I think in a lot of ways, baseball is an ideal sport for me. It’s polite and gentlemanly in its way, but it’s tense and exciting, too. It’s orderly and statistical, but it’s also unpredictable. Fans are smart and passionate. The whole history of the sport is riddled with triumph and heartbreak, with cheating and honesty, with colorful characters, villains, and heroes.
Sounds kind of like a romance novel, doesn’t it?
I think that my writing a baseball romance was an inevitability. Beyond the obvious intersection of my interests here, a sports romance has one other key element: setting. I love a vivid setting in a novel, one that lives and breathes as much as the characters do. I want to know what everything looks like, smells like, feels like. I love nitty-gritty details. That was something I was conscious of as I wrote. The novel takes place in New York City primarily—my two heroes are both players for the same fictional MLB team—but it also takes place in stadiums, on fields, in locker rooms.
As a writer, I like to have a clear picture of the setting, so I draw maps and diagrams. I knew which parts of the stadium were where: the distance from the locker room to the field, the locations of the executive offices, the parking lot. My fictional stadium is magically located roughly where Ebbets Field once stood, which I never say in the book, but I knew which roads the characters would have to drive on to get to Manhattan. I did a ton of research, too, to get the cadence of speech right—how do baseball players talk to each other? how do sportscasters talk about baseball—and to make sure all my terminology was right. I watched documentaries, I read several books, I listened to baseball podcasts, and, of course, I watched a ton of games. (Not a hardship, by the way!) Immersing myself in the world of baseball was really key to my creating what I thought was a convincing setting. And hopefully, it’s a setting in the same way New York is a setting, so that the reader sees it as color and detail and not as an overwhelming amount of information!
Kate McMurray is a NYC-based writer, editor, and baseball fanatic. She writes m/m romances and reads lots of books. She also likes crafts and plays the violin and lives in Brooklyn in an apartment over an ice cream parlor. Kate’s baseball novel, Out in the Field, is available now.
Website: www.katemcmurray.com
Twitter: @katemcmwriter
4 comments:
I write hockey romance and do many of the same things. I want readers to either 1- understand that I know what I'm talking about or 2- feel like they learned something about the sport.
I write romances about rowing. I can't say I do all that diagramming, but the on-the-water action is in some ways a lot simpler. Okay, it's not, but I don't want to bury the reader in the esoterica of a sport people don't know a lot about.
I know very little about virtually any other sport, all of which I tend to lump under the category of "sportball." But I like to read sport romances, because I find the level of detail and care that authors put into them engrossing. The passion that writers of sport romances tend to have spills over into the writing and makes for an enjoying reading experience.
But Cassandra? Hockey romances? I think my husband would be interested in those. Care to recommend a title or two of yours?
I've also read a couple of sports romance without a lot of sports talk, which is weird. I guess you don't want to overwhelm a non-sports person with detail, but my thinking was, "These are major league ballplayers, they live and breathe baseball... they're gonna talk a lot about baseball." And I love a really detailed setting, so... there's a lot of baseball talk in this novel, is what I'm saying. :)
You're right, Kate. YOu do need that detail and you have to get the balance right! I don't know much about baseball or American football (I'm a Brit) - so I like to have those nuggets of info when I'm reading.
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