Daniel Paisner's Blog

https://vol1brooklyn.com/2022/05/22/s...

new story, just published in the online literary journal Hobart...

http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_feature...

So here I am, nearly four months in. My third "first novel," a baseball-ish piece called A Single Happened Thing, was published in early April by the craft-indie press, Relegation Books - so-named, natch, because... oh, you can probably figure it out. My first first novel, Obit, had been published in the 90s by Dutton. My second, Mourning Wood, by Bonus Books in the early Aughts.

Four months in to what, exactly? My Year of Living Shamelessly... and yet the thing of it is, I keep telling myself there is nothing to be ashamed of. (There. I've said it again.) It's my own little pep-talk, and there is a truth to it, of a kind. You see, it appears I have written a novel. My third, as I have mentioned. Why the "first novel" tag? Because it has been my experience that readers, reviewers, booksellers, librarians, assignment editors and just plain folks who happen to be seated to my left at a dinner party (insofar as anyone ever really sits to my left at dinner parties) are more inclined to embrace the work of a struggling first-time novelist over the latest efforts of mid-list writers who can't seem to find a wide audience. So until I do (or until, by some strange alchemy, that wide audience somehow finds me), I will only write first novels - because, alas, they are the best novels, brimming with the best words, and shot through with the kinds of enthusiasm and benefits-of-the-doubt I much prefer over the grudging disinterest that tends to attach to widely under-read writers over time.

It also appears that my experience, in this case, is relevant. I know such things because I am a somewhat successful working stiff writer - a ghostwriter, mainly. Even as I struggle to make my bones as a novelist, I make my principal living helping to write the autobiographies, memoirs and musings of variously celebrated actors, athletes, politicians and business leaders. In the six-month run-up from when A Single Happened Thing was accepted by Relegation Books to when it appeared in stores, I published three (count' em, three!) New York Times best-sellers: I Feel Like Going On, with retired NFL great Ray Lewis (Touchstone Books); The Power of Broke, with fashion mogul and "Shark Tank" panelist Daymond John (Crown Business); and Game 7, 1986, with SNY baseball analyst and former New York Mets pitcher Ron Darling (St. Martin's Press). A fourth collaboration - The Way Around: Finding My Mother and Myself Among the Yanomami, with David Good (Dey Street Books) - made hardly a ripple, but may or may not be made into a mini-series, or a movie, or something. I mention these things not to blow smoke my way, as might appear, but to place my condition in context.

And here it is: I write books for a living. Lots and lots of them. I have good working relationships with big-time editors and big-time publishing houses. Lots and lots of them. And yet when it comes to my own work, I am on the outside looking in. Still.

Hence, my shamelessness. It comes with this uncertain territory. There are no ad budgets for third-time first novelists, no Times Square billboards, no slick book trailer to off-set the world's ho-humedness over my new book's release. And so these days I move about with my hand out, desperate for a blurb or a re-tweet or a tolerant nod in my direction, hoping against hope that someone, somewhere will crack the spine of my novel and find something to admire - to celebrate, even.

To be fair, my experience with the good people at Relegation Books has been altogether wonderful. Dallas Hudgens, the publisher, himself a "relegated" writer of baseball fiction (his "Season of Gene," published by Scribner, is a wild romp of a baseball novel that deserves to be read "bigly") has been a tireless supporter of A Single Happened Thing since he got his hands on it. He believes in the written word, in the small, out-of-the-way novels that have lately been ignored by our major publishers. Too, he's assembled a whip-smart team of publishing professionals who share in this belief, who have also lent their skills and their passion to this project - also, tirelessly.

A Single Happened Thing re-imagines the life (and, death) of one of the forgotten greats of our national pastime, a man named Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap who for a short while in the 1880s was considered the greatest baseball player of his generation. What intrigued me most about Dunlap was that he managed to die in relative obscurity, despite a few glorious seasons in the sun. During one of these seasons, toiling for the 1884 St. Louis Maroons of the Union Association, he ran circles around the league, establishing standards of excellence that have not been approached since, leaving me to wonder what it means to matter, in the end.

