Son of Bold Venture

DREW MAGARY'S THE POSTMORTAL, OUT TODAY

2011-08-30T21:06:00.000-04:00

Drew Magary's The Postmortal is out today. It's a big day for him. Here's how he described the feeling of his novel being released:

I feel great! I feel like I could vomit lightning! Now, all I have to do is write another one. GAHHHHHHHHH

Back in May, Drew was kind enough to join me for a Five for Writing. It's worth your time, as is Drew's book. It's available everywhere fine books are sold. Sincere congratulations to this man I've never met. Writing a book is really hard; writing a novel... Well, I have no idea.

MY SECOND EMPIRE: WITH PICTURES!

2011-08-22T22:06:00.001-04:00

Early joiners might remember that when I started out trying this blogging thing, it was over at Esquire.com, and it was meant to document the resurrection of a big old house that Lee and I bought in Port Hope—a beautiful Second Empire, built in 1870, that needed some pretty serious love.

Well, that particular blog stopped—despite appearances to the contrary, this one has not—but I kept on working at the house. It's been more than a full-time job, which, in addition to my real work at Esquire and Grantland, has left me feeling pretty... damn... tired.

Anyway, we're moving in on Friday, slightly more than a year since we took possession (and the house took possession of me). It's still not finished, but it's livable, and I can't wait.

I'll write a longer post about the experience later, when it's not so fresh and painful. Honestly, fixing our house is the most ridiculous thing I've ever done. I'm not sure I'll ever get over it. I've literally removed 58,000 pounds from it, by myself. Most of that was dust. Thankfully, I've happened to develop old man strength this year, which has been like a superpower. It's also a nice complement to my old man balls, which I've had since I was eight years old. It's great that the rest of me has finally caught up.

For those of you who were there in the beginning, I thought I'd post a couple of before and afters. Of my house. Not my balls.

THE TAO OF SIGN STEALING

2011-08-12T00:27:00.001-04:00

In which two bloggers—the other being The Tao of Stieb—discuss “Signs of trouble in Toronto,” the ESPN: The Magazine story by Amy K. Nelson and Peter Keating about allegations that the Jays steal signs at the Rogers Centre.

JONES

This will be fun: a little journalism, a little baseball... Someday we'll be perfect? That day is today, my friend.

Why don't we start off by getting our biases out of the way up front?

GARY SMITH AND ME, THE SEQUEL

2011-07-03T22:32:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading “Crime and Punishment,” Gary Smith’s celebrated 1996 story about basketball player Richie Parker and the fallout from his conviction for sexual abuse. It’s also the first Gary Smith story I’ve read. Here are some thoughts.

GARY SMITH AND ME

2011-06-26T22:36:00.005-04:00

A confession: I’ve never read a Gary Smith story.

CHECK BACK WITH ME A LITTLE AFTER NOON

2011-06-08T00:18:00.003-04:00

My more devoted reader(s?) might have noticed that things have been a little quiet around SoBV lately. I’m sorry for that. These are busy times, my friends.

For the early joiners who might remember my first, failed attempt at blogging about my struggles to whip a big, old house into shape, said house has nearly killed me, but we’re in the literal home stretch—drywall’s up!—and I’ve been working most of my daylight hours trying to get my wife and kids happily ensconced there… Oh, only six months later than I'd hoped we might have moved in.

Esquire’s been a workout lately, too, with a big political feature of mine coming in the August issue, and some exciting stuff planned for the fall.

And, as you might have read recently—if you’re really into the architecture of online mastheads, at least—I’ve joined the contributor ranks at Grantland.com, which enters orbit, depending on when you’re reading this, either a few hours or minutes from now.

Or it has already launched, and it’s become apparent that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

LAST CALL AT ELAINE'S, ft. KEVIN VAN VALKENBURG

2011-05-26T20:16:00.004-04:00

Elaine’s, one of my favorite places in New York, is closing tonight. Elaine Kaufman, the longtime owner—and one of the best friends a writer could have—died a few months ago, and the joint just couldn’t manage without her.

One of the best nights of my life was spent at Elaine’s, in the company of writers old and young, at the wake held for W.C. Heinz, who wrote “Death of a Racehorse”—from which this blog’s name was lifted—among many other great things.

A few of us read “Death of a Racehorse” out loud to an audience that, had I been less drunk, would have made me shit my pants just by its having assembled. Later, five of us ended up at a round table together: Charles P. Pierce of Esquire and the Boston Globe; ESPN’s Wright Thompson and Jeff MacGregor; and Kevin Van Valkenburg of the Baltimore Sun.

It was one of those great, beautiful nights when we shared each other’s dreams and stories and company. I could never do justice to it.

Luckily, Kevin Van Valkenburg can. He’s done us the favor of writing about it, and allowing me to post his words here. My thanks to him for that.

Kevin’s a great man—a husband, a father, a writer, a traveler, a drinker, a reader, a romantic, and a beast. But mostly Kevin’s a dreamer. Of the five of us, I would bet that he’s the one most likely to have already been on the moon.

If this is your introduction to him, I hope you like what you read here. You’ve been missing out. If you know Kevin, well, then you already know what you’re in for: You’re in for grand company, which is what Elaine’s was all about, on our night there, on every night there, and now, tonight, with closing time coming down hard, and just enough time for one last wake.

Mr. Kevin Van Valkenburg, the floor, my friend, is yours:

DELETED SCENES

2011-05-25T20:02:00.000-04:00

Four years ago this week, Sgt. Joey Montgomery was in the middle of his journey from Iraq to the cemetery down the road from his mother’s house in Scottsburg, Indiana.

I wrote about that journey in 2008 in a story called “The Things That Carried Him.”

I’ve never had a story stay with me like that one, and I probably never will experience anything like it again. It was just an incredible confluence of time and space and heart-touching people, living and dead.

That story, when I first talked about it with my editors, David Granger and Peter Griffin, was supposed to be like most of our features: 6,000 words. I can remember writing the first section one night—the first section I wrote was actually the Kalitta flight from Dover to Scottsburg—and it coming in around 2,000 words. I had planned for thirteen sections. I did the math, and I called up Peter.

