Setting the pins

Avi — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 07:01:49 +0000

When I was a kid I had a job as pin boy, which was in the basement of a local church. A pin boy, for those younger than I, was the kid who set up the bowling pins in a bowling alley. (This was long before the job was handed over to robots.) It was tricky and sometime dangerous work, because pins could and did fly in wild directions.

One my tasks was to make sure the pins were spotted exactly right. If not, the bowler, looking down the alley, would shout, “Hey pin boy. Pin six. Get it right!” If I didn’t get it right, the bowler would have a harder time knocking down all the pins and thereby achieving a “strike!”

I thought about that today as I worked on my new book. Sometimes when I write, I have the plot more or less all worked out in my head. It’s never that simple of course but sometimes I know, sort of, where I am going. Other times, such as at this moment, I’m not at all sure. As I result I go back and forth, this way and that. Here I am, one hundred and fifty pages in, and I write a new chapter one. And then some.

What I am doing, if you will, is setting up the plot pins. If I don’t get the plot right, line it up, space it just correctly, the reader won’t be able to knock them down. Dangerous work, setting down plots.

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Setting the pins