Writing Jack and Larry

The ideas that become books come to writers in different ways. The idea for Jack and Larry came to me from somebody else. For me, that is atypical: I come up with my own ideas, and I have more of them than I’ll ever be able to write books about. But a fellow member of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), Fred Schuld, had a kind of personal history with the story of Jack Graney and his bull terrier, Larry. Fred’s father was a born-and-raised Clevelander who lived during the time Jack played for Cleveland. Fred’s father infused him with a love of Larry’s antics. He didn’t need to infuse him with a love of Jack Graney, because when Fred was growing up and also when he was raising his own family, Jack Graney was the Voice of the Cleveland Indians, and Fred was a fan of both the team and their announcer.

So Fred, as a historian and researcher, collected newspaper references from the 1910s, little mentions here and there of Larry, Jack Graney’s bull terrier. And in the early 1990s Fred began to suggest that I write a book on Jack Graney and Larry. Eventually, I became convinced that I wanted to write such a book.

The information that Fred Schuld gave me consisted of small (50 words or so) articles. These were primary source materials because they were written at the time Jack and Larry lived. These clippings helped me see what kind of person Jack was; what kind of dog Larry was; how the fans viewed Jack, Larry, and the team; and how the newspapers viewed them. I also got the bigger picture of how the Cleveland team was faring.

Thanks to Fred Schuld, I got to meet Jack’s daughter, Margot Graney Mudd, and also his grand-daughter, Perry Mudd Smith. When Margot was growing up, her father told her and her brother stories about Larry, and Margot shared with me her favorite of those stories. I included that story as “Taking Care of Business.”

Once a writer decides that, Yes, she’s going to write a particular book, that doesn’t mean the going is easy. It took me several years to write Jack and Larry because I wasn’t sure what form the story should take or how to tell it. Fred Schuld thought it should be either a magazine article or a picture book. Or both. 

Aiming to write an adult magazine article with an emphasis on history and aiming to write a children’s picture book at the same time is like two forces pulling in opposite directions: progress is difficult, if not impossible.

I tried writing Jack and Larry’s story as a history article, but I wasn’t happy with it. I tried writing it as a picture book (Larry Leaps In was the title), and I wasn’t happy with that, either. The history article was mainly Jack’s story. The picture book was mainly Larry’s story. My gut feeling, which I couldn’t let go of, was that the story I wanted to tell was the story of Jack and Larry together.

Some of the editors to whom I submitted the manuscript of Jack and Larry considered it a weakness that the story was neither Jack’s story nor Larry’s story. They wanted it to be one or the other: one hero/protagonist, not two. I disagreed.

I’m not saying that I was right or that the editors were wrong. Each view is legitimate. I wanted to write the story that I saw in my head. The editors didn’t see that particular story, or they thought that particular story wouldn’t be appealing, and/or wouldn’t sell to the public.

In a situation like this, a writer always has two choices: (a) rewrite the story according to the editor’s suggestions (and these suggestions are often what’s best for the story); or (b) continue to stick to the story one sees . . . but try to make that story better in every way. In this case, I went with the second choice.

After I gave up on the history article and gave up on the picture book, I still had to answer the question of what kind of book I should write. I was torn between writing a middle grades book (roughly ages 8-12) and writing an adult book. I felt the story of Jack and Larry would appeal equally to each audience. But when it came to writing a book for adults, I felt they might want more of the story of Jack Graney himself, less of the story of his bull terrie — though the dog-lovers among them would enjoy the antics of Larry. As would middle-graders.

So I wrote Jack and Larry as a crossover book — one that appeals to both children and adults. I had never written such a book before, nor have I written one since. 

Writers usually have an audience (individual or plural, invented or real) in mind when writing a book — we think of ourselves as speaking to that particular person. It helps to have such a person in mind because it helps us shape the story, make it interesting and appealing to that person. When writing She’s on First, for example, I had in mind a young woman who was passionate about baseball and wanted to play. She wasn’t a real person, she was an audience I invented. But when writing Jack and Larry I found myself writing to two audiences at the same time — a 10-year-old boy who loved dogs and baseball, and a 40-year-old woman who loved baseball and history. I tried to write in a way that wasn’t too adult for the 10-year-old and wasn’t too juvenile for the 40-year-old.

The single most difficult problem I encountered while writing Jack and Larry was how to tell the story in an exciting way. And here I found that straight prose just did not work. That could be because the clippings I had were small, the information sparse, and sometimes the articles mentioning Larry were many weeks apart. So whenever I wrote straight prose sentences, I felt they were inadequate: I felt I might end up writing extra sentences just to make the book longer. That I didn’t want to do.

The problem of length, of sparse facts, and of exactly how to tell the story — this took me seemingly forever to overcome. But one day I sat in a comfortable chair in my office, pulled the manuscript out of its file, and — all of a sudden, out of nowhere (but more likely out of my subconscious), it came to me that I could tell the story in free verse.

The advantage of free verse as a way of telling Jack and Larry’s story was that it allowed me to tell the story in vignettes. Which is exactly how the story came to me: in small glimpses from the newspapers. As soon as I began rewriting the story in “lined prose,” I thought of myself and the reader peering at a major league ballpark through a knothole in the fence, catching a glimpse of the action.

I think I succeeded in writing a book through which readers catch glimpses of early 20th century baseball in Cleveland, Ohio. When fans of the book write to me, they often mention a particular glimpse that appeals to them most. Some mention the poem about Larry meeting President Woodrow Wilson, others the one about Larry “coaching” third base. My own favorite is the two-part glimpse titled “Looks Like a Loss” and “Triple Steal and Bite.”

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Catch your own glimpses of Jack Graney, Larry, and the Cleveland teams of 1912-1920 in Jack and Larry.