Takeaways from The Church of Baseball, a grand slam of a book by Ron Shelton
Back in 1988, former minor league baseball infielder Ron Shelton was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Bull Durham. He lost to Rain Man in a stacked field. But now – 34 years later – he’s written a business book that’s also a writing primer for creators.
Early on in “The Church of Baseball: The making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings and a Hit,” he talks about his time after baseball as a script reader: “The good scripts were so stunningly different from the others that after studying them, I found my own writing improved practically overnight.”
So that’s the first takeaway from this book. After capturing my notes, I had nearly 40 takeaways that weren’t quite as obvious. I’ve highlighted a few here. There’s a lot more for scriptwriters and video content creators as he takes the reader through the challenges of creating what is considered one of the best sports movies ever despite a studio that wasn’t exactly supportive or excited.
You can buy it here on Amazon – and yes, I’ll make a few cents – or you can head over to your favorite independent bookstore, which my daughter prefers me to say.
Shelton’s references to filmmaking apply equally to all types of writing and to freelancers coping with clients, communications people dealing with other departments, and to writers of fiction and non-fiction.
I was fighting for what turned out to be one of the movie’s strengths, and those fights drained my energy and took time away from focusing on the filmmaking itself. I’d learn in later movies that this is part of the drill—fighting the fights that shouldn’t need fighting.
Why do those writing the checks and the producers midwifing the project always throw obstacles in the way of the creative process?
Being in your own way is a more formidable obstacle than someone else being there—and they know that, too. I hoped the audience would also know it.
It’s a curious behavioral contortion to have all your nerve endings open for discovery while you circle the wagons to defend your vision. Sometimes it helps to have an enemy; if none exists, it’s sometimes the director’s job to invent one. Bogeymen, real or imagined, are handy to rally the troops against.
The compelling thing I quickly learned was that good writing separated itself from bad on the opening page…The first line matters. The first description of place matters. It has to attract producers, studios, money, actors. It has to be different.
I’m of the school of E. L. Doctorow, who said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Rules are meant to be bent and broken.
Structurally, certain “moves” the script makes become like load-bearing walls in a building. As the narrative shifts and adds weight, the scenes and character development have to be strong enough to carry the growing weight. If the turns in a screenplay are earned, the building grows effortlessly and can take a number of shapes. If not, it crashes under its own weight—the load-bearing walls weren’t there.
Scenes in a screenplay need a turn, a moment when the scene suddenly isn’t about what it was about up until that moment.
It’s easy to fall in love with the secondary characters—the coaches, the girlfriends or boyfriends, the announcer—because they don’t have to carry the burden of forward movement. They’re easy to write, they’re fun, they fill up and sell the world you’re trying to evoke, but they’re low-risk.
“You just got Lesson No. 1. Don’t think. You can only hurt the ball club.”
On Why It’s OK for Your First Draft to Be Too Long
First drafts of screenplays should be full of things to cut out, and I’d had enough experience by then watching two of my scripts made into movies to know that it wasn’t possible to predict what would survive the cut, even if I would be the one doing the cutting.
Another reason I resist detailed outlines before beginning to write is that they don’t allow for dramatic sequences to appear just because they feel right. Scenes that make no sense in a linear construct, that seem to come out of nowhere, and yet are the perfect tonal shift as the story unfolds, cannot be imagined beforehand. At least that’s how I function.
And it’s why detailed story outlines always miss the very thing the story is about, because the writer can’t know it until he discovers it. Otherwise, it’s just connecting the dots.
It has been said that a movie is like a hot-air balloon carrying a basket full of narrative information and it’s necessary to start throwing the cargo overboard until the balloon takes off.
It’s always your favorite scene you have to lose. Somehow it gets in the way—it’s saying what you’ve already said or doesn’t need saying at all. But there had to be something more, and over the years I’ve formed a view that seems to stick. The scene is intimate in a way that nothing else has been in the movie up to that point.
Play Music When Writing?
Before I close, Shelton weighs in on a topic that seems to divide writers: What’s better when I write: Music or silence/headphones? “While writing, I often play music that suggests a mood or tonal landscape. It can never be thematically specific but should be somehow reflective of the character—maybe it’s just music the character might play.”
Add this to the list of outstanding writing (and production) books on the market. Buy it here on Amazon (affiliate link) or head over to your favorite independent bookstore, which is what Abby will do if she reads this since she refuses to read anything on a Kindle.
What’s your favorite takeaway from this list? Or, weigh in on whether Bull Durham is the best sports movie ever.
