When I was a sophomore in college, I took a Creative Writing class that functioned as a writing workshop. As part of the class, we had to submit things that we wrote to get reviewed by the rest of the people in the class. For our first assignment, we had to write a 300 word or less "short." I submitted the following story:
I twisted the ball
in my hands, trying to place my fingers on the seams the way my dad had showed
me seconds earlier. The waves crashing twenty feet to my right and the hard-packed
sand under my feet were of no consequence at that moment. I brought my right
arm back behind me in a circular motion, my elbow making a “t” in relation to
my body, before bringing my hand and the ball next to my ear. At this point, I
exploded my arm forward, twisting my wrist around the ball as I released it
into the thick, coastal air. The baseball, traveling about 50mph, hurtled
towards my dad, before making an abrupt, sudden drop, with a slight left-hand
turn. The ball seemed to defy physics, my 13-year-old mind didn’t understand
how it could change direction so suddenly.
Sitting in a AP physics class five years
later, I would learn about the Magnus effect and how airflow around the seams
of the ball caused it to drop and turn through the air. But at that moment, as
the ball plummeted towards the earth, the only thing running through my mind
was “I cant believe I just did that.” As the ball popped into my fathers
catchers mitt, he shouted “Hooo boy, that one snapped off!” A grin seemed to split
my face in two as I got my dads approval on my first successful curveball.
Since that day in July on the shores of Cherry
Grove beach, I have thrown many more curveballs. Some have been hit hard,
others have resulted in strikeouts, and one curveball badly fooled a catcher
and hit him in the mask. No curveball will ever be as special as the one I
snapped off to my father for the first time. The popping of the catcher’s mitt
and the coastal wind whipping across the beach are forever overmatched by my
dads excited voice shouting about the first time I made a baseball bend and
hook through the air. That moment is frozen in my mind, for me to look back on
and smile. After all, you don’t do something for the first time very often.
After the class, the professor came up to me and said that I had produced a really good writing sample. She happened to have a contact at a online baseball journal, and wanted to know if I was interested in getting my short published. I told her absolutely, and over the next few weeks I talked with the website to get everything worked out. Eventually, this became the first thing I ever got paid to write. I looked recently to try to find this online, to have a record of my first published thing. Sadly, I couldn't find it.
Stephen King has the opinion that if you write something, and someone gives you a check for it, and that check doesn't bounce, and you use that check to pay a bill, then you can call yourself a professional writer. I am glad to say that the words in italics are the ones that started my writing career. It might not be my best writing, but its the stuff that made me think I have a future in it.
Yours, Ryan
