What If . . . ?

(Alternate History)

In 1984, one of the worst decisions in the history of making decisions occurred, altering the course of American, and perhaps even world, history.

In the 1984 NBA draft, with the second pick, the Portland Trail Blazers chose Sam Bowie of the University of Kentucky over Michael Jordan of the University of North Carolina.

Bowie, a seven-foot-one-inch center, was hobbled by injuries most of his career. He wound up playing a total of 511 games in the NBA, averaging 10.9 points and 7.5 rebounds per game, respectable numbers but not enough to keep him from being named the “biggest draft bust in history” by Sports Illustrated magazine.

Michael Jordan, as many know, became the greatest basketball player of all time. Six championships, five MVPs, and a starring role in Space Jam, in which he bands together with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and other Looney Tunes characters to defeat a band of animated Monstars, who have stolen the basketball ability of NBA stars like Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, and Muggsy Bogues.

As a lifelong Chicago Bulls fan, I am overjoyed by this accident of history, but it’s worth asking: what if Michael Jordan had been a Portland Trail Blazer instead?

Questions of alternate history are fascinating exercises in research and reasoning. What would’ve happened if Al Gore won the 2000 election instead of George W. Bush? What if Adolf Hitler had stuck with art school or Harry Truman had decided not to drop atomic bombs on Japan? What if John Lennon wasn’t murdered and the Beatles reunited? What if? What if? What if?

In the case of Michael Jordan and Sam Bowie, yours truly, as a Chicago Bulls fan for his entire life, would’ve spent many fewer hours enjoying the success of my favorite basketball team. I also never would’ve seen Michael Jordan enter a convenience store where I was waiting to pay for a Slurpee, grab a copy of a newspaper with his picture splashed on the cover of the sports page, flip a twenty on the counter, and stride back outside and into his Corvette.

Your task is to create an alternate history around the question “What would’ve happened?” by altering a single event in the past and then projecting events forward.

AUDIENCE

You audience is both interested in and generally knowledgeable about your topic. In the example above, my audience would be basketball fans, and they likely remember things like Sam Bowie being drafted before Michael Jordan or that Hakeem Olajuwon was the number one pick in 1984. Your audience is not made up of absolute experts—my audience doesn’t know Michael Jordan’s career stats off the tops of their heads—but they aren’t blank slates, either.

You will need to remind them of some things, but they don’t need massive dumps of information to engage with your analysis.

They’re hoping to be provoked by your alternate-history theory. You are trying to persuade your audience that your invented past is plausible, but you should also expect them to challenge some of your claims. You are not spinning a fantasy. You’re arguing from inferences and evidence. In the end, your goal is to make them believe such a past could’ve been at least possible had a single historical event been different.

PROCESS

1. Brainstorm possible topics.

Start with your interests, passions, and preoccupations. For obvious reasons, history is a promising area in which to find a good scenario for an alternate history, but as you can see from my example, it’s not the only route. Even if you’re not as knowledgeable as you wish, think of a topic you’re really interested in so any research you do will be pleasurable for its own sake.

2. Pick a moment.

Pick a single chain in a past event and break it. Have the Trail Blazers draft Jordan. Have a young painter named Adolf Hitler be so praised for his work he winds up pursuing the life of an artist in Paris instead of becoming a genocidal maniac. Make sure the break is at least somewhat plausible. Remember that the event need not be big in and of itself. It just has to have ripple effects that change the path of history.

3. Research.

Research can take a lot of different forms, but it need not be formal or structured. The goal is to become knowledgeable about what happened and why it happened. The Portland Trail Blazers picked Sam Bowie because they thought they needed a center more than a guard like Jordan. This was a different era when a dominant seven-footer was thought necessary to compete for championships. “Fools, fools,” I say, but that’s hindsight talking. Understanding the context in which history happened is necessary to understanding the ways history could’ve been different.

4. Write the story.

What would’ve happened? Tell the reader. Remember the “story” part of “history.”

5. Check your story.

Looking at your tale, what is the evidence you’ve included to support the likelihood of these events? How convincing is your evidence to the audience? Are there interpretations of the evidence other than what you’ve decided? Should you mention those possibilities in order to head off any audience objections to your theory? If history is a chain, are all of the links of events in your imagined history strong?

6. Revise, edit, polish, title.

The story is the main character of the piece, but you don’t want any blemishes hindering engagement with the story. A title framed as a question that your piece answers is probably a good way to go.

REFLECT

This experience is a good opportunity to reflect on what you know now that you didn’t prior to doing the writing. One of the most difficult parts about developing as a writer is the long, slow slog toward subject expertise.

You began with an area of interest and at least partial expertise, but you likely increased your subject expertise. For example, in drafting this experience I went digging around and found a quote from the general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers saying that they felt they already had a great shooting guard in a guy named Clyde Drexler, who was awesome in his own right, having been named one of the fifty greatest players of all time in 1996. (I just looked that up right now: I know more than I did thirty seconds ago.)

