalistic training.

My wife worked at the New School for Social Research, which meant that one of her fringe benefits was that I could go there for free. In 1999, I applied to the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program, one of the nation’s best. I submitted a couple of articles and a letter of recommendation from Frank McCourt. I still had his address. He still remembered me.

I don’t know what he wrote – nobody told me – but my writing and my recommendations got me into the two-year class, doing the non-fiction thread.

My instructors were some outstanding modern writers, who collectively became my third literary mentor. They included Hilton Als, Honor Moore, and Lucy Grealy.

Lucy suffered the worst fate of any of them. She suffered from the twin struggles of a badly disfigured face (and unsuccessful surgeries to repair it) and heroin addiction. She committed suicide the week after my mother died. I shed more tears over Lucy than over my mother. My therapist said that was more common than I would believe: it’s not the big expected death that gets you but the unexpected one right after that.

They taught me immense amounts about things I had never considered before: pacing, story arcs, and how books are written. And sold. That was a lot more interesting than any English class I’d ever taken before. Sarah Hardman’s lesson plan was purely about why Jane Eyre’s life was such a misery. Lucy Grealy’s lesson plan was about how Junot Diaz wrote his novelistic memoir “Drown.” It was all about how to write it, not what the book’s comment on the Regency Era was. That was what I needed. All very simple.

Until I had to sit down at my computer, light it off, and write the first essay for class in September 1999. This could not be accomplished with an Associated Press Formula One lead (per Stan Fischler) or a Walter Lord book opening.

Which was precisely where things started going wrong. I stared at MSWord’s blank page, and didn’t know what the hell to say. A piece of memoir about my own life. How in hell do I grab the reader and what do I say? This isn’t an essay for middle school or high school, to jump through a hoop. This is the top level of competition and performance. If I fall on my ass here, I’m done.

I looked at my watch. The Yankees were coming on. I need inspiration, I thought, and flipped on the radio. Roger Clemens was pitching for the Yankees, the greatest pitcher ever to fire a baseball over home plate in the long history of the game.

Clemens was delivering his characteristic pitches for the Yankees against an opponent I do not remember. What I do remember was his pitch selection, arsenal of pitches, power, concentration, and clear knowledge of hitters. As I listened, I thought more about Clemens and his whole career, which at that time amounted to four Cy Young Awards, two 20-strikeout games, and a reputation for conditioning and domination. He did not just come to pitch. He came to beat you. When he picked the ball off the rubber that groundskeepers place for the starting pitcher, he came to stomp you in the ground. To stick it in your ear if you dig in at the plate. To shove it down your throat. After 30 years of being the stompee, I wanted to be in the stomper’s position.

I spun my chair back to my computer, empowered by the hard pitching. “I’m going to start this mother with some high heat,” I said to myself. “That’ll back him off the plate and then I can go with breaking pitches away to freeze him in the zone for this first paragraph. The next paragraph will be more high heat, because he’s expecting location. Then I gotta mix up my pitches to get the final out of the inning.”

The essay was supposed a mixed piece about memories of events in my life, and I had to go back and forth in it from one memory to another. I found that mixing up my pitches conveyed the mental and emotional confusion I was feeling as the narrator of this essay along with the pain and jumps in time, location, and space between each incident in the essay. As I plunged on, it got easier and easier, and suddenly the essay was done.

I got an A.

When the paper was handed back, I was genuinely shocked. I was competing with some of the best MFA candidates in America and I had equaled them or won. I remember gazing down at the paper, Lucy nudging me to move along, so that the next victim could receive her paper, and then I did the triumphal jump I had seen Clemens do when he bounced off the mound after an inning- and rally-ending strikeout, and burst out singing: “Rocket man! Burning out his fuse up here alone!”

Everybody else, not being a Yankees fan, had no idea of what I was doin.

With Clemens’ pitching as the guide, it became easy. I didn’t have to think about rhythm, poetry, or journalistic leads and tie-backs.

It was now all regarding writing projects or assignments as pitching in a game. Either I was starting the game or working in relief. I had to understand the opposing batters (the readers), the game and its situation (the nature of the assignment), the impact it would have on the standings (what I was trying to do), and what pitches would work against these hitters (my voice, tone, and style).

In this epiphany, writing became at once the easiest and hardest thing I did. Hard in that I had to figure out what I was going to do and then execute the pitch sequence. Easy in that once I had the pitch sequence and plan in hand, I could do so until I had finished the paragraph or section (getting the hitter out), and had to do the next section (face the new hitter).

That required me to do the intellectual version of stepping off the rubber, rubbing up the baseball, taking a circle around the mound, catch my breath, and think, “Okay, Lippman, what comes next here?” Unless the catcher (my instructor or junior editor) came out to the mound to discuss the situation.

Usually I can come up with the answer pretty speedily. After about two to three hours (the length of a ball game), I recognize that I’m running short of intellectual energy, and there is a danger I may have written myself into a corner or worse, lost the thread of the project. At a time like that, I know I have to stop, but I also know I’ve either won the game or I’m turning it over to the bullpen with a decent lead.

