54 STORIES WRITTEN FOR ONE MAGAZINE

I stay up late. That’s just how my biological clock rolls. But it’s also because I’m a writer, and I traffic in ideas, and the middle of the night is when everyone else asleep. So all the ideas are hanging out there, ripe for the picking.

I’ve been a fulltime freelancer and author for nearly a quarter-century, since I was 23 years old. I write for a living. But for some reason, people often think that all I do is write. When really, what I mostly do is think. I imagine. I wonder. I research. I query. I pitch. Then I write it up. But the pursuit of the idea is the large part of the adventure.

I love the idea of ideas—the fact that it’s possible to summon some sort of creative notion that hasn’t necessarily been conjured before. To be honest, I tend to enjoy the imagining even more than the writing. But if my file cabinets brimming with past and future (and occasionally rejected) story ideas are any indication, finding subject matter is the easiest part of my job.

But rather than telling you that, I’ll just show you—by exploring the articles that I have written for a single magazine and musing on the origins of many of them.

I have long been listed as a contributing editor for my college publication—Cornell Alumni Magazine. Basically, that means I write for them so often that they kindly added my name to the masthead. I have always welcomed the opportunity to write for CAM because it’s not a magazine about sports or quilting or parenting. It’s about anything. A story simply need be compelling and have some attachment to the university—a place that has churned out thousands of fascinating graduates over the years.

So how have I found suitable story ideas? You name it.

75 ALPHABET BOOKS FROM SLEEPING BEAR PRESS

Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Sleeping Bear Press has published hundreds of titles since releasing its first children’s book in 1998. It may be best known for its excellent (and seemingly endless) series of alphabet picture books, all featuring an innovative two-tiered format. That means that each letter of the alphabet contains three elements—a beautiful illustration, a short poem (for young readers) and a more extensive sidebar (for older readers). So kids can grow with the books while they grow as readers.

Sleeping Bear has published an alphabet book for each state—from A is for Arches: A Utah Alphabet to Y is for Yellowhammer: An Alabama Alphabet. There are also alphabet books devoted to Canadian provinces (including S is for Spirit Bear: A British Columbia Alphabet) and cities (W is for Windy City: A Chicago Alphabet) and countries (K is for Kabuki: A Japan Alphabet).

But wait, there’s more. Much more. Sleeping Bear is to alphabet books what Pooh-Bear is to honey. You can never get enough, and suddenly you’ll look on a forgotten shelf and find an unexpected gem. The subject matter ranges from ancient Rome (G is for Gladiator) to writing (S is for Story) to fishing (H is for Hook) to Halloween (J is for Jack-O’-Lantern).

I’m proud to have contributed nine sports-themed alphabet books to the mix—covering everything from baseball and football to soccer and stock car racing (my latest is W is for Wrigley: The Friendly Confines Alphabet). I’m also proud of the award-winning S is for Save the Planet: A How-to-be Green Alphabet. But you could build a library of Sleeping Bear alphabet books (everything from A is for Airplane to Z is for Zookeeper), read them all, and find that you’ve ingested a fine education about almost everything.

Here are 75 alphabet books, separated into categories—and this doesn’t even include any of the 50 state books or 11 Canadian province and territory books or, for that matter, any of the dozens of counting books that Sleeping Bear Press has produced. Still, it’s quite a list:

28 CYNICAL OBSERVATIONS FROM ONE HENRY MILLER RIDE

Whenever I have bouts of cynicism, periods of pervasive pessimism—and they’re not infrequent—I try to remedy the situation with occasional travel. That may mean physical forays into the American outback (setting a course for, say, Utopia, Texas) or fantastical forays into the literary realm (“After all, tomorrow is another day”).

Sometimes, it’s a combination of the two. My first travel memoir, States of Mind, chronicled a 314-day cross-country excursion in 1995-96 that essentially was a cynical Generation Xer’s attempt to find out if that cynicism was justified—did I reflect the state of the union, or merely misjudge it? So I turned that figurative notion into a literal search for virtue in America – in places like Pride (Alabama), Justice (West Virginia), Honor (Michigan) and Wisdom (Montana).

So it was a hopeful expedition.

I would say most literary travelers allow sanguinity to ride shotgun. As Mark Twain once declared, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” We journey in search of something better.

Well, most of us do. Then there’s Henry Miller.

He’s best known toeing the obscenity/literary line in novels like Tropic of Cancer, but he also wrote a cross-country travel memoir. And it was about as hopeful as a pothole. It was brimming with condescension and despair, grumpiness and gloom. “One’s destination is never a place,” he wrote, “but a new way of looking at things.” Yet he seemed to pack a suitcase full of old biases and mean-spirited generalities, which colored his view of the American scene (after a long stay in Europe) during one cross-country trip in 1940-41.

He called his travel memoir The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

I’ve selected 28 cynical statements from his journey. There were far more to choose from:

1. “A great change had come over America… Everything was cock-eyed and getting more and more so. Maybe we would end up on all fours, gibbering like baboons.”

2. “The lack of resilience, the feeling of hopelessness, the resignation, the skepticism, the defeatism—I could scarcely believe my ears at first. And over it all that veneer of fatuous optimism—only now decidedly cracked.”