“I think this story might go a little long,” I said. I have said that sentence many times, but never meaning it quite like this.

FIVE FOR WRITING: DREW MAGARY!

2011-05-16T21:26:00.001-04:00

I don’t know Drew Magary. I know his writing, mostly through Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber. I can’t remember how I came to read an advance copy of his first novel, The Postmortal—I feel like he whored himself out to me, but I might have pestered him, because he’s one of those guys I’ve always wondered about, and not just in a metaphysical sense. Either way, it doesn't matter: The Postmortal is good. Really good. I’ve already attached myself to write the screenplay (I’m not sure if Drew knows this yet) for what will surely be a popular and critically acclaimed blockbuster about immortality, the meaning of life, and women with impossible bodies.

You can pre-order your very own copy here.

What’s weird for me about this particular Five for Writing—apart from its comparison of personal watercraft to breasts—is that I actually found it kind of unsettling. I’ll write more about this later, but I felt like Drew was speaking to me when he wrote what he wrote about guys who write on typewriters. I like to think writing is IMPORTANT, because it’s what I do. But maybe, when you strip it right down to its most basic elements, it’s just putting words in an entertaining order in exchange for money. Reading this made me wonder whether I’ve been squeezing the bat a little too hard lately.

Anyway, maybe a little more than usual, I’d like to thank Drew Magary for joining the Five for Writing circus. Despite the fact that he puts two spaces after every period—fixed—I really like what he wrote here, and what he wrote between the covers of his new book. I hope you do, too:

YOU GOTTA SHOW UP

2011-05-11T21:43:00.000-04:00

I’m writing this in the press box at the Rogers Centre—I still want to call it SkyDome—which is both strangely familiar and foreign at the same time. There’s Internet here now, which is quite a development, and most of the faces have changed in the ten years since I last worked the Blue Jays beat; the only player I covered who’s still in uniform is Pat Hentgen, who’s now the bullpen coach. That makes me want to drink.

One thing hasn’t changed, though: If I’m at the ol’ ballpark, someone—usually one manager or the other—is mad at me.

Last night, I did one better and got reamed by both.

NO.

2011-05-09T09:58:00.002-04:00

The following twenty things should rarely if ever appear anywhere near your copy:

1. Is your name F. Scott Fitzgerald? [Edit: Or Gene Weingarten?] No? Then take your adverbs out back and shoot them in the head and bury them in lime.

2. Popular culture references, unless you’re writing about popular culture, in which case you should probably occasionally refer to popular culture, but only through your clenched teeth. The names Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Bilbo Baggins, and Lady Gaga should not appear in your copy unless you’re writing a story about three fictional characters and their chance encounter with a hobbit on a quest.

3. Any sentences that read as though they might have appeared in an academic text; therefore, “therefore” is not permitted. “Heretofore?” Get the fuck out.

THE CHATTANOOGA FIX

2011-05-03T22:44:00.002-04:00

Stephen Burns is an aspiring writer from Toronto. He’s about to turn thirty-nine. He earns a living through other means, but he still writes—he still writes with discipline and passion and skill. I believe he still dreams of scratching out “aspiring” from his self-list of adjectives, but he’s deep enough into things to know that it might not happen for him the way he might have hoped, once upon a time.

He asked me to read a blog entry of his about his continued efforts to overcome some pretty terrible math, and I did. You should, too. It made me think a lot about my own career and some of the things I’ve written for this blog. It made me wonder about the true definition of success. It made me wonder who’s right, if anyone can be right about things like this. Over and over again these past few days, I’ve found myself thinking about the question Stephen and his hope represents.

I still don’t know the answer.

Really, it comes down to this: Is there a value in trying—is there a nobility in effort alone, regardless of the outcome?

LYDIA COULD

2011-04-28T15:15:00.002-04:00

Looking forward to part II where you at least hint that j-school is worth it… even a little.—typicallydia

Oh, sweet, dear Lydia. I’m afraid you’ve wasted your life. The Daily Beast said so yesterday. Didn’t you see? Your journalism degree is the single most useless degree in the history of higher education. In the history of paper, in fact.

Happily, you’re still young. According to national life expectancy standards, you’ve wasted only a quarter of your life. Like, a third, tops.

No—I’m kidding, Lydia, of course.

Sort of.

OPENING ACTS

2011-04-25T16:52:00.001-04:00

This might be my favorite start to a sports story ever. This was the first story that made me realize the possibilities of non-fiction: It’s called “Resurrecting the Champ,” and it was written in 1997 for the Los Angeles Times Magazine by J.R. Moehringer, who went on to wide acclaim for his memoir, The Tender Bar.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about. To distract myself from this uneasy vigil—and from the phone that never rings, and from the icy rain that never stops pelting the window—I light a cigar and open a 40-year-old newspaper. * “Greatest puncher they ever seen,” the paper says in praise of Bob Satterfield, a ferocious fighter of the 1940s and 1950s. “The man of hope—and the man who crushed hope like a cookie in his fist.” Once again, I’m reminded of Satterfield’s sorry luck, which dogged him throughout his life, as I’m dogging him now. * I’ve searched high and low for Satterfield. I’ve searched the sour-smelling homeless shelters of Santa Ana. I’ve searched the ancient and venerable boxing gyms of Chicago. I’ve searched the eerily clear memory of one New York City fighter who touched Satterfield’s push-button chin in 1946 and never forgot the panic on Satterfield’s face as he fell. I’ve searched cemeteries, morgues, churches, museums, slums, jails, courts, libraries, police blotters, scrapbooks, phone books and record books. Now I’m searching this dreary, sleet-bound Midwestern city, where all the streets look like melting Edward Hopper paintings and the sky like a storm-whipped sea. * Maybe it’s fatigue, maybe it’s caffeine, maybe it’s the fog rolling in behind the rain, but I feel as though Satterfield has become my own 180-pound Moby Dick. Like Ahab’s obsession, he casts a harsh light on his pursuer. Stalking him from town to town and decade to decade, I’ve learned almost everything there is to know about him, along with valuable lessons about boxing, courage and the eternal tension between fathers and sons. But I've learned more than I bargained for about myself, and for that I owe him a debt. I can't repay the debt unless the phone rings.