There are failures, too. I stare at something I’ve written, and I can see the mistakes – they can range from a really lousy sentence (line drive base hit to the right side) to an erroneous one. (“Off the wall for extra bases! DiMaggio fields it and fires it in! Doerr will score! And Boggs goes to second! It’s an RBI double for Wade Boggs!”) Or a catastrophically-organized paragraph (“Deep to left! That ball will be…out of here! A two-run home run by Jim Rice! And Boston now leads, 3-0! And pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre will come out to talk with Clemens!”

However, when I see that, I have an advantage over the real Clemens on this battle between the all-time Yankees and the all-time Red Sox…I can yell, “Do Over!” shut off the computer, and come back to the article later.

When I return, Bobby Doerr’s still on second, there’s still one out, Boggs is still up, and I can change the sequence (erase that sentence), induce him to hit a ground ball in front of Doerr to Derek Jeter freeze him for the second out, and then jam Rice inside so that he hits a pop up to Ruth in left to end the inning. In case you’re wondering, Mantle’s in right. But don’t be so impressed: the Sox have an outfield of Rice, Lynn, and Yaz. Williams is the designated hitter.

So now, I have a winning formula. The approach comes from a seven-time Cy Young winner, the rules and theory come from my instructors. The choice of words, construction of sentences, focus on subject, and use of time from Walter Lord. The observation of detail and ritual comes from Frank McCourt.

Simple, isn’t it? Well, not really. After I apply all these tools, and the article appears, the criticism comes in. Most of the time, it’s supportive with some nit-picking. Occasionally, I face furious lunatics, like an arrogant Holocaust denier, enraged that I refuse to support his cause; irritated nationalists, who accuse me of “dishonoring the Italian Army;” and smug know-it-alls, who want to know how come my article on the naval Battle of Cape Esperance in the Solomons didn’t include the fanatical stand of the 999th Messkit Repair Battalion at the Battle of Pork and Beans. C’est la guerre, fellas. Live with it.

More annoying are people who attack my writing ability, which is hitting below the belt. I have professional awards for doing so. I got my MFA in Creative Writing – straight A’s. Only time I ever did that. I don’t have to – and usually don’t – take that abuse from 15-year-olds of any age. If they send me a letter, I answer back, and include a check for the price of the magazine, plus their postage, plus 10 percent interest. I have never seen them cashed.

However, they are microscopic in number. And a lot easier to deal with than Newark residents and media who shout at me on the phone because I can’t solve their problems.

The real problem comes before I apply these tools. It’s easier for me to get started on a project if it comes from my chain of command or my family. It’s like sitting in the bullpen, the phone rings, and the bullpen coach yells to me, “Hey, Lippman! Get your arm loose! You’re going in next inning!”

Nonetheless, I dislike the term “writer’s block,” or “having no time to write,” or worse, “I like to write, but I need to be dragged to the keyboard.” Somebody says that doesn’t want to be a writer. He or she wants to make the book tour, read laudatory reviews, saunter down the red carpet at the movie premiere with a supermodel on his arm, and live in a Beverly Hills mansion, surrounded by more supermodels, dictating copy to one of them. In other words, he wants to live like his dream of how writers live, but not really work like writers work.

In one of my writing classes, a classmate whined that he wanted to write, but “had no time.” So I broke down his week. 120 hours. 40 of them he slept. 40 of them he worked. Seven of them he was in the bathroom, showering and grooming. 14 of them involved cooking and eating. Five covered commuting to work. Two hours for laundry. Two hours for grocery shopping. That left 10 hours a week. What was our man doing during those 10 hours a week?

He looked at me with a wan smile. “Wasting it, I guess.”

I nodded. “Try turning off the TV and turning on the typewriter,” I said.

I have that problem, but in a different way. I’m not quite sure what to say when I start writing. I have three tools get myself going.

The first is a basic one: if you’re having trouble figuring out the next words in the article – go over the old ones. You may have difficulty writing, but you can ALWAYS edit existing work and make revisions (remember what I said about changing the pitch sequence to Boggs). That will invariably get you going to write the next sections.

The second and third are to get audio support. I say “second and third” because for me, there are two types. The first is to hit the button on the radio and put on the Yankees game. Or, or others, the Red Sox game. Or the Montreal Canadiens game. Whatever your sport is, you’ll find emotional backup. The energy of the radio broadcasters, force of the game, and power of the event will quicken the pulse rate and stimulate the brain. Just try to ignore the annoying commercials, especially those for “Kars-for-Kids.”

The second type – or third, I guess – is to put on your stored music. Not the local radio station, because that’s even more annoying commercials and distracting DJ patter. Get yourself a playlist of up-tempo music from a genre you look, set the playlist on “shuffle,” and light it up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to get started and keep going from listening to songs like the following:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/6/2108870/-HOW-I-LEARNED-TO-WRITE

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