3. “I, on the other hand, always expect angels to pee in my beer.”

55 NUGGETS OF TRIVIA FROM THE SPORTS 100

My favorite nonfiction books are the ones that examine oft-mined subjects from a new point of view, whether that means Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point or Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. So early in my career, I wrote one of my own. Twenty years ago, in 1995, I produced a book called THE SPORTS 100, published by Macmillan. It was a ranking and profile of the one hundred most important people in American sports history.

The book judges influence, not athletic prowess. If all you can say about someone was that he was the best quarterback or hit this many home runs or won that many U.S. Open titles, that isn’t enough. There are too many stars in the world of sports to have included people for star power alone. You won’t find Ted Williams or Joe Montana or Steffi Graf. But you will find jump shot pioneer Hank Luisetti and vilified baseball owner Walter O’Malley and influential bookmaker Charles McNeil. It is an attempt to show that there are relative unknowns who left more of an imprint than a great many legends.

Another aim of The Sports 100 is to put the games into historical perspective, to show how its cultural influence often manifests itself in a handful of significant individuals—from Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson to Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe. The book also highlights the many cases in which one person was largely responsible for introducing an eventually monumental element of sports—be it free agency, the point spread, the minor league farm system, or the forward pass. In fact, it is not only a study of 100 remarkable people, but also of 100 components of sport’s evolution. It is as much a history of the games as a profile of the participants.

In the end, the list is as diverse as sport itself. There are athletes and innovators, activists and academics, executives and inventors, journalists and judges, agents and outcasts, pioneers, producers, promoters and presidents—all of whom made a lasting impact, in one way or another, on American athletics. Of course, readers were bound to disagree with many of the selections and omissions. But like the old argument about New York’s greatest centerfielder, it’s all a matter of perspective.

Unfortunately, the book is long out of print. If you want a copy, you’ll just have to contact me personally. And if you want some interesting bits of trivia that I discovered along the way, well, there’s plenty of that.

37 INSIGHTS FROM THE IMAGINATION OF DR. SEUSS

In the pantheon of the profound—Churchill and FDR, Shakespeare and Twain, even Will Rogers and Woody Allen (if you prefer mirth while musing), we at the Why Not 100 think Dr. Seuss belongs. Really. He did it through allegory and whimsy, substituting edifying imagination for speechifying exhortations, replacing rim-shot one-liners with Once-lers and wonders. Indeed, many of his most famous passages are designed just as much to enlighten as to entertain.

Most of them are life-affirming perspectives—every person counts and should try new things and can save the world one speck or tree at a time. They’re the kind of reminders that lodge firmly in a child’s psyche—brain-remainers, he might call them. Sometimes, too, Seuss tossed in some gentle barbs, kindly poking fun at the excesses of authority or income disparity or the diffusion of responsibility. And once in a while, he just comments on love or imagination or gratitude or 

aging.

We’ve chosen our 37 favorites:

1. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” (Oh, The Places You’ll Go!)

2. “Don’t give up! I believe in you all. A person’s a person, no matter how small!” (Horton Hears a Who)

3. “In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with a Z. I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends.” (On Beyond Zebra)

96 BOOKS WITH NUMBERS IN THE TITLE

When my son Luke started reading in earnest—that is, when he found that he had made his way through enough contemporary fantasy novels to fill the libraries of Rivendell and Hogwarts—I began to suggest some older classics.

He had already read the three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, including The Two Towers, which was his favorite one. How about Jules Verne, I said. Around the World in Eighty Days or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Then I got him hooked on Sherlock Holmes, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. For good measure, I led him to Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None.

See a pattern? We at the Why Not100 obviously treasure the written word, but there sure are a lot of classics with numbers in the title, whether it’s 1984, Seven Years in Tibet, or North Dallas Forty. Hence, the following list.

Only once, as you’ll see, do we reference Janet Evanovich, who has written twenty numbered Stephanie Plum mysteries—from One for the Money, Two for the Dough, and Three to Get Deadly to Explosive Eighteen, Notorious Nineteen, and Takedown Twenty.

You may also notice, when you get to number 50, that a certain erotic novel didn’t make the cut.

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Ken Kesey)

2. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

3. The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)

4. The Sign of the Four (Arthur Conan Doyle)

40 INITIALIZED AUTHORS AND THEIR REAL NAMES

Ever consider that most of us don’t necessarily know the first name of the authors of such classics as The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, Curious George, Mary Poppins, Charlotte’s Web, and Winnie the Pooh? Or The Catcher in the Rye? Or The War of the Worlds? Or, for that matter, The Sixth Sense?

Oh, and the Harry Potter series, too. Joanne Rowling was asked by her publisher to adopt a more masculine pen name. So she borrowed her grandmother’s name (Kathleen) and became forever famous as J.K. Rowling. Much the same process happened with Susan Eloise (better known as S.E.) Hinton, author of The Outsiders.

So let’s take a tour of initials and explore the real names behind some literary icons.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel)

2. W.E.B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt)

3. J.K. Rowling (Joanne Kathleen)

4. C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples)

5. E.B. White (Elwyn Brooks)