THE CORRECTION

2011-04-23T22:00:00.000-04:00

Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit—his thorough, intricate takedown of Greg Mortenson’s fraudulent book and charity—has been downloaded 70,000 times by users of byliner.com. That’s terrific news in more ways than one. The problem is, Mortenson’s first book sold more than four million copies. Math isn’t my strongest suit—that would be my reasoned, measured approach to criticism—but I believe that’s a ratio of about 57-to-1 between the fabulists and the factualists.

Unfortunately, it feels more and more like fiction is winning the war against non-fiction, that sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, lies have been slowly eroding the truth. Mortenson is probably the biggest name to have been exposed for his expansive imagination, but he’s far from alone in using it. In fact, the non-fiction book industry in particular seems poised for a steroids-and-baseball kind of reckoning.

I was emailing back-and-forth with a friend about this, after 60 Minutes and then Krakauer did their good work on Mortenson. My friend’s a respected non-fiction author. He’s written several books. You know his name. He’s asked that I not identify him here, because he’s worried about publishers holding his accusations against him, and he wants to make a living. But here’s what he wrote:

This is in no way a defense of Mortenson, but he is symptomatic of a much larger and more insidious problem plaguing the non-fiction publishing industry, which today uses every imaginable euphemism to encourage writers to make shit up. As an author of a number of books this is something I have encountered repeatedly and with increasing frequency during both the editing process, and, more recently, in the proposal stage. Selling 20,000 or 30,000 copies of a book, which once sustained the industry, is no longer enough. The current environment demands best sellers and best sellers only, with the pressure to produce those running through the industry from top to bottom and infecting it at every stage.

A RESPONSE TO TOM SCOCCA

2011-04-21T21:01:00.001-04:00

Edgy Washington Post Company man Tom Scocca wrote this today. Here's my response:

A PARTING GLASS

2011-04-20T20:36:00.000-04:00

Charles P. Pierce—Charlie, my friend and mentor—recently wrote and gave a eulogy for Clif Garboden, his friend and former colleague at The Phoenix in Boston. (Garboden passed away last winter, but his memorial service was only a couple of weeks ago.)

This has already been posted at Full Brother site gangrey.com, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to spread the word—especially today of all terrible days. Two courageous and talented photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, were killed in Libya. They died for this business. They deserve perfect eulogies.

I mean this as a high compliment: Charlie is excellent at wakes. One of the great nights of my life was shared with Charlie and other writing friends at a proper drunk send-off for W.C. Heinz at Elaine’s in New York City. If you can hear Charlie’s voice in your head from his stints on NPR, and if you can imagine him with his tie loosened and a pint in his hand—even in a church—you’ll be able to put your ass in the seats at Garboden’s farewell, and I hope you’ll agree that this would have been exactly what you needed to hear.

Farewell Clif, and farewell Tim and Chris. You did the rest of us proud. You did good work. You did the best work.

Mr. Charles P. Pierce, bring them home:

THREE CUPS OF BULLSHIT

2011-04-17T22:41:00.000-04:00

I’m curious what Greg Mortenson is doing tonight, wherever he is. He almost certainly sat down a few hours ago—I imagine in a room filled with advisers and confidants, but perhaps alone—to watch Steve Kroft’s piece about him on 60 Minutes. He knew what was coming, but I have to believe his stomach still dropped when he listened to Kroft’s introduction: “We found there are serious questions about how millions of dollars have been spent, whether Mortenson is personally benefiting, and whether some of the most dramatic and inspiring stories in his books are even true.”

The books in question are Mortenson’s best-selling Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools: supposedly non-fiction accounts of his mountaineering travails, his epiphanies in the high country, and his building of 140 schools in impoverished regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

And the millions of dollars include money raised by his charitable organization, the Central Asia Institute, which apparently has been used more successfully to promote Mortenson’s books than to educate children.

It was a damning report. Fellow author Jon Krakauer straight-out told Kroft that Mortenson’s story is “a lie.” Charity watchdogs literally laughed about the CAI’s single audited financial statement since it was founded in 1996.

Mortenson himself declined to talk to Kroft, issuing a statement that a heart condition, for which he is preparing for surgery, prevented him from commenting publicly. As the 60 Minutes cameras showed all too clearly, that alleged condition hasn’t stopped Mortenson from attending book signings or booking speaking engagements. His heart can’t be that damaged, at least not in the physical sense.

FIVE FOR WRITING: GREGG DOYEL!

2011-04-14T20:42:00.001-04:00

I’d like to tell you a story about Gregg Doyel.

Gregg and I began corresponding a few months ago, after he got into it on Twitter with my Esquire colleague Scott Raab. Their skirmish made me sad, because for reasons I can’t really explain—their passion, their abiding sense of morality—I had decided that they would actually get along famously in real life.

So, I asked them to make up. More specifically, I asked Gregg to make up with Scott. Now, Gregg once got challenged to a fight by an angry MMA dude and accepted. He’s not exactly known for backing down. But Gregg and Scott eventually patched things up, and one night we’ll meet for dinner in Cleveland or Cincinnati or somewhere in between (Xenia?) and have a grand time. That makes me happy.

Anyway, Gregg and I have maintained our correspondence, and one thing Gregg does a lot is make fun of his own abilities. He’s always saying that he’s not capable of this, or he wouldn’t be able to contribute to that. When I asked him to do a Five for Writing, he said that he’d read the past entries, and he didn’t belong in the same company.

Well, let me tell you another story about Gregg. He received these five questions at 9:52 a.m. this morning. Three minutes before noon, I had 2,400 clean, precise, entertaining words land in my inbox. You can’t do that if you’re not made for this game. You can’t write like that, have the words just pour out of you, if you’re not built to do this.

I’m very pleased to introduce Gregg Doyel, esteemed member of Five for Writing’s Class of 2011. He belongs.

THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH

2011-04-09T21:19:00.001-04:00

My friend Ben Montgomery—a terrific writer for the St. Pete Times and the man behind the essential gangrey.com—has a tattoo on his right wrist. It’s in old typewriter font: TRUTH, it reads. I’ve never talked to Ben about his tattoo or admitted to him my envy of it. But I like to think that Ben got that particular tattoo in that particular location so that when he picks up his pen to write, he’s reminded of what should be coming out of it: always, the absolute truth.

Since I wrote my post about the National Magazine Awards and my disappointment about not getting nominated this year, I’ve taken quite a few shots from various corners of the Internet. The latest comes from a dabbling writer and graduate student (cue Liz Lemon) named Michelle Dean. “If this sort of delusional self-confidence is what it takes to succeed I do not have it,” she writes. “I do not know that that is a bad thing.”

Now, I can see a lot of things in that post I wrote, but I’m pretty sure the last thing I can see is delusional self-confidence. I’m almost certain that post demonstrates precisely the polar opposite trait: fact-based insecurity.

I also happen to see it as the stone-cold truth.

LOSING'S REWARD

2011-04-05T15:51:00.000-04:00

I wish I didn’t care about awards, but I do, very much. I understand from a purely rational perspective that awards don’t matter in the grander scheme of things; I get that winning an award (or not winning an award) doesn’t change the words on the page; I know that an incredibly small percentage of the world even has any idea that writers sometimes win trophies for their writing, or that people are still writing at all. I’m sure more people care about who caught the year’s biggest bass.

Last year, I went out for drinks with a new hire at Esquire and one of his friends from Vanity Fair. They asked me if I ever thought I might win a National Magazine Award. I told them, as quietly as I could, that I’d won two, including one less than a year earlier. That’s when I realized, No one gives a shit about these things except for you. No one else is keeping score.

But I've always kept score. I don’t know why, exactly. I just know that Gary Smith has won the most National Magazine Awards, with four. I know Tom Junod has won two. William Langewiesche has also won two. I like the validation of their company. I like being able to think, late at night, that maybe I belong.

And that’s why, this morning, when I found out that I hadn’t been nominated for a story I’d written on Roger Ebert, I first took to Twitter to spit the dummy—always a wise and prudent course of action—and then retired to my day bed for an afternoon of dizziness and spells.

FIVE FOR WRITING: GLENN STOUT!

2011-04-04T09:50:00.008-04:00

Glenn Stout is a man of many projects. Among fans of longform sports writing, he’s perhaps best known as the editor of the vaunted Best American Sports Writing series. (The 2011 edition, guest edited by Jane Leavy, will be released in October.) He’s also written dozens of his own books, covering a wide variety of topics, from baseball to the World Trade Center site to Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

Glenn’s next book, Fenway 1912, is about the building of that ballpark and its first season. It will also be released in October.

I admire Glenn for his having forged a career mostly as an editor and author of books—a very tough nut to crack—but also because of his continued interest in helping develop young writers and readers. Glenn treats the words that make it into print like an inheritance, like objects that are being passed down. And I believe he wants, more than anything, for those words to be good—to be worthy—and for them to continue to be good. I don’t know anyone who’s done more to seek out and highlight bright new talent. He’s like an old birddog scout, and I can still remember the first time he found me. Getting a phone call from Glenn, telling me I’d made BASW, was one of those moments I’ll remember happily forever.

Many thanks to Glenn for taking the time to participate in Five for Writing. There are many lessons here worth noting if you, too, wish one day to be collected.

Sons and Daughters of Bold Venture—Vermont’s own, Glenn Stout:

THE BASEBALL THEORY OF LIFE

2011-03-31T22:00:00.001-04:00

Opening Day—now Opening Night—and baseball is back in my life. As I wrote for Esquire.com today, I was once in a very deep love with the game. That love has faded—it had to, or it might have crushed us both—but I’m glad to feel the flicker of what we used to have again. It feels like an Adele song come to life.

Back in my besotted days, I came up with something I called The Baseball Theory of Life. (It was around the same time I also tried to convince friends that I’d written the lyrics to Motley Crue’s “You’re All I Need,” so keep that in mind when you read this.) I was young enough back then to think there was something fresh in employing sports as a metaphor for the rest of our existence. Now, I’m a little embarrassed by it, but I also like to think, on this rekindling night, that there was something to it.

At the time, the life expectancy for a North American male was 72 years. Up here in safe, beautiful, socialized Canada, it’s now nearly 81 years, and I’m going to use that figure, because it will make this exercise less depressing for me.

It’s really nothing profound. It’s just math.

GONE, BABY, GONE

2011-03-28T22:58:00.001-04:00

I asked my lovely bibliophile wife, Lee, for her take on a question posed in the comments of my last post. Here’s what she wrote, except for the part William Faulkner wrote, which she quoted:

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.—William Faulkner

Someone named Scott Warden left a comment on Chris’s blog wondering “how difficult it was to do anything else—other writing, even mundane day-to-day tasks” during the reporting, and writing, of a story. The story in question was “The Things That Carried Him.”

I am a first-hand witness to how well Chris manages the real life/story life balance. In short, he doesn't. I mean, how could you? He does his absolute best, but how could you think about the mundane, the day-to-day normalcy, when you've been interviewing witnesses at a morgue? When you've watched graves being dug? When you've watched a mourning mother cry over dinner?

HOW IT BEGINS

2011-03-24T21:57:00.001-04:00

This was my original pitch for the story that became “The Things That Carried Him,” a story about the return of Sgt. Joe Montgomery’s body from Iraq and probably the most important story I’ll ever write. I had mentioned the idea to my editor, Peter Griffin, and Esquire’s editor-in-chief, David Granger, at a face-to-face meeting a few days before this—I’d pitched the general idea that we should do a story about the return of dead soldiers from Iraq. They both said yes.

I had stumbled on the idea when I was reading CNN.com and saw a story that included a short account of the carrying of a soldier’s body back to his base by his fellow soldiers. That soldier was Joey. After my meeting with Peter and Granger, I went home and started doing some research, looking into the stories of other soldiers, but I kept coming back to Joey for reasons that are hard for me to explain. I know this will sound weird, but my being drawn to him felt almost cosmic, somehow.

