Plot Twist Three in the Side Pocket
I’ve taken up pool again, after a hiatus from serious play of about fifteen years. I played a lot in my youth, and got good enough that in my dorm they gave me all kinds of handicaps, including making me play left-handed. Still, unbeknownst to me at the time I had developed a few common bad habits that kept me from progressing beyond a certain level of skill. So as part of taking up my cue again I have purchased a few new instructional books, torn my mechanics down to nothing, and begun rebuilding my game from scratch.*
Of all the various cue sports, the game I have always favored is 14.1 Continuous, better known as straight pool. It is a game of points, in which one point is scored for every pocketed called shot. The first fourteen balls of each rack are sunk, then the fifteenth and the cue ball are left in place, the other fourteen re-racked, and play continues. A typical amateur game is played to fifty or one hundred.
The stretch goal I set myself in taking up the sport again is to run three hundred points of straight pool without a miss. That is a lofty aspiration, a high run that would make a professional proud. Given that I am starting by reconstructing my fundamentals, I will likely require years of practice to achieve this high run, if I can manage it at all.
I thought about that as I practiced the other day. I could have chosen to focus on a shorter game, such as 8-Ball, 9-Ball or One-Pocket. Those games take a few minutes each in the former two cases, and perhaps half an hour in the latter case. Instead, I chose a game that takes hours to play, that requires more focus and precision, and I’ve set myself a demanding target.
Suddenly I saw a parallel between my drive to perfect my straight pool game and my drive to write novels. Writing a novel is a long, involved process that requires dedication, focus and precision. In fact, a rack of 14.1 is kind of like a chapter in a novel: you follow the point-of-view character (cue ball) through a series of problems (sinking balls, breaking up clusters and the like) that inevitably to the next chapter (rack), by way of a set up (the key ball that sets up a shot on the fifteenth ball) that leads to the transition (the fifteenth ball, which is used to break up the next rack when it is sunk).
If the writer doesn’t do a good job of setting up those transitions, the whole thing quickly falls apart.
The most recent novel manuscript I’ve written (which I am revising once more) contains twenty-three chapters. A run of twenty-thee racks of straight pool is worth 322 points. Perhaps I’ll refine that goal a touch….
*Pun intended, I admit it.
