Ask the Author: Daniel Paisner
Answered Questions (2)
Daniel Paisner
I try to ignore it... when I'm working on one of my ghostwriting projects, it's never an issue because the stories I'm telling have already been told and retold... the "block" only finds me when I'm working on a novel, and when that happens I look for a way around... one great trick is to fast-forward to another scene... if I'm stuck on a particular passage, I'll set it aside and find another particular passage that needs writing... invariably, the work on one will shake loose whatever it was that was holding me back on the other...
Daniel Paisner
the idea for my new novel found me over beers one night in Houston... I was in town working on a ghostwriting project, spending the evening with a colleague of my celebrity client... there was a ballgame on at the bar, and we fell in to talk of baseball... two or three beers in, the colleague mentioned an old-time ballplayer named Fred Dunlap, who was once one of the most celebrated players in the game... I'd never heard of the guy, who at the height of his fame in the 1880s was known to sportswriters and fans as "Sure Shot"... so I looked him up - and, indeed, this guy had somehow put together one of the greatest seasons in baseball history and still managed to die in relative obscurity... I caught myself wondering how it was that you could blaze through life on such a high note, only to leave this world on such a low one, and somewhere in the middle of these wonderings I came up with a story of contemporary protagonist, mired in mediocrity, who believes he is visited by the ghost of Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap... between the lines of this close encounter, I thought, I'd find a way to look at what it means to live a life worth remembering... or, not - but at least that was the idea, going in...
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