When I first imagined the story that became The Pride of Central, it was only a story for myself. I was picturing a summer league baseball team and the people who surrounded it just to pass the time on long trips to games I would cover for the newspaper.
Because the story was in my mind for eight years, there was no immediate pressure to change the story for someone else. If I wanted to picture the Central team as a national champion or a last-place team, no one else cared. If I wanted each player to be a saint or a monster or anything in between, no one would complain.
Then I sat down to start typing my first draft.
Everything changed then. For one thing, the story would have to make sense. Any inconsistencies in the details that I ignored in my mind would have to be corrected on the page.
But a much more troublesome issue arose: would readers accept my story the way I envisioned it? Did The Pride of Central have to be told a different way on the page than it was in my mind?
When facing a problem, a new author can often feel like he or she is encountering the issue alone. But most authors come to this conflict at one time or another:
Am I writing my story for myself, or am I writing it for the reader?
If the author changes the story too much, it no longer seems like the real story is being shared. But if the author refuses to consider what a reader will accept and understand, what was the point of writing it down in the first place?
Maybe the best way to answer this debate is to remember that there is a relationship between the author and reader, even if they never meet. Like all relationships – spouses, friends, parents and their children – there needs to be give and take on both sides. A marriage cannot be about only the husband or wife, it must be for both partners. And when writing a manuscript, the author must remain true to the essentials of the story while making it as appealing to the reader as possible.
As a writer, when I wrote The Pride of Central, I had to remember that most readers would want a balance between the baseball action on the field and the character development of each individual in the story. Even during portions of the book where I felt the baseball games were secondary to the character development, or during stretches where the action was more important to me than the character narratives, I had to remember the reader was most likely looking for some of both throughout. Portions of my book were written differently than I had pictured in my mind because of this.
But the writer needs to also be willing ask for a little grace from the reader, because some things cannot be compromised without destroying the story. Perhaps one hero is a little too good for some readers to accept, but the story does not work any other way. Or maybe the main character makes a mistake that some readers find difficult to forgive, but without that flaw, the whole narrative falls apart. In The Pride of Central – without spoiling the ending – no matter how deep into the playoffs Central gets, some readers will feel I should have let them be more successful, and others will feel that they were too successful to be realistic. But in order to stay true to the themes of my story, I had no choice to but have them advance exactly as far as I did.
In the end, I did write the story for myself and for any readers willing to open the book. I can't tell other writers what to do, but I believe that this is where the marriage between writer and reader is most likely to succeed.
Next week: Saying yes to one thing and no to another.
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