“If you go, it’ll happen.”
Somehow, it’s been almost 25 years since my undergraduate mentor, a beloved journalism professor, urged our nonfiction writing class out into the world to ask questions: If you go looking for a story, a story will happen.
We sat transfixed by our teacher, a former Catholic seminarian, and his sermons on writing: three decades of reporting on (and rubbing elbows with) famous figures had garnered him a National Book Award Finalist’s medal and countless other journalism awards.
I don’t remember whether the adage was a line he’d picked up from some grizzled city editor or it was his own formulation, but “If you go, it’ll happen” was hard-earned wisdom he’d gleaned looking for interesting stories on the American byways of the ’70s and ’80s. The phrase’s durability stems from its Zen-like acceptance of chance, of discovery. Stated: If you go, it’ll happen. Unstated: “It” might not be what you thought you were looking for.
I think of “If you go, it’ll happen” every time I sit down to write. Inevitably, somewhere along the way, writing leads me to a new question, difficulty, or idea, something that wouldn’t have “happened” to me if I hadn’t “gone” to the blank page.
Not quite as many years ago — let’s say 18 — I was a newspaper reporter in a small city in New Hampshire. I was on the sports desk and I’d drawn the short straw. It was the city’s annual Pumpkin Festival, and I had to find some sort of human-interest content for a column on the sports page. I figured I’d find someone who’d won one of the carving categories (“fanciest” “most-inventive”) and hope that they were interesting, or otherwise wander around asking attendees some variation on the question “How ’bout these pumpkins?”
As I patrolled the pumpkin-seed spattered sidewalks, I happened upon a pie-eating contest (pumpkin, of course), just about to commence. A competition! For the sports page! Perfect!
I volunteered. Yes, I know: journalists aren’t supposed to become part of the story they’re covering. But having won both pie- and salad-eating contests during my collegiate “studies,” I felt, if nothing else, I could cast myself in a sort of George Plimpton amateur-participant/writer role. And I really didn’t want to have to interview someone about their pumpkin-carving technique.
After the first round, most of the whipped cream was on my face, but my plates were clean, and I’d advanced to the run-off. I faced off against a college student who’d won the competition two years before.
Reader, I beat him.
What did I win? A $25 dollar gift certificate to Dick’s Sporting Goods, which I declined (I was, after all, a journalist), and a nifty little lighthearted column for the Sunday edition that my editors loved.
Writing advice is easy to collect but hard to really understand until you’ve had a similar experience. These days, I’m not filing many sports columns or meeting daily deadlines, but I think of “If you go, it’ll happen” almost every time I sit down to write. The “going,” in this case, is showing up to the page. And “it” — the result — isn’t ever exactly what I’d planned. I’ll sit down with an idea of what I want — a point or a joke I want to make, a story I want to tell. Sometimes this goal is vague, other times it’s quite clear. Inevitably, though, somewhere along the way, the writing will lead me to a new question, difficulty, or idea, something that wouldn’t have “happened” to me if I hadn’t “gone” to the blank page.
In fact, this short post, the one you’re reading right now, has arrived at a conclusion I hadn’t been aiming for. Believe it or not, I didn’t set out to write about my work at Hillside — the charge was to write about an important part of my writing practice. But here I am at the end, a little surprised to be telling you: this is exactly what we do with writers. During the Discovery process — the conversations and batting around of ideas we do together — we have no idea at the start where these paths might lead. We don’t know what the piece will be. What we do know is that, if students go (write, in detail, from their own experiences), it’ll happen: they’ll find a new perspective on that experience or will connect two experiences they’d previously considered unrelated or … who knows?
These discoveries are never as tasty as a piece of pumpkin pie, but they can be just as satisfying.
Sebastian is a Hillside coach.
