Some of you may know that I love the game of baseball. It has a sentimental value for me because it was the game my father taught me, a game he and I spent many hours playing together. Some of my earliest memories are of me at four and five years of age, waiting for dad to come home from work, so we could play ball across the street from our home on an empty lot. He would hit ground balls to me, and fly balls, and he would patiently teach me how to properly field them all.
As I got older he worked with me on pitching, how to properly release the ball, how to throw a curveball, and a knuckleball, and eventually I became good enough to pitch on my high school team, and then for the college team until my shoulder was injured my junior year and I had to stop playing.
I remember one game in particular, back when I was about thirteen. I could throw pretty hard for a thirteen year old, and most teams I could handle simply by throwing the ball past the opposing batters. They simply could not catch up with my fastball.
Until one day in July we played the second place team, a team with a lot of talented batters, and it took them about two innings to zero in on my fastball, to get their timing fixed on it, and suddenly every pitch I threw was being hammered for a hit. One run, two runs, three runs . . . finally I got out of that inning after giving up four runs, and I was one frustrated baseball player when I got to the dugout to sit down and rest. It seemed the harder I threw, the harder the other team hit the ball . . . really just a matter of physics, but I was in no mood to discuss physics when that inning ended.
I was getting a drink of water when my dad met me at the water cooler. He asked me, with that grin on his face I remember so well, how my day was progressing. I was almost in tears when I told him that no matter how hard I threw, the other team was just killing my fastball, and I didn’t know what to do. Dad said just two words to me and then walked back to the stands and sat down next to my mother. He said “throw smarter!” I knew exactly what he meant. If they were hitting my fastball then I needed to throw smarter and start throwing my curveball and knuckleball.
We won that game 5-4 and I didn’t give up a hit the last five innings, and a valuable lesson had been learned.
It is that lesson I pass on to you today. Work smarter! Make a priority list. Realize that you may not be able to do everything you want to do as a writer. Hell, you may have to drop some of your goals, and concentrate on the big goals, or you may have to seek help to fix a problem you can’t seem to fix . . . work smarter!
I hope you all have a fantastic week of writing . . . and living! Remember how gifted you are. Remember that probably one percent of the population can do what you do as well as you do it…one percent!
You are extraordinary!
Bill
“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”
Billybuc
Artistry With Words 