Bookshelf author profile: Shawn Green

June 22, 2011

Here’s my feature on Green and his new book, The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mphPersonal Transformation Books), which appears in the print edition of this week’s NJ Jewish News.

More on the writing process:

Green had planned on writing a book even while he was playing. “I’ve always been interested in Eastern philosophy,” he said. “I started to really integrate it into my baseball career and my hitting.”

Originally, he had thought to do the book by himself. Gordon McAlpine, a writer and teacher, is actually a neighbor. “I asked if he’d like to be co-author. At first he said, ‘No, I’ll just help you out,’ but then he started getting into the project and really liked the twists and turns of my story. So the way it worked is, after the book proposal was done we had each chapter already kind of laid out and we’d discuss it. I’d start writing; I’d write maybe 20 pages and send them off to him and he would rework things a little bit and while he was doing that I’d work on the next 20 pages. It was a little bit of an assembly line. Then we’d go over each chapter and make changes together. He was a great guy and I learned a lot about myself during the process as a writer, not oly better techniques — he teaches creative wriing at different universities — but also learned how much I enjoyed collaborating and how my creativity flourishes more than on my own.”

Green will be a featured guest on an upcoming Bookshelf podcast.

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