Guest post by: Scott Nadelson

Author of Aftermath, Scott Nadelson appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 1pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and is leading the workshop In the Beginning: Crafting Compelling Story Openings on Saturday, October 8 at 3pm.

In the late spring of 1993, just after my junior year of college, I had a miserable job selling newspaper subscriptions over the phone. This was in northern New Jersey, where my fellow salespeople were all far more aggressive than I, and far more successful. In the cubicle beside me was a dapper old guy in his seventies, who had a deep musical voice and higher commissions than anyone else. He wore suits and ties and reeked of gin.

Whenever he talked to anyone who wasn’t a customer, he spit out near-insults, as if couldn’t be bothered with any nicety that didn’t contribute to his paycheck. He once looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re the worst salesman I’ve ever seen.”

But it wasn’t only the job that made me miserable. The young woman I’d been seeing the previous semester was at her family home in Long Island, less than a two hour drive away, but she kept making excuses not to get together. It was obvious she was pulling away from me, hinting that she’d reconnected with a high school boyfriend, but I didn’t want to believe it. I kept hanging onto a futile hope, calling her every few days, leaving messages, waiting for her to call back. I spent my nights watching basketball, pinning my romantic dreams on the unlikely event that my Knicks would win a national championship; if only they could pull off the impossible, I thought, then the girl would come to her senses and find her way back to my bed by the start of the next semester.

That summer, with its painful oscillations between hope and despair, stayed with me long after it was over, and for years I wanted to do something with the material. But there wasn’t much of a story in it. The drunk, grouchy old salesman and I hardly spoke. All summer we stayed isolated in our separate miseries, until I quit the job and went back to school. The Knicks lost, and the girl left me.

Still, I couldn’t let situation go, and while working on an early draft, I knew that the old man’s failures and disappointments would have to be central, that they would provide the soft nudge that would send the narrator in a new direction, though I didn’t yet know what that direction would be. Since I already had the Knicks in mind, basketball provided a logical starting place, but the turning point came as a total surprise. One day, with the story still going nowhere, I was idly reading about New York Jewish basketball players of the 1940s and discovered this small detail about the career of Dolph Schayes, one of the game’s early stars: during college, Schayes had broken his arm in the middle of a season and kept playing, learning to shoot left-handed rather than sit on the bench.

As soon as I discovered this detail and imagined the old man playing beside Schayes as a teenager, I knew what the story was about–an impossible striving toward unattainable goals, and the mixture of dignity and humiliation that follows. In the shadow of Dolph’s greatness, the old man can’t cease striving and failing, and punishes himself as a result. Faced with the old man’s suffering, the narrator relinquishes his own hopes and abandons an essential part of himself, the part that desires and strives and accepts each new disappointment as it comes. Soon after finding the detail, I had a complete draft of the story, “Dolph Schayes’s Broken Arm,” which became the first story in my new collection, Aftermath.

What I love about writing stories is how open they are to surprise and improvisation, how a small detail can shift a story’s entire geography, changing its contour and climate. All I needed was that broken arm, and what had been the disordered, drama-less chaos of ordinary life suddenly began to take shape. This is something I learn again and again, whenever I sit down to write: one accidental detail can give form to formlessness, and the most unexpected discovery is often the most illuminating.

More info about Scott Nadelson at his website: http://scottnadelson.com/.