It’s been a while since my last post, and I apologize for that. That’s partly due to my class schedule but mostly due to the bane of any writer’s existence: The Dreaded Writer’s Block.

When it comes, it comes hard. It’s a cruel mixture of sensations, feeling a bit like a dentist’s anesthesia on your brain. Everything is numb and a few beats slower than usual. Your fingers suddenly feel like the size of Christmas hams as they hover warily over the keyboard. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s virtually impossible to figure out when The Dreaded Writer’s Block is going to strike and how long it’s going to last.

Hell, it was like pulling teeth just to sit down and write this simple post.

So while there won’t be a chapter posted this week, I just wanted to share a few thoughts on this common mental freeze. While it can be daunting to overcome, it can be tamed. And the answer, as with so many questions about writing, is deceptively simple.  Click “New Document” and start pounding. It doesn’t matter if what you’re writing is pure drivel.

When Bob Dylan was writing “Like a Rolling Stone,” his seminal tune, he started with what he described as twenty pages of “vomit.” What emerged was his magnum opus.

So don’t beat your head against the wall about writer’s block. With a little elbow grease, it can be reversed.

Here’s a clip from one of the co-writer’s of the Oscar-winning film crash talking about how he gets over writer’s block:

Here’s the second chapter.

It’s all too easy to get bogged down in exposition while writing. It’s especially true for fiction, but it’s applicable to any style of writing. But it’s absolutely critical to avoid info dumping, something I was guilty of in my first chapter.

I got too flashy in my various flashbacks and character tangents, showing off my research a little too much. It’s a classic first-time writer mistake, many of which I’m making with great zeal.

I’m not sure if all of the tangents in the first chapter are at the right place in the narrative, or even if I need them at all. That’s half the fun of this little blog experiment: seeing my writing with fresh eyes and shuffling things around accordingly.

So for a story ostensibly about baseball, the book has been curiously baseball-free so far. Do you think chapter two is too late to introduce the theme of baseball? Have I kept your interest so far?

I had always heard of sculptors, writers and painters feeling as if they stumbled upon their work and had not created it. This sounds like mumbo jumbo, but now I can relate.

Here is the best-kept secret of starting a book, or any sort of long-form writing: you have no idea what you are saying or where you are going. And that’s okay.

“When you are working on your first book, it is easy to believe that there is some holy mystery to plotting or structuring a novel but, at its most basic level, it is no more than a matter of you as a novelist deciding that this will happen, then this, then that… and if it doesn’t work, you will change it…Often, the only way to discover what happens next is to start writing and see what comes,” says author Louise Doughty in an informative Telegraph column about starting novels.

The lesson I learned was simply start writing. Even if it’s just word vomit, you’re still finding your voice.

I was constantly reminded of prospecting for gold. You’ve got to sift through gallons of muck before you find that shiny nugget. In this case, that lump of treasure represents characters and a plot.

Here is Michael Chabon, my favorite author, on his writing process when he begins a novel (this is an excerpt from an uncommonly thoughtful interview he did pre-superstardom in 1995 for Critic’s Choice):

“I begin with an image, usually, or a vague feeling of some kind — a longing for a place, a person a time… then I try to figure out who my characters might be…what kind of people I associate with the above-mentioned feeling or longing… Once I have my characters I try to find a narrator, and then let my narrator help me find a way into a story…only when I’ve got about forty to fifty pages do I sit down a make an outline.”

And that’s really it. Sometimes you’ve got to let your story come to you. If you start out with a great idea, it will have no choice but to find you.

Wait, hold on. (Shotguns a Redbull and throws on The Stroke’s Is This It?)

Okay, where were we? Staring at that blinking cursor on a blank page is tough enough when you’re sitting down to write a punchy little essay. Knowing you have to write at least 100,000 words (the length of the average novel) is a different beast entirely.

But it is a surprisingly exhilarating feeling, like hitting the halfway point of a five-hour drive or watching interest accumulate. When you know something is going to take a significant amount of time, you mentally buckle in. This long-term thinking has allowed me to stretch my legs and experiment with my writing voice in ways I didn’t foresee.

Before you read more, I’d recommend you thumb through my prologue. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Hooked yet? To start things off, I followed the old adage of “write what you know.” I’m familiar with the rules  of journalism much more so than the rules of fiction, so I decided to incorporate a plot device that would take advantage of that knowledge.