In the novel, Sure Shot appears to haunt our late 20th century protagonist, David Felb, a going nowhere book publicist whose days are sufficiently insignificant and leave him wondering these things as well. And in the back-and-forth that passes between Felb and the specter of Dunlap, there is the stuff of baseball fiction: history, moment, legacy, the enduring bonds of family... good things all.

At least, that's the idea - a coming-of-middle-age novel about leaving some kind of footprint in this world. (Like a third first novel, I guess.)

I am plugged-in enough to find a way to get the book into meaningful hands. I sent a copy, through a friend, to Robert Redford, thinking there might be something in these pages to spark his interest. (You know, because of his work in "The Natural," his professed love of the game, our shared good looks.) I sent another to the actor-turned-novelist David Duchovny, through another friend, thinking that since Duchovny is just out with his own baseball novel he'll want to know he's keeping shelf space with another moonlighting baseball novelist. (Again with the shared good looks.) I reached out to my celebrity collaboration pals, thinking they'll want to tell their millions of fans on social media that the middle-aged hack ghostwriter who helped them with their autobiography/memoir/musing has written a new book they should probably think about reading. (As if...)

And now here I am, three months in, bending that old philosophical saw about a tree falling in the forest to suit my frustration: if the same tree that falls without making a sound is turned into pulp, and the pulp into paper, and the paper into the pages of a hardly-read novel, does that novel exist?

I have no answer. I have only to keep flogging.
In the first quarter of My Year of Living Shamelessly I gave a talk and a reading at my local library, which seemed to go pretty well until I took questions from the audience, at which point a disheveled looking gentleman in the back row (one of the few people I didn't recognize, this being my local library and all) raised his hand and said, "Ty Cobb. You ever hear of him?" I fielded that half-question, best I could, and moved on to another show of hands, only to return to the disheveled gentleman again: "Satchel Paige. You ever hear of him?" Then, a short while later: "Rogers Hornsby, you ever hear of him?"

At another library talk, a member of the audience raised his hand to tell me excitedly about a book he'd just finished reading. "It was so good," he said, "I binge-read the entire thing."

At a group book signing at my local independent bookstore, I was seated next to another author, and when the crowd of book buyers invariably thinned (as crowds of book buyers are invariably wont to do at these sorts of things), we fell in to talking. I asked the young woman about her book. "Oh," she said, "it's a novel-a," accenting the word in an unfamiliar way and leaving me momentarily confused. "Ah," I finally said, "a novella?" Sort of asking, making clear. But now I guessed it was the young woman's turn to be confused, because she looked at me like I'd sprouted horns. And then she looked away.

At another group signing, at another independent bookstore, a self-published writer confided in me that he'd paid for the review he'd printed up and was now displaying on his author's table. "Thank God it was a good review," he said.

Yes, I could only think. Thank God.

Perhaps the highlight of these first months has been the inclusion of A Single Happened Thing in a round-up of new fiction on the excellent Writer's Bone website, beneath the heading "6 Books That Should Be On Your Radar." Joining me on the list: Dodgers, by Bill Beverly; Everybody's Fool, by Richard Russo; We're All Damaged, by Matthew Norman; Bucky F*cking Dent, by my not-yet pal David Duchovny; and, The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which had just been awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I was delighted to be in such good company, in the estimation of the excellent Writer's Bone editors/curators, whose excellence of course has nothing to do with their determination that my third first novel does not, indeed, suck.

I was so delighted, in fact, that I did what all struggling novelists are now required to do to lubricate the grudging disinterest in their work: I tweeted about it.
Here's what I wrote: "so a couple #Pulitzer winners, @People's #SexiestMan and a balding/paunching hack walk into a bar and order beers..."