And so I sat down at my kitchen table and wrote Peter and Granger the following email. There are mistakes in it—Joey’s wife’s name is Missie; he was flown to Dover, Delaware, not to Washington, D.C.; his brother Micah was not his escort home—but the outline of the story is there.

This is how a story begins:

FEAR

2011-03-21T21:03:00.000-04:00

I've no doubt you're inundated with emails and requests and ideas for blog posts, but as a writer, if you can ever get around to addressing self-doubt, and writer's block, if you've ever suffered from it, I'd love to read your thoughts.

I thought I could write well. I've been told I can write well. But I can't write. Literally. I think every sentence I put together is garbage. I'll be honest: I'm bitter about others getting opportunities I feel I should have gotten. The self-doubt is, as stated, nothing short of crippling.—Name withheld out of Love.

Oh, Love. This is sad. Because I see so much of myself in your words, and I know how it feels.

I’ve never had writer’s block. But I’ve had such doubt. I’ve spent more of my life feeling sick to my stomach than ninety percent of people who know when their next meal is coming, I would guess. I can’t remember the last time I wrote something and thought I’d nailed it. Not since I was a kid, I don’t think.

HOW I GOT MY JOB (PART I)

2011-03-16T23:28:00.001-04:00

Right now, there are 831 unanswered messages in my inbox. Part of the reason I started this blog was to try to answer “frequently asked” questions, thereby tripling my institutional efficiency. It hasn’t exactly worked that way, but I’m going to take another stab at it.

Here goes:

I’m 37; my favorite color is orange; you need to read a lot; I’d say my calves are my best physical feature; Ricky Williams; April, 2002; I think you probably should stop ending stories with quotes; and yeah, dude, I know, my calves are pretty ridiculous.

But the question I get asked the most, by far, is some variation of: How did a loser like you find gainful employment?

SHANE, TAKE A KNEE

2011-03-14T23:48:00.000-04:00

There’s a blog entry that’s making the rounds among sports journalists: It’s called Duke-UNC III, and the Truth About “Sports Writing.” Because I’m old-media and kind of slow, I can figure out only that the writer is a college kid named Shane.

You can tell from the quotation marks around “Sports Writing” where Shane’s going with this. (I love inappropriate quotation marks. They can “make” almost any “sentence” seem “totally” sinister.)

But here’s the quick version:

Shane covered the Duke-Virginia Tech ACC Tournament basketball game. From his seat on press row, he got in an altercation with an older radio announcer. Ruh-roh.

TOM SCOCCA IS WRONG

2011-03-10T19:55:00.001-05:00

I have no desire to get into a thing with Slate’s Tom Scocca. I don’t know him as a man or a writer. He might very well be good at being both. But for reasons unknown to me—I don’t think I’ve ever wronged him in this life or any other—he decided to take a run at my blog entry about profile writing this week. Like I wrote him last night, he gave the Internet just what it needs: more glib douchey snark. But far worse by my measure, he was also really, really wrong.

Referring mostly to my argument that writers should pitch stories about hidden gems rather than the rich and famous, Tom wrote that my advice was wonderful “if you are writing tenderly crafted profile stories on your own typewriter, at home, to staple together and pass out to your aunts and uncles.”

He continues: “It is, in fact, great advice for any writer who wishes never, ever to compete with Chris Jones for the finite amount of space and money available for feature writing in major American magazines.”

You want never, ever to compete with me for that space and money? Call up my boss and pitch him a story on this little-known character actor named Tom Cruise. Pitch him a story on George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.

FIVE FOR WRITING: CHARLES P. PIERCE!

2011-03-07T18:08:00.000-05:00

Charlie Pierce is one of the reasons I became a writer, or at least one of the reasons I became the writer I did. When I was in school, I read Esquire with religious fervor, which meant, mostly, that I read Charlie’s sports column, “The Game,” and anything else he’d written over the course of his long and varied career. I became obsessed with many things about him: his limitless-seeming knowledge base, his mastery of the metaphor, his beautiful sentences. His best stories read like true-life fairytales.

I set my sights on becoming his colleague. Unfortunately, when I finally got the chance to join Esquire, it was to write “The Game,” which Charlie had left to write features for Esquire and elsewhere and to join the staff of his hometown Boston Globe.

Let me tell you something: Nothing made my insides turn more quickly to mush than the idea that I was filling the space formerly occupied by Charlie Pierce. I’m the one other person on earth who knows how Ryan Minor felt.

More happily, Charlie and I have since become friends. This past fall, we sat in a bar in New York City called Jimmy’s Corner and watched Roy Halladay no-hit the Cincinnati Reds. We shouted over the jukebox and laughed and drank whiskey, and I couldn’t help remembering how I had once been a young man who had studied the words written by the man beside me, and now here we both were, drunk in Jimmy’s Corner. Roy Halladay was the least perfect thing about that night.

With pride and pleasure, I’d like to introduce my friend, Mr. Charles. P. Pierce:

PROFILE WRITING: THE BASICS

2011-03-03T13:26:00.000-05:00

I’m not sure why, but I’ve received several emails recently about profile writing. I like writing two types of stories the most: process stories—like police procedurals, how something came to be—and profiles. I’ve given a lot of thought about what makes a good profile, but I’ll admit to missing as often as I hit. Because profile writing is hard. It takes empathy, and observation, and reporting, and structure, and access, and then a few thousand words filled with beautiful sentences. It’s tough to get everything right.

As it happens, I’m sitting in my hotel room in Santa Barbara waiting for my appointed time with our May cover subject. Now, the celebrity profile is almost a beast unto itself, but selfishly, I thought this might be a good chance for me to remind myself about what works and what doesn’t work before, one more time, I try to get it right.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HUGO AND LAST CHANCE

2011-03-01T19:43:00.000-05:00

I’m writing this—because we live in the future—on Air Canada flight 799, from Toronto to Los Angeles. I travel enough that Air Canada sometimes gives me the gift of an upgrade, which they have today, which means I’m in seat 1F. To them, I’m a number who appears often enough on their computer screens to warrant the occasional perk. To my fellow passengers in the first-class cabin, I’m the homeless-looking dude who somehow stumbled onto a flight and nobody thought to remove.

