If you watch a Major League baseball game in March, then watch one in October, you are seeing the same sport, correct?
Three strikes for an out. Three outs in an inning. A player has to make his way around the bases to score a run. Nine defensive players in the field. Nine innings, unless a tie score forces extra innings.
These and all the other rules are the same no matter which MLB game you attend. So these games in March and October are the same...aren't they?
Yes and no. The sport of baseball does not change identity over the course of the season. But anyone familiar with baseball would know that the two games are not the same at all.
A game in March would be a Spring Training contest. A scrimmage, with a result that has no meaning. Teams use these games to prepare for the regular season – the games that count. It might still be the basics of baseball and it might be played in nice Florida weather, but these games are almost never memorable.
A game in October is a playoff game, possibly a World Series game. Not every team even gets to play in these games. For those that do, they are the most important contests of the year. If the game is in the World Series, it could be a contest that people talk about for generations to come.
Ask someone from Boston about Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. Or ask someone from New York about Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. (Don't get those backwards – trust me on that.) The memories of these and other Fall Classic games endure for a long time.
Baseball in October, playoff and World Series games, get people who do not always call themselves baseball fans to turn on the game and watch an 18-inning contest that lasts until 3 a.m. Why? Because it is not just a game anymore.
It is an event. World Series games only come around once a year. World Series games for “your team” sometimes don't come around for ten or twenty years. It is an event – sometimes a rare one.
The game is no longer just about strikes, outs, innings, runs. It is about the culmination of months and years of hard work. It is about people coming together, forgetting political and social differences, to support the team that represents their city. It's about finding a hero on the field whose name might be remembered for generations to come.
If you are an author, getting a book published is a big accomplishment, just like making it to the professional baseball leagues. But in your heart of hearts, you should also have a goal of making your book into an event, not just a story.
I don't mean that your book's release is an event. For every J.K. Rowling who has the news reporting on each book that is written, there are thousands of authors whose books are released to relative obscurity.
I mean that the book itself should be an event for its readers. It does not really matter if that means five readers or five thousand. Your story should be something that readers will recall for months or years to come, because of something that happened in your story, because of what happened to your characters, because of that one bit of flair you put in your story that no one else put in theirs.
What exactly that flair should be will depend on your genre and your style of writing.
There are a lot of romance novels out there. For many readers of that genre, the stories become the literary equivalent of a scrimmage. They read it, and that story is forgotten as quickly as a spring training game as they go on to the next love tale.
Mystery novels are all over the place. But not every mystery leaves the reader with fond memories. Some are quickly dismissed after the final page is read because there was no true shock at the end. The readers put the book aside awaiting their regular-season and playoff caliber novels.
Sports fiction is not nearly as large a genre as romance or mystery. Still, when I wrote The Pride of Central, I knew that I had to do my best to give it something that no one else had done before. For the benefit of readers who are still reading my story, I won't give away too much here, but there is a symbolism behind each character and each event that I never saw used in any other sports tale. I hope that it is enough to make The Pride of Central not just a book, but an event for my readers. I hope I found that rare thing to make my story stand out.
If you are writing a romance, do not fear using some of the cliches of the genre. But include some aspect of the couple's passion that you can uniquely describe, something that will stick in your readers' memories. Something that will make them remember your story while they read the next several books on their bed stand.
If you are writing a mystery, spend some time going over the same things other mystery writers have done. But include the clue, the twist, the surprise that you never heard of anyone else using before. Done properly, the readers will remember not just your book, but that one moment when the surprise is revealed, for years to come.
You'll be your readers' World Series hero.
Next week: You didn't fail