Back in the old days, one of my favorite things was to watch Dwight Gooden throw a curveball. He already had a masterful fastball. So he’d set the hitter up to expect the fastball and throw a rainbow twelve-to-six curveball and the batter would freeze. Or collapse. He was really, really good at his craft.
If you aren’t a baseball fan, you wouldn’t care. Even if you were a baseball fan, you might not take the time to stop and appreciate the mastery and beauty in a guy throwing a ball to another guy while a third guy (all overpaid, of course) tried to hit it with a stick.
It’s easy to walk past something that’s layered and nuanced and not even notice it.
Micki Browning is a writer friend. She’s also really, really good at her craft She recently guest blogged about opening lines on a site called Novels Alive. And she shared the opening paragraph of her novel Mercy Creek.
“Everyone had a story from that night. Some saw a man, others saw a girl, still others saw nothing at all but didn’t want to squander the opportunity to be a part of something larger than themselves. To varying degrees, they were all wrong. Only two people knew the full truth.”
That’s some damn fine writing right there. It buckled my knees and sent me back to the dugout.
Although I haven’t read that novel yet, that paragraph promises amazing things. In four sentences, it covers the fact that eyewitnesses are sometimes unreliable. Who’s reliable? Who isn’t? And it baits the hook. Who are the two people? What do they know? Will I know who the two people are?
But it’s the middle where I found depth.
If my college roommate were exactly one year older, he’d have gone for a semester abroad on Pan Am flight 103, which crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. That gives me connection, helps me understand a tiny slice of what it must be like to lose someone that way.
Sometimes people go far beyond using emotion by proxy as a way to relate. After any sizeable tragedy, you’ll find people trying to insert themselves into that tragedy, from Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies taking and sharing pictures of the Kobe Bryant crash scene to people vamping on Instagram in front of Auschwitz. Everyone, it seems, wants to be part of the story.
There’s even an old Rockford Files episode (a two–parter) where a police groupie wants very badly to be part of the action and almost gets people killed.
In our social media obsessed culture, there’s public release for that need. It speaks to a hole that can’t be filled. To how you can be lonely while standing in a sea of people.
It speaks to how I felt a little lonely when I had to serve a day in the Facebook penalty box because there are a lot of people I connect with there. People want connection and will sometimes do warped things to achieve it.
I got all that from one sentence in an opening paragraph of a novel. A few words opened up that entire thought process.
When I watched Gooden strike a guy out with that curveball, I’d take a second and reflect on the skill and artistry of what I just saw. Sometimes, I just said, “Damn.”
Same thing here.
And it’s even better because Micki Browning will never play for the Yankees, the way Gooden did.
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