Swinging for the Tenses

Opposites don’t always attract

I spent my childhood summers hitting orbs with sticks. From April to August was baseball season, where I took to the field every day in a valiant bid to rise above athletic mediocrity. I was a student of the swing, a partner to the bat. Hours each day I spent with my equipment, learning the grooves of the handle, the correct tightness of the straps of my batting gloves, becoming one with my dirt-writhed weapons to impress someone in the stands and convince them to be my girlfriend.

No one could guess the amount of time I devoted to the game, especially when I played. For 15 years, my parents sat in the stands, watching their son try to get on base by drag bunting down the third base chalk or taking fastballs to the back, the two sectors of the game where I excelled most.

When baseball season ended in the late weeks of summer, I took to another area of grass and sand. My friend and I slung our golf bags over our shoulders and walked to a small 9-hole course near our neighborhood, where we spent embarrassing measures of time searching for our drives in bushes, streams, and living rooms of nearby houses.

After the grind of baseball season, the laxness of golf came as a relief. I could pursue the white ball in something other than a sprint and take water breaks whenever I pleased. The only people yelling at me to hustle were the old men behind us, watching us take our fourth hack from the tee box.

No, I was never great at swinging either a bat or a club, but I did know to swing both at the same time guaranteed horrendous results. Baseball and golf were independent sub-seasons of summer. Like rum and wine — fine separate, but when mixed, things go awry, especially in open fields. It had nothing to do with time or stamina, but the conflicting fundamentals of their swings, which I’ll get to soon.

Into my high school seasons, I pursued a rise above mediocrity in something else: writing words. Creative nonfiction and personal essays first pulled me into writing. They provided a place to funnel my strange thoughts into a physical form — a drainage pipe for the naive metaphysics sloshing in my mind. A place your thumb is touching right now (for those who I haven’t bored to the point of a retreat back to Twitter).

That hasn’t changed. I still love the art of the essay. But now, as the editor of a college newspaper, it’s created a battle between my passion for creative writing and my duty toward news writing. The two have different goals and styles to perform them. Instead of sinking into my couch a few hours a day to write whatever grips my brain, I spend all day running around campus with a recorder and waiting in chairs outside offices.

As you know, news writing is meant to inform the public with accurate and unbiased reporting. It’s objective and un-opinionated (or should be). As a journalist, the story is never about you, and if in any instance it is — like the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in October — someone else will write it for you.

News writing is like a baseball swing.

A baseball swing is reactionary. It’s a horizontal, direct snap using every joint in the body. An object is speeding in your direction and you must quickly decide what to make of it. You analyze what you know: the pitcher’s release point and their hand movement, the spin of the red laces, the projected direction of the ball.

Then, you execute. You use instincts developed through repetition. You tame your muscles for as long as you can, and then, at once, release all your body’s torque, whipping the knob of the bat toward the ball and extending through it. It’s a lateral motion. If you are the y-axis, the bat is the x-axis moving neither up or down, just out. The path is a flat circle. Direct.

A golf swing differs from a baseball swing in terms of verticality. The path of the clubhead is an erect circle instead of a flat one. The club leaves the ground, rises behind your head, swoops through the golf ball and finishes back behind your head. Back and forth. It’s not a violent movement, like a baseball swing, but a graceful one.

Creative writing is better compared to a golf swing than a baseball swing.

The structure of the creative essay is not always linear. You start at a point. You go back from that point. You pivot and swing through that point, all the way around until it connects with the rest of your story. You can swing in any way you want; even Charles Barkley eventually got the ball into the air.

In Draft №4, John McPhee writes, “Developing structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme… The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected.”

And while the topics may cry out to be collected, it’s up to the writer alone to collect them. No one is forcing you to (unless it’s an English professor or if you’re lucky enough, an employer). The golf ball perches on the tee, not flitting toward you at 80 mph. It is there now. Only you can choose to begin your swing, to push your point down the landscape. And only you can choose not to.

I earlier mentioned the difficulty of swinging a bat and a club during the same season. One day, during my eighth-grade summer, I made the decision to golf the morning of a game day in July. The result? Nine lost golf balls, four flyouts, and a case of missing dignity. Both swings were disastrous — crooked lines following every path but the right one.

A few weeks into my first editorship earlier this fall, I balanced 2–3 weekly stories for the paper with 2–3 weekly assignments for a creative writing class. Underneath the workload, I felt a deterioration of my drive to finish either. When I sat to type sports stories for my section, I felt the journalistic constraints of news writing dull my voice, and it saddened me to delete quality sentences because I knew they wouldn’t make it past the editors above me.

As I wrote creative pieces for my writing class, I felt my inner news editor restrict my compositions of color and zest; a block between what I thought and what I said, because, in a news story, no one cares what you have to say — that’s not the point. Who cares what I think, I thought, and my writing reflected my confused state.

What would I do if I couldn’t will any more sentences out of me? Change my major to economics? Retreat to the mountains and live as a forest nymph? Return to South Dakota State and learn how to tend cattle?

I brought this battle to my creative writing professor one day during class. She began her writing career with a newspaper (or perhaps the newspaper) in Norfolk, Nebraska 20 years earlier, before turning to fiction and publishing mystery novels.

“How do you write news and essay at the same time?” I asked her. “What’s the balance between news and narrative?”

She told me she used the constraints of news writing to fuel her creative junkets.

“I spent all day reporting across northeast Nebraska, which, you can imagine, was thrilling,” she said with a laugh. “When I got home and sat down to write for myself, the walls fell down everything opened up.”

Over spring break, I returned to my high school in Rapid City — the one I had worn the name of on my uniform four years ago — as a speaker at a writer’s conference for AP students. I was the youngest of the nine speakers, the only unprofessional, closest in age and experience to the students. As I took questions (though it was more conversational), a young lady in the front row (she was a senior, I think) asked me: what was one thing you needed in college that you didn’t know you needed before going?

My first answer was shower shoes. My second answer was caffeine (I encouraged them to decline Adderall and cocaine as alternative sources of energy). My real answer, after some thought, was time for themselves. I told them, as they give their time to hectic schedules and workloads and activities and social events, to give time to themselves as well.

If you don’t, burnout is inevitable, and when it happens nothing matters to you except your next hour of sleep.

I love being the editor of a newspaper. It’s my job to write words, just as I envisioned myself doing when I was the age of the students I spoke to. And though I love it, it’s still a job. It’s a lot of work. It’s hard. It can be frustrating, demoralizing. But I realize getting any entity to accept my words will be work.

However, when I write for myself, away from my office in the newsroom, laying down prose doesn’t feel like work, and my tone relaxes as I move down the page.

How was I able to swing a bat without giving up the club? I separated them. I knew one damaged the other when I held them simultaneously. So I chose one, and then the other. My strokes went down (no they didn’t), and my average went up (You saw me on first base because my ribs caught a loose slider).

An hour from now, I’ll be in the newsroom finishing stories that campus will see on Print Day. If you concentrate hard enough, you’ll hear traces of my voice within the newsprint. But as you read, know that I’m not trapped inside of the page.

I’ll actually still be in bed, because I sent pages for print after midnight and I didn’t get to sleep until 3 a.m. But when I do awake, I’ll make coffee, perch on my yellow couch and open my laptop. I’ll close out of the AP Stylebook website, open a blank document, and describe how the morning sun still finds my baseball glove, tucked away in my closet.

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