Lunch will apparently include something called mesclun salad. I have no idea what that is, but I’m excited to try it.

I’ve probably flown a thousand times, but I’m still happy to put some more miles under me. My family traveled a lot when I was a kid; I come by my restlessness honestly. I took my first trans-Atlantic flight when I was six weeks old. We made our first trip around the world when I was sixteen. I’ve been to thirty-some countries and all fifty states (elusive Idaho was the last one crossed off my list). I’ve made some of those trips, including my snowy drive to Idaho, for pleasure; a lot of them, the majority of them, I’ve made for work.

THE LOCKER ROOM RULES

2011-02-24T20:08:00.003-05:00

Warning: Dick jokes ahead.

Earlier this week at Son of Bold Venture, I wrote about the press box and how to behave in it. (Some morons apparently think that acting like a professional means you don’t have a heart; I suspect they're doomed never to understand that the biggest hearts don’t need megaphones.) But for young sportswriters, navigating a professional locker room is the far scarier proposition. I’ve spent more than a decade of my sad, sad life in locker rooms for every possible sport—including Whirlyball, which is actually kind of awesome—and I still don’t feel entirely comfortable in them. I think that’s probably because I have this thing about talking to people not wearing pants.

THE YOUNG REPORTER’S GUIDE TO LOCKER ROOM DECORUM, ETIQUETTE, AND NOT COCK PEEKING

1. Seriously, no cheering.

FIVE FOR WRITING: JEFF PEARLMAN!

2011-02-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

Jeff Pearlman is a columnist for SI.com and the author of four sports biographies, including the best-selling Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty.

He was also, back in 1999 or 2000, watching BP from the first-base side at Veterans Stadium before an ordinary afternoon game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies.

At the time, he was one of the youngest writers at Sports Illustrated; I was a beat writer for National Post. Jeff was the guy I aspired to be. For maybe twenty minutes, I stood with my back to the cage—rookie mistake—and asked him many, many questions about how to become a magazine writer. He was very kind and patient in his answers. They were helpful and inspiring. He wore a red hat. The sky was blue. Jeff doesn’t remember our conversation—I checked—but I remember it very well.

Whenever a young writer asks me about my work and how I do it, I think about how generous Jeff was with me that afternoon at the Vet.

And now here he is again, all these years later, still answering my questions.

My thanks, then and now, to Jeff Pearlman.

THE PRESS BOX RULES

2011-02-21T10:04:00.000-05:00

For Ron Drogo.

Received this tweet from Chris LaMacchia, prince of Maine, king of New England:*

This is going to be my 1^st year in a press box. Any advice?

Let me see… Oh, yes, here it is.

THE YOUNG REPORTER’S GUIDE TO PRESS BOX DECORUM AND ETIQUETTE

1. No cheering.

THE BEST PARTS OF LONELY

2011-02-18T19:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday morning, Deadspin’s Drew Magary posted a painfully honest account of his lost, lonely college years, which included a transfer, getting stood up at a football game, and lots of tears: The idea of being left alone on the dance floor never occurred to me, he wrote, which made it all the more jarring when it happened.

Drew’s story was a pretty difficult read for me.

That’s partly because he’s pathologically honest in it, including a wince-inducing masturbatory walk-in, improbably set against the backdrop of The Price is Right.

But it’s mostly because I went through the same kind of period in my life.

LARA LOGAN'S MATH

2011-02-15T21:40:00.001-05:00

It was revealed today that Lara Logan, a CBS correspondent for 60 Minutes, was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last Friday. She’s in hospital recovering.

She was doing her job—reporting, on the ground, witnessing history first-hand—when she suffered through a terrifying twenty or thirty minutes. She will carry that segment of an hour for the rest of her life.

It’s not enough to say that you want to be a journalist anymore. The field has become too broad: It’s like saying that you want to drive cars for a living, and there’s a big difference between driving an airport limo and a Ferrari in Monaco.

At some point, you have to make a choice: Do you want journalism to be your job, or do you want it to be your life?

A NAME BY ANY OTHER NAME

2011-02-14T21:26:00.000-05:00

I received a funny email yesterday from a young woman named Laura Myers. She pointed out that she wasn’t the Laura Myers who writes for the Review-Journal in Las Vegas, or the Laura Myers who writes for the Associated Press, or the Laura Myers who’s in J-school down at Mizzou. This particular Laura Myers is the Laura Myers who’s the assistant managing editor of The Observer at Notre Dame.

You, also, have a very common name, Laura wrote. I graduated with Chris Jones. The first story in 2009's Best American Sports Writing includes a doctor named Chris Jones. Chris Jones is the merchandise manager for the band Parachute.

What are your feelings about being a (semi-)public figure with such a normal name? Did you ever consider changing your name to something more distinctive? Has it ever even crossed your mind?

BEST WRITERS UNDER 40, THE BOOK

2011-02-13T21:03:00.001-05:00

My Esquire colleague Mike Sager and Walt Harrington—author of the seminal reporting textbook Intimate Journalism—are on a search. They’ve begun work on an anthology collecting “the finest literary journalism being done by the next generation.”

At the moment, the book is in its earliest stages. Mike and Walt are looking for nominations. (Actually, suggestions is probably a better word.) Specific writers and specific stories, please and thank you. The writers should be under forty or thereabouts, but their work can be from virtually any medium, so long as their work is true: newspapers, magazines, Web sites, literary journals, the backs of napkins, that underpass in Jersey. It just has to be non-fiction, and it just has to be good.

The book's tentative title is Young Wave: America’s Next Generation of Fine Literary Journalists.

FIVE FOR WRITING: WRIGHT THOMPSON!

2011-02-09T20:45:00.001-05:00

Wright Thompson is a friend of mine. We met at the Masters five or six years ago. There was a dinner for golf writers, and I’d never been to anything like that before. I wore shorts and a loud shirt. I got out of my car in the parking lot and saw all these guys in suits. Oh, shit, I thought. I walked in, and there was one other dude in shorts and a loud shirt. I started walking up to him and he started smiling, and I said something like, “You and me, we’re hanging out tonight.” That dude was Wright. And so we did.