I made sure to drop in a couple hashtags and handles to draw just the right amount of attention, and to attach a link to the Writer's Bone mention. Then I sat back and waited. And waited.

I can't say for sure, but I believe the world took note. I got three "likes" and a re-tweet. That's good, right?

Authors and Authorship Part 5: Daniel Paisner is one of the writing industry's most prominent ghostwriters, having written more than 50 books for some of the biggest names in Hollywood, sports, and politics. He sheds light into the ghostwriting process, talks about his books, and what he's learned over three decades of writing.

Q: The ghost-writing process is one that the average reader knows little about. How does it work? How much of the writing is your own and how much is done by your subject?

Every project is different. Sometimes, I work with an individual who never really sets pen to paper. The material flows from them, the thoughts and emotions are all theirs, but they don’t do any actual writing. Other times, I work with an individual who might have some chops as a writer, but it just works out that he or she doesn’t have time to do the heavy lifting over a couple hundred pages. Most times, it falls somewhere in-between. How it usually works: I’ll conduct a series of interviews, spend some time with my subjects, get inside their heads, and offer up a draft for them to consider. Then, we’ll bend, shape, rework until we have something they can truly call their own. Very often, we’ll gather friends and family and colleagues to share stories and help to lubricate the memory, because it’s difficult to grab at the stuff of a long life and expect to come back with a handful. I find that when you sit people down in a group, the stories tend to flow more freely. One memory leads to another.

Q: What traits have made you such a successful ghost-writer? What makes so many successful people turn to you to tell their story?

It sounds like a cliché, but it all starts with listening. If you’re a good listener, you’ll hear some amazing things. This is true in life, as it is in ghost-writing. You’re nothing as a collaborator if you can’t get your subject to open up to you, so I always tell the folks who are considering working with me that fit is all. You can find a dozen perfectly competent writers to help you tell your story, but if you don’t feel comfortable with that person, if you can’t let down your hair and be yourself with that person, your book will reflect that. In my case, the listening also comes in handy because it helps to me to develop a rhythm and tone for the piece. You need to have an ear for how people speak – meaning, in this case, how they might write as well. My goal, always, is to make the “voice” of the book consistent with the voice of my subject. It should be of a piece with who they are, and how they carry themselves.

Q: You've helped some of the biggest names in sports, politics, and Hollywood write their books. What projects have been most enjoyable and entertaining for you to work on?

I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a good relationship with almost everyone I’ve worked with as a collaborator. There’s a very cool dynamic that takes shape around one of these projects. You’re not working as a journalist, where there might be the framework for an adversarial relationship. I’m not working on the outside, looking in. I’m there to present a life story, or a slice-of-life story, in a way that serves the subject. Very often, I’m staying at their house, getting to know their families, shadowing them as they move about their days. During the run of a project, I might be one of my subject’s closest confidants, but once a book is finished we invariably go our separate ways. That said, I keep connected to most of the folks I’ve worked with, at least in a social media sort of way. Some have become close friends. If I had to generalize, though, I’d say I’ve formed the deepest connections with some of the non-celebrity subjects who’ve crossed my path – ordinary people who’ve done or seen or experienced something extraordinary. One good example of this is my pal Izzy Paskowitz, a former world champion longboard surfer. Izzy’s family was like surfing royalty in Southern California – all over the world, really. But he was just a surfer dude at heart, able to flit about the planet in relative anonymity, and I was drawn to his story, to his family, to the happy band of big-hearted surfer dudes in his community. These days, Izzy devotes himself to running a wonderful charity called Surfers Healing, where he gathers the best surfers in the world to tandem surf with autistic children. He calls it “extreme special ed,” and it’s the most remarkable thing, to see these kids out in the water and how they’re transformed by the ocean and this totally rad activity, so completely outside their experience. Our book is long done, but Surfers Healing was a big part of Izzy’s story, and I responded to it in a big way, and now I keep traveling with Izzy and his crew to these events and helping out in what ways I can. There’s a connection that runs deeper than the book that brought us together.

