In the summer of 2008, I was covering an American Legion baseball tournament for a local newspaper. It was one of dozens of baseball tournaments I had covered over the years. Baseball has always been my favorite sport and I jump at any opportunity to write about it.
But this tournament was different. Not because the games were any more or less exciting, but because during this tournament, I started to get an idea. For the first time, I started to see a story about a baseball team develop in my mind.
It was not much of a story that first day. But in the weeks that followed, I could not stop thinking about this team I had invented. The players and coaches started to develop personalities of their own. The star pitcher was no longer just a pitcher, but a young man who forced himself to be disciplined in all areas of life to make sure he never lost his college scholarship. The third baseman transformed from simply being a great hitter to being a boy on a journey from confidence to arrogance to humility.
More details filled my brain, long after the baseball season of 2008 was over. I decided the team played in central Pennsylvania. They had one head coach and two assistant coaches. There were about one hundred devoted fans who attended every game, but many more who would start coming to the games when the team started succeeding. Among those fans were three softball-playing girls who would become the romantic interests for certain players. Most importantly, I eventually decided that an outsider, a stranger, would have an influence over the team, for better or worse.
That first idea I had while sitting at a baseball tournament eleven years ago was not enough for a full story. In theory, I could have quit on The Pride of Central then. I had to let it grow, even if it was only growing in my mind at the time. Using my imagination allowed a few stray thoughts to become a 123,000-word novel.
If you have an interest in writing fiction, one of the earliest decisions you have to make is to allow those first thoughts to grow. That initial idea may not sound like a book or even a short story right away. Continue to think on it anyway. Maybe it won't grow the way you'd like (many other ideas of mine have not). But not every thought needs to turn into a story. Only one does. When that happens, you can see the new characters, places and situations that were not there in those first moments, but were born out of that first idea.
I never had the whole manuscript in my head. Waiting until I knew every detail would mean I would never start writing. I sat on the story for a long while, partially because I did not know when to find the time, and partially because I was scared to share it. But I eventually found the time and courage to start typing.
Next week: It's scary to start at the beginning