The prologue gradually introduces the reader into the story’s world (I will keep referring to it as a world, pretension be damned, because that is how it feels as I write it) with a faux-newspaper profile, written 50 years after the events of the novel. It’s a big, unruly world I’m trying to populate, and I felt that if I started the story with some distance and removal from its events it would be easier for the reader to swallow.

What did you guys think of the prologue’s plot device? Does it make narrative sense? In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve been writing this book for a while (I’m about 15,000 words in) and I often feel like the prologue only makes sense to me, who has seen further into the story than someone picking it up for the first time.

I plan on sprinkling more faux-features set in 1971 throughout the book to comment on actions that are occurring in the story in 1921, though that isn’t set in stone. My goal for the prologue was to introduce both the alternate universe I’ve created and the main character of the story, Cy Cohen. Did I accomplish that?

I will be your personal tour guide through the frantic, chaotic, messy, heartbreaking and exhilarating  experience of  a first-time novelist, as I write it. Writer’s block in real time, as it were.

So how did I get lured down this rabbit hole? A few months ago, I was researching the relationship between American Jews and our country’s beloved former national pastime, baseball.

Now, I am half-Jewish, and have always been a passionate fan of baseball. In fact, most Jews I know love baseball, and whether they admit it or not they cheer a little bit louder when Ryan Braun, Ian Kinsler or Kevin Youklis get a hit. There’s a weird sense of camraderie between Jewish baseball fans and Jewish baseball players, like we’re all familiar friends, or that we’ll run into them at Thanksgiving. I suppose this stems from our people’s almost complete lack of representation in all other sports. (Omri Casspi, the Israeli wunderkind who is currently straight-up balling for the Sacramento Kings, is the rare exception. His reception from the Jewish American sports-loving community falls somewhere between “He’s going to need another agent whose sole job is handling  Bar Mitzvah invitations” to “Who’s to say the Messiah wouldn’t return as a 6-9 basketball player?”)

ANYWAY, as I was researching the history of Jews and professional baseball, I realized that Jewish players in the early 1900s on through the outbreak of WWII faced many difficulties I had never even imagined. Obscenities were hurled at them from the stands and from the opposing team’s bench, and they were casually mocked in newspaper stories of the day, which often dismissed them when they had a bad game and rarely complimented them when they had a good one. Many Jewish players even played under pseudonyms to avoid persecution.

However, perhaps the most nefarious threat they faced came from an unexpected place: auto mogul and titan of industry Henry Ford. (Quick history lesson: Henry Ford was a notorious anti-Semite. Say whaaaat? Crazy, I know. Before the outbreak of WWII, Germany awarded Ford on his 75th birthday with the Golden Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor Nazis could bestow on foreigners. I guess that answered the age-old question, “what do you get the anti-Semite who has everything?”)

Ford’s “newspaper”, The Dearborn Independent, essentially served as a soapbox for him to holler his extremist and predjudiced beliefs at a large audience, and he seized the opportunity with relish. That is, until he had to shutter the paper in 1927 because of libel lawsuits. So the moment I realized I had to write a book about Jewish baseball players came when I stumbled upon a couple of articles in Ford’s Dearborn Independent that essentially advocated the removal of all Jewish men from professional baseball because of (insert age-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory here).

Ford’s paper had a huge circulation for its day, reaching over 700,000 people. Ford was a living American icon, and people took what he said very seriously. It did not seem too far fetched to me that baseball indeed could have removed all Jews from the game, particularly at a time when corporate sponsorship was starting to play a larger role both in sports and in American society. Any league would kill for Ford’s sponsorship, so if Ford told organized baseball in 1921 to “Jump,” they would answer quickly, “How high, Mr. Ford?”

I took the concept and ran with it.

Set in Newark, New Jersey in 1921, my story follows a couple Jewish kids as they grow up to become professional baseball players in the Negro Leagues. (Oh yeah, that’s another wrinkle to my alternate universe: Jews were forced out of the Majors and into the Negro Leagues.)

So here’s the deal: I will regularly post chapters and content on this site or through Google Docs, and solicit advice from you, dear reader. I’ve never written any sort of long-form fiction before, so I need all the help I can get. Since this is my first crack at it, I can’t afford to be insecure; don’t mince words. If you don’t like something, tell me. If a plot device doesn’t work, I’ll cut it. If I resort to cliches, call me out.  I aim to make this as much of an interactive experience as I can, with plenty of commiseration and give-and-take between author and reader. Working together, maybe we can sift a book out of all this spilled ink.