Wright lives in Mississippi. He made his bones at newspapers, including the Kansas City Star, and now writes features for ESPN.com. Whenever they land, they are centerpieces. He appears annually in Best American Sports Writing. He writes long and often personally, and he lays his heart out there, which is a rare thing these cynical days. For a lot of us, it can feel like too much of a risk.

But I love Wright because he takes risks. He takes chances. He’s wide open. The other day, I sent him these five questions about writing. (He’d emailed to say how much he thought of Gene Weingarten’s responses, and I saw my opening.) Hours later, Wright sent back 2,500 honest, beautiful, purposeful words. One more time, he’d served up that big bleeding southern cheeseburger heart of his, and I want to thank him for that, sincerely. I’m lucky to call him a friend, and I’m lucky to be able to read him and feel like he’s kicked my ass again. Love and the occasional beating: I’ll always be glad we were both wearing shorts and loud shirts that night in Augusta.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Wright Thompson:

FIVE FOR WRITING: GENE WEINGARTEN!

2011-02-07T13:24:00.001-05:00

Gene Weingarten is a columnist and humor writer for The Washington Post. He recently pulled the remarkable trick of winning two Pulitzer Prizes for Feature Writing—the only person to win twice in that category—in a three-year stretch. His first winning story, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” explored what would happen if a virtuoso violinist named Joshua Bell masqueraded as a street musician in the D.C. subway. (Virtually everybody except children ignored him.) The second, “Fatal Distraction,” was a heart-wrenching account of parents who accidentally killed their kids by leaving them in hot cars. He has written four books; his latest… well, you’ll see.

I’m thrilled that Gene—this award-winning journalist and kind soul who also sports a terrific mustache—agreed to be the first subject of Son of Bold Venture’s new feature, Five for Writing.

Thank you, Gene, very much. Enjoy, everybody.

FIVE FOR WRITING: AN INTRODUCTION

2011-02-07T12:50:00.000-05:00

A new feature will debut here at Son of Bold Venture later today: Five for Writing.

In it, I’ll email five questions to a great writer about his or her work and how they do it. I hope to include writers of all stripes: novelists, journalists, fabulists, and essayists, moralists and monsters. Some of them will be friends of mine; some of them will be strangers to all of us. I think that doing the interview by email will allow each writer to do what he or she does best. Keeping it to five questions, I hope, will keep things fresh and lively.

Also, having five questions means I can call it Five for Writing, betraying my semi-secret affection for hockey, and its major penalties for fisticuffs especially.

THE KID IN THE TANK IN CAIRO

2011-02-03T20:44:00.001-05:00

Tyson Alger, one of my former students at Montana, sent me a link today to a blog by a young photographer named Andrew Burton.

In it, Burton recounts his near-calamitous day photographing the uprising in Egypt, only his second day on the ground there. He ended up being pulled into an army tank after things went sideways and some angry men in the crowd turned on the kid with the camera.

Burton’s 23 years old. He might have just turned 24. He lived with Tyson when they interned at The Oregonian last summer. He’s just getting started.

Four days ago, he announced to his friends that he was going to Egypt. He bought a ticket and left the next morning.

A STUPID SLAP FIGHT BETWEEN TWO GUYS WHO NEED ATTENTION

2011-02-01T21:32:00.000-05:00

Unwittingly, I’m still in the middle of my first full-blown media feud, which is a little like being in the middle of a Mexican wrestling match, if the wrestlers were separated by a buffet table and a trail of broken dreams, and they angrily typed at each other.

A week ago I wrote a blog about how to be a professional writer. In it, I took some shots at Jason Whitlock. They weren’t very nice. But I stand by the words I wrote, because I believed in them then, and I believe in them now.

Whitlock, for me, is a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with journalism. He’s a phony and a hack and a non-believer. I wrote that blog hoping that some eager young journalist out there might read it and decide he wanted to grow up and be S.L. Price or Thomas Lake or Wright Thompson instead.

THE GREAT GIG IN THE (BIG) SKY

2011-01-31T22:09:00.000-05:00

The University of Montana’s School of Journalism is accepting applications for one of the great gigs in journalism.

Every fall semester, the fine folks in Missoula invite a working journalist to become their next T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor.

I was lucky enough to be the Pollner professor in 2009. It really was one of the best times of my life.

It’s not a minor undertaking. Anthony Pollner was a graduate of the school in 1999; he was killed in an accident two years later. His family put together an endowment in his memory. It’s a beautiful thing they’ve done.

MATH IS HARD

2011-01-31T09:01:00.000-05:00

The new blog has been going for a week, and the results are in. I’ve received nearly 25,000 hits, which is far more than I ever thought possible. I’m gratified by the response. But I’ll tell you what: If someone were paying me by the hit, I’d just sit here and take shots at Jason Whitlock. It would be an easy living.

But the mistake I made with My Second Empire, I think, was that I paid too much attention to the numbers; it was my first brush with the Internet’s penchant for cold-eyed quantification. I started up that blog to document my fumbling efforts at self-improvement through home improvement, but hardly anyone gave a shit about that. The math was pretty plain. Entries about the house routinely received far fewer hits than entries about Micky Ward or the Metrodome’s failing roof. People were more interested in my weird kids, even, than in my struggles with bat husbandry.

And so I began crossing myself up, trying to write entries that I thought would earn an audience. I became overly focused on the market rather than the product.

OBJECTS OF INFLUENCE (PART I)

2011-01-30T10:51:00.000-05:00

I received a package in the mail on Friday that brought me a level of happiness disproportionate to its weight.

It was from a man named Jon Bartlett; we have never met, but we both know a guy named Drew. Jon runs a record label in Ottawa, Ontario, called Kelp Records. In my imagination, Jon is not a millionaire. He does, however, possess many things, including an encyclopedic knowledge of music, with a particular specialization in Upper Canadian quartets. Over the years, I imagine, he has added to the smoke in a lot of smoky bars. I imagine he drinks Labatt 50 in quart bottles. I imagine his car still has a cassette deck.