Q: You've written or co-written more than 50 books. What have you learned about writing and publishing along the way? What do you know now that you wish you'd have known when you were writing your very first book?

Ah, a question for the ages. What I wish I knew early on was that I’d be at this for a while. My very first collaboration was with NBC News personality Willard Scott, back when he was the morning weather person on the “Today” show. I thought it would be a one-off, and that I would be back to writing my own stuff soon enough, but that first ghost gig led to another, and then another. Here I am, thirty years later, and I’m still at it, and when I look over my shoulder at the body of work I’ve produced I realize there are very few of my own books on my shelf. The idea was to do one of “theirs” alongside one of my own, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way, and I wish I’d known that going in. When you start out, you tend to think you have all the time in the world, and that you’ll get around to realizing your hopes and dreams soon enough, but when you get older and you’ve been at it a while you begin to see that all the time in the world has a way of running out on you. Don’t misunderstand, I love the work I’ve carved out for myself as a ghostwriter, but I don’t love that it’s taken me away from the work I’d set out to do in the first place – writing books of my own, fiction and non-fiction, in a meaningful way. Now that I’m in a position to pick-and-choose among a variety of ghost-writing gigs, and to leave myself time to work on my own material, I worry that I might be a little late to the party. The publishing industry has changed over the past thirty years. People are reading/buying more books than ever before, but that number is spread over fewer and fewer titles. The kinds of small, midlist books I seem inclined to write are the kinds of books our big box publishers seem less inclined to publish. Turns out the shelf-life for a relatively young, relatively unknown novelist runs out after a while, and right now I’m trying to come to terms with that. I’ve just published my third novel, “A Single Happened Thing,” with a terrific indie press in Virginia called Relegation Books, but as we send the book out into the world I’m realizing how much easier it would be to get some review attention and literary cred if I was a young up-and-comer instead of a grizzled old bald guy with all these books to my credit. First novelists are given a kind of hall pass, with publishers and reviewers alike. “Third novelists” like myself don’t always get the same benefit of the doubt.

Q: You recently held a book launch event for A Single Happened Thing. How'd it go? What recommendations would you have for authors looking to launch their own book?

Look, writing is hard. Writing a book that makes you smile is hard. But finding a publisher to throw in with you and to help you find an audience for that book is harder still. The book launch was great – we held it at this terrific baseball-themed shop in Greenwich Village. There was beer from a Cooperstown brewery, and baseball-themed stuff all around. (It’s a baseball-ish novel, by the way.) The room was filled with friends and family and folks I didn’t know who seemed to care about baseball and literary fiction. But I went home that night realizing that grabbing at attention for a small, indie book is an incremental thing. If you can get ten or twenty readers out of an event or a book-signing, that’s a great good thing, so my advice for first-time novelists, or widely under-read novelists like myself, is to be realistic. And, patient. Trust that a good, selling review will come your way before too, too long, and along with it there’ll likely be another. And in the meantime, go ahead and serve yourself up to every blog, podcast, ‘zine that takes an interest in your work, and hope that each can blow just enough smoke your way to turn those ten or twenty new readers into ten or twenty more. After that, who knows?

I was recently asked by my ghostwriter pal Roz Morris to contribute to her terrific blog, collecting thoughts from writers on their musical inspirations... you can follow along here: https://mymemoriesofafuturelife.com/

meanwhile, here's what I wrote...

Confession: I listen to the Spa channel on Sirius when I'm writing. Like, a lot. In my defense, I don't actually "own" any of this music, and I'm not really "listening" to it. It's just on, like white noise, a little something to fill the space between exasperated sighs. I've tried listening to jazz, or symphonic music, or even piano sonatas, but when there's a mood to a piece it messes me up. I hate it when some long-dead composer's sense of bombast or melancholy seeps into my work, so this New Age pap is just the thing. (Plus, sometimes there are zithers!)