If you pause to appreciate what you’re learning, you may better appreciate how content knowledge translates into confidence with writing, and start to set a threshold for how much research you have to do to feel sufficiently comfortable to take on a topic.

This is also useful when you’re midstream on a project, as you’re more likely to recognize gaps in your knowledge that need filling.

REMIX

Let’s switch to the realm of personal history. Can you think of any moments in your own life when a single choice or event may have altered its trajectory? For example, I first met my wife on a semiblind date, filling in for someone who had been thrown in jail. I’m not sure we would have ever crossed paths otherwise. If that dude hadn’t done whatever stupid thing put him in jail, I’d be living a markedly different life. It messes me up to even think about it sometimes.

What’s a road not traveled in your own life? Explore your alternate personal history in a very different piece of writing.

PROCRASTINATION

When I ask a group of writers, regardless of age, experience, or accomplishment, how many of them are procrastinators, somewhere around 80 percent of them raise their hands.

My hand is raised.

There is something about writing that lends itself to procrastination. But in my experience as a writer and teacher of writing, procrastination comes in many different flavors.

Some procrastinate because they simply do not like writing and want to put it off as long as possible, the same way I will put off getting a flu shot. This dislike may be rooted in lack of confidence or lack of practice, but either way it’s procrastination as avoidance of an unpleasant experience. In other words, they’re afraid.

Some people are the opposite. They actually enjoy writing and are excited about the task but also recognize that doing the task means producing something that may not measure up to their own expectations, thus causing disappointment. In other words, they’re afraid.

Some writers are paralyzed by the thought of having to show their writing to others, be it an audience, a teacher, or anyone else. In other words, they’re afraid.

And believe it or not, others are not worried about their writing failing but are instead concerned that their work may be too successful. What if the next thing they write is the best thing they’ll ever write and it’s all downhill from there? Better to just not write at all. In other words, they’re afraid.

Fear drives procrastination. Very rarely are these fears rational—though we may have a boss or teacher who has taught us to fear feedback—but just because they aren’t rational doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

Most of the people who admit to procrastination also say that they rarely if ever fail to deliver on a deadline. This may mean pulling an all-nighter or sacrificing something they wanted to do, but the work gets done. The best cure for procrastination seems to be someone demanding we finish.

Except, in hindsight, most of us express regrets about the torture we put ourselves through having procrastinated. Why did I make it so hard on myself? I could have just started earlier. I was once given sixteen months to produce a book manuscript. I did it in the final four months, while also working full time, nearly driving myself to madness. I vowed to never do that to myself again.

Except, of course, I’ve done similar things to myself again and again.

The experiences in this book outline a detailed process from inception to completion in order to help mitigate procrastination. There’s always some next step to take. But life rarely gives us these sorts of models. When this is the case, go back and reflect on how much of the writing process happens before words get on to the page and think about charting your own process to completion.

I wish I had a foolproof method for overcoming procrastination, but I do not. I struggle with it constantly. That said, some things can help.

First is to recognize the difference between normal procrastination, when you’re not yet ready to put words on the page, and total avoidance, when you’re pretending you don’t actually have writing to do. Binging Netflix is not a part of the writing process, unless you’re writing about Orange Is the New Black. Writing does not have to mean words accumulating on a page, but it does mean being engaged with some part of the writing process.

If words aren’t coming, it may mean you’re not done with the prewriting stage yet, and that’s okay. You never know at what moment of the process the right idea is going to show up. Just be cautious that you’re not avoiding the task entirely. It can be a tricky balance. Inspiration may strike while you’re in the shower or cooking dinner, but it will only strike if you’re directing at least some of your (possibly subconscious) attention to the task. If you’re purely seeking distraction, it may be necessary to more explicitly reengage with the earlier prewriting.

Second is to get started with words on the page as soon as you have anything to say. For example, this chapter sat on my computer screen with only the title and first sentence for a solid week. I knew I wanted to write about procrastination, but I did not know what I wanted to say. By putting that title and sentence up, I’d at least started, dispelling a little bit of the fear.

A complete piece of writing is never going to arrive all at once. Get started, add bits as they come to you, and over time they will accrue into something meaningful. Think of it like pushing a boulder over a flat plain, trying to get it to a spot where it will roll downhill. At some point, your momentum will accelerate.

You may also want to try writing multiple things at one time. One cause of procrastination is the feeling that you have nothing to say, and the more you obsess about not having something to say, the harder it becomes to find something to say. This is a recipe for writer’s block.

Writer’s block is real. I know this because I’ve experienced it. In fact, I’m experiencing it as we speak. My cure for writer’s block is to be juggling four or five projects at any given time.

I am always blocked on something. I’m never blocked on everything.

And often all I need to get unblocked is to truly let my mind take a rest from the subject. Sometimes a distraction will work, but often it’s writing something else that will trigger reengagement with the things on which I was blocked.

The anticipation is almost always worse than the reality. We can really freak ourselves out when we’re focused on worrying. When it comes to fighting procrastination, mostly I’m trying to do something to forget to be afraid.