In the package Jon sent me, he included the following objects: two compilation compact discs; three button-shaped magnets; seven Kelp Records stickers, the sort of thing I once attached to everything I owned; and five honest-to-goodness LPs, including a 180-gram made-in-Canada slab of shining black vinyl, upon which Jim Bryson and The Weakerthans have impressed ten terrific songs on two sides, collectively known as The Falcon Lake Incident.

#MUSICTOWRITETO (YOUTUBE PLAYLIST!)

2011-01-27T23:28:00.001-05:00

One of the massive collection of Scotts here—specifically Scott Warden, Man of Miracles and Son of Bold Venture's Scott of the Week—was kind enough to make a YouTube playlist of virtually the entire #MusicToWriteTo list. Eight hours of epic tunes, hand-selected to bring out your writing best. If you fire this puppy up and start writing and don't stop until the music ends... You'll have War and Peace. And probably cramps. But War and Peace! Awesome.

Now everybody go give Scott a big hug. He's earned it.

THE WORDS THAT AREN'T THERE

2011-01-26T20:03:00.001-05:00

It’s probably the hardest lesson in writing: learning when you’ve already written enough.

We’re taught to believe that words have a value, a power, a weight. Logically, then, the more words, the better the sentence or paragraph or story. But writing isn’t always a logical exercise. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s about things that are harder to measure.

My editor, Peter—he will hate that I’m about to praise him in public—is one of the best in the business. He’s particularly good at carving the little excesses from a story that might either push it into sentimentality or turn the screw a little too hard. Because I’m often writing about emotional subjects, I’m especially dependent on Peter’s eye and knife. He just seems to know when even the smallest trim will serve the story. Peter understands restraint. He knows the value and power and weight of the words that aren’t there.

LESTER'S DILEMMA

2011-01-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

There was a comment under yesterday’s post from a young writer named Lester. It kind of broke my heart.

It sounds like Lester’s in a tough spot, like too many writers these days, stuck in what he thought would be a way station and unsure of his next move.

So for today, yeah, doing good work is enough of a reward, he wrote. I can't really say for how many more tomorrows I'll feel that way.

There’s trouble in the writing business. It’s in a state of wild and painful transition. I don’t think it’s as bad as the worst expectations—I have to believe there will always be a place for words in our universe—but I know there are thousands of Lesters out there: good writers who do good work and have been rewarded for it with low salaries, no benefits, and zero job security.

HOW TO BE A PROFESSIONAL WRITER

2011-01-24T14:57:00.004-05:00

I get a lot of emails from young writers asking for career advice. I don’t mind it. As I’ve told people before, I once cornered Richard Hoffer, the excellent boxing writer for Sports Illustrated, in a New York bar until his face registered a bemused kind of alarm. A big part of figuring things out is relying on the wisdom of others, and I think that applies especially to young writers. Growing up is hard to do; growing up in print is even harder.

Jeff Pearlman sparked an interesting debate over the last few days by doing what, admittedly, most writers have at least thought about doing: He found a couple of kids who blasted him on Twitter and called them up. Of course, they issued stammering apologies, because nobody would dream of talking to a person the way they attack each other online. Otherwise, there would be a lot more people walking around with eye patches.

Now, one of the kids in Jeff’s story, a would-be writer named Andrew Tworischuk, has responded with a blog entry of his own—not taking back his apology, exactly, but trying to justify his initial shitty behavior.

#MUSICTOWRITETO

2011-01-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

Last year, I wrote a short blog at My Second Empire about a few songs I’ve listened to while writing. I then opened the Twitter floor to suggestions. They came rolling in. Every writer has a different process, of course, but it seems as though plenty of us listen to music while we write—for inspiration, to help us set the mood for a piece, to block out the outside world. For whatever reason, for a lot of us, music helps open the door. It’s our big brass key.

At last, I’ve put together a (nearly) complete list of those songs. When I’m feeling particularly bored some day, I might manage to piece together a YouTube playlist of the whole thing, but for now, you’ll have to do a little legwork.

I think that’s okay, by the way—that the list is not plug-in ready. I was watching a cool documentary about the White Stripes a little while ago, and Jack White said that he leaves his spare guitar picks in an out-of-the-way place, toward the back of the stage. He thinks a little work, a little thought and purpose, makes him consider what he’s doing a little more; it’s as though he’s manufactured a sense of care in himself by tying inspiration and industry together.

EBERT PRESENTS

2011-01-21T11:13:00.000-05:00

Roger Ebert’s new show is premiering tonight on PBS stations across America. (Except, strangely, in San Diego. They’re still watching Bob Ross.)

Nearly a year ago now, a story I wrote about Roger came out in Esquire.

IT'S FUNNY ABOUT JOE POSNANSKI

2011-01-21T09:33:00.002-05:00

I’ve never met Joe Posnanski; we’ve exchanged emails and tweets, forming a kind of mutual admiration society by proxy, but we’ve never yet shaken hands. But like a lot of his readers, I imagine, I feel as though I know Joe Posnanski. I would feel that way if I’d clicked through just a few of his amazing blog posts. I would feel that way if I’d found him for the first time this week, through his back page story about John Green in Sports Illustrated.

“It’s funny about scouts,” Joe writes. I couldn’t tell you why that’s my favorite line out of many very good lines, but for me, that’s Joe Posnanski in four words. Like most of his stuff, it’s clean and conversational; it resonates but is totally free from sentiment. It’s about baseball, but as is usually the case with Joe, it’s also about so much more.

MR. KEELEY'S MONSTER

2011-01-20T20:28:00.001-05:00

I was maybe fourteen years old when Mr. Keeley stopped me in the hallway at Millbrook High School. It was a very small school in a very small town; the teachers each taught several subjects. Mr. Keeley taught geography—urban and physical—as well as gym and health. I’d just written something for him for health class.

“You should think about becoming a writer,” he said.

Because I was fourteen years old, and because I was standing in the hallway with my friends—a confluence of circumstance that automatically turns a kid into an asshole—I brushed off Mr. Keeley. “Who the hell would want to be a writer?” I said.