Getting to know Pat Jordan has been one of the highlights of my brief time hanging around sports writers. First, Pat was candid and funny in an interview I did with him for Bronx Banter back in 2003, then he occasionally gave me writing tips as I worked on my first book, a biography of Curt Flood. After that book came out, I approached Pat about doing a compilation of his best stories. I was shocked that one didn’t already exist. It’s the kind of project he’d never offer up on his own but he was more than delighted to be involved. So I wrote a proposal, got the book sold, and then we had a wonderful time going through well over one hundred profiles and finally selecting 26 stories to appear in the collection The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan.
The book is now out and Pat, a self-diagnosed troglodyte who still uses a typewriter and refers to himself as “the last knight of the freelance,” might be just that–the last guy who still makes a living strictly as a freelance magazine writer. Which isn’t to suggest he’s completely resistant to change, as he’s been busy doing publicity all ’round the ‘Net ever since his Jose Canseco piece appeared at Deadspin at the end of March. Derek Goold caught up with Pat for a nice blog entry he did on Rick Ankiel, and here is a profile on Jordan from the Florida Sun-Sentinel. There are also interviews with Rich Lederer, Will Carroll, Bill Littlefield for Only a Game, and Deadspin.
I like the following bit about the craft of writing from a Q&A with Playboy:
JORDAN: I grew up with radio and as a result I’d go to bed at night listening to “The Shadow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Batman and Robin,” “The Green Hornet” and with radio I had to use my imagination to figure out what they look like. What does The Shadow look like? And so it stimulated my imagination and it made me very conscious of the way things look. To this day I’m very detail oriented, but unlike Tom Wolfe, who lists 48 things that a guy is wearing to supposedly describe him, I say it is not the accumulation of detail, it is right details. If you get the right details, you allow the reader to create the scene himself. It is always about the reader, I want the reader to think he wrote the story and that I didn’t.
PLAYBOY: You mention this in the book’s forward…
JORDAN: You create the ideal story when at the end of it the reader can’t yellow out a paragraph on page three and point to where you told him what the story was about. The reader needs to think that they discovered something in the story that the author didn’t because the author didn’t spell it out. If the writer doesn’t hand it to him the reader to thinks that they are in the process of discovering more of the story than the writer intended to put in. I think of it as a collaborative deal.
PLAYBOY: So you’ve made a living by making people think that you aren’t as smart as you actually are?
JORDAN: Exactly. They don’t think that you are leading them and they don’t know you set it up bit by bit. As far as sentences go, I feel that you should never have a sentence so complex that the reader has to stop and go over it again to get the meaning. The same applies to images. If you use a metaphor you need the reader to not reread the metaphor over again and sit down and think, “What does he mean a cow is like a moon?” If the reader has to unravel a sentence or a metaphor, that’s bad. You want them to read it all through effortlessly so they would be reading the story as if they were looking over your shoulder when you were typing. Some stories come easily. The stories you think came easily you think are genius and it comes out later that they weren’t that good. And the one that was like pulling teeth, that you had to bang on your typewriter like hammering nails into wood, that you hated doing because it was so hard to get right, you find out that that was the good one. In the end you want it to appear that the story is flowing out of you and that it is effortless. These are all the things that you do that nobody knows about.