Mostly it's the lyrics that get in the way. I need music to fill the room, but there's no room in my head for the words -- not when I'm working on a piece of my own. That's not always the case. You see, I make most of my living writing other people's stories. I'm a ghostwriter, by principle trade. I work with actors, athletes, politicians and assorted colorful or celebrated characters and help them craft their autobiographies or their 15-minutes-of-fame tomes, and when I'm collaborating on one of these assignments I can listen to pretty much anything. Classic rock, mostly. Loud. Since I've got the satellite radio set up in my office, that lately means Little Steven's Underground Garage channel. Are you hip to this channel? Here, I've got it on now as I write this: Chocolate Watchband's "Let's Talk About The Girls" into Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie" into Social Distortion's "Ball and Chain." Lots of surprises here, always, and some of the jocks dig deep into liner notes and back-story, so there's good context too, and when I'm rendering a life story that's already been lived by someone else I can absorb these distractions.

But it's when I'm not writing somebody else's memoirs that the music starts to matter, and it's when I'm not sitting at my desk that I'm doing most of my own work. For example, I've got a book coming out next month called "A Single Happened Thing," from a terrific indie press called Relegation Books ("craft publishing at its finest"), and that sucker was gestating for a long, long while before I actually rolled up my sleeves and started writing. During that long, long while I listened to a lot of singer-songwriter types -- alt rockers and folk rockers, troubadours and hillbillies. James McMurtry. Jason Isbell. John Hiatt. Bonnie Raitt. Christopher Paul Stelling. Courtney Barrett. Storytellers, all. Writers, all. Foot-stompers, most of 'em. I was drawn to artists with a singular vision, a way of looking at the world that hadn't been slick-polished by mainstream success. There was no formula here, only a clear sense of voice and place. A sensibility.

A lot of times I'll hear a snatch of lyric or a turn of phrase that stays with me and informs the piece I'm working on. That's what happened with this new novel. It's based on the life (and death) of an old-time baseball player named Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap, one of the forgotten greats of the game. He played in the 1880s, most notably for the 1884 St. Louis Maroons of the Union Association, where he had one of the greatest seasons ever, ever, ever. For a stretch, he was one of the best-known ballplayers in all the land, at a time when our national pastime was taking root. And yet he died at the relatively young age of 43, penniless, friendless, all but forgotten. His body lay unidentified for days -- far too long for a man who was once baseball's highest-paid player -- and strangers had to be pulled from the street to serve as pallbearers.

Sad, huh?

I started thinking about Dunlap's curious legacy, and looking for ways to attach his story to a contemporary tale of a middle-aged protagonist coming to terms with the fallings short in his own life. Alongside this thinking, I was playing a shit-ton of James McMurtry. (Yep, his dad is Larry McMurtry, so he's got some serious pedigree to go with his serious chops.) His first album, "Too Long in the Wasteland," was on all the time in my study -- and, after that, his follow-up, "Where'd You Hide the Body."

There's one song of McMurty's, "I'm Not From Here," that haunted me, stayed with me, and as he sang that title refrain and told his story of a vagabonding soul my own story began to take shape.

I'm not from here, I just live here...

It was just a phrase, a snatch of lyric, but it spoke to me of the rootlessness that must have been at play at the end of Dunlap's life -- the life of an itinerant ballplayer, with no apparent tether to family or community. At least, that's how I imagined it. The song, I think, is about something else entirely, but the line itself was all Dunlap, and out of that one line a story emerged. Really. Those album titles had a hand in things, too. Left me wondering what would happen if together with that rootlessness there was also a restlessness in Dunlap that left his spirit to wander in the cosmos, like an unreceived radio transmission, only to alight in the path of another lost soul.

I'm not from here, I just live here...

And so I was left at the intersection of two lives without footprints -- one real, one imagined -- separated by a century, and joined somehow by this one line from this one song. Anyway, that was the germ of it, the nut of it. And now, if you don't mind, I'm back to the Spa channel. There's another story to tell.