In my past life, I got paid to watch baseball games. Pretty good, huh?”

Steve Krasner, children's book author

PORTSMOUTH — It wasn’t so unusual to see numerous authors videoconferencing from their homes with students of Portsmouth Middle School during the school’s recent fourth annual All-Day Audible with Authors event. After all, that’s what happens every year.

What was different this go around, however, was that many students were home themselves due to the pandemic.

It didn’t matter, however, as students got to interact with more than 20 different authors from all around the country — and another, Gary Ghislain, Zooming in from the French Riviera.

A few authors were closer to home, however, including Rhode Island’s poet laureate, Tina Cane, and Steven Krasner, a former sports writer for the Providence Journal who now writes children’s books. He’s perhaps best known for covering the Boston Red Sox from 1986 until his retirement from the paper in 2008.

“In my past life, I got paid to watch baseball games. Pretty good, huh?” he asked the fifth-grade students in Amy Guertin’s ELA class. (The next day he taught a journalism class to students in Singapore — also by Zoom.)

Mr. Krasner authored a well-received non-fiction book about one of those games that was based on his front-page ProJo story recapping the 33-inning marathon between two minor league teams, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, in 1981. It was titled, appropriately enough, “The Longest Game.”

“It was so long, it started in April and ended in June,” said Mr. Krasner. 

That’s not hyperbole. The game started on April 18, and 32 innings were played before the umps halted things at 4 a.m. the following morning. The next time the Red Wings were in town, the game was completed.

Mr. Krasner pointed out he was not assigned to cover the original game, but was there for the ending in June. “I didn’t have to shiver through 32 innings,” he said of the contest, which featured both Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs, both minor-leaguers at the time.

Revisions and more revisions

He read students his 1998 picture book, “Have A Nice Nap, Humphrey,” about a bear who needs to hibernate but has one problem: He can’t sleep. Other characters, such as Penelope Penguin and Mortimer Monkey, have their own issues, but everyone works together to help each other.

As with all his books and articles, he kept making revisions over and over, until he got it right. 

“Nobody likes to revise. Everybody likes to write it once and be done with it,” he said. “But just because you write something once, does not mean it’s done.” (As Mr. Krasner hammered home the critical need for revisions, Ms. Guertin could be seen applauding.)

Illustrators also constantly tinker with their drawings, said Mr. Krasner, who hired Sandy Griffis for that job. (“I don’t draw very well,” he said.) He displayed original sketches by Ms. Griffis, and they how they later appeared in the book. One student, Gabe, noticed that Humphrey’s bed mattress had stars on it originally, but they’re gone in the book.

Mortimer originally had a tail, but Mr. Krasner reluctantly agreed to ask Ms. Griffis to remove it after his editors pointed out the character is based on a chimpanzee, which does not have a tail.

“I said, ‘This monkey talks and drives a car, so certainly we can give him a tail,’” he said. “One of the great things about creative writing is there is no right or wrong.”

With the tail gone, Mr. Krasner had to change a line about Mortimer: “scratching his tail” became “scratching his stomach.”

Mr. Krasner did stress the need for accuracy, however, when it comes to basic grammar and spelling. He recalled the time he wrote a book about Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, whom he considers a buddy. The book was published by a company in Pennsylvania, and he recalled the day he received a box full of them.

“I was very disappointed, because this company misspelled my name on the cover and the title page, but spelled it correctly on this little paragraph about the author,” said Mr. Krasner. A student could do really good work on an assignment, only for the teacher to find a glaring spelling error that was made out of laziness, he pointed out.

“Make sure you check your facts,” he said. “Just because you find something on the internet does not make it accurate.”

He also encouraged anyone who wants to be a decent writer to read, read, read. “The more you read, the better writer you will be because the mechanics of writing seep right in and you don’t every realize it.”

Asked what he plans to do in the next 10 years, Mr. Krasner replied, “Keep both feet on the ground and be upright,” before adding he’d also like to develop a book with his 7-year-old granddaughter. “It would be great to see a book with her name on it with mine.”

Mr. Kranser, who was unable to realize his dream of being a professional baseball player, said he was fortunate to have had a gift for the written word. “Because I could write, I got to stay connected to baseball,” he said. “Everyone has a passion. Writing can get you connected to that passion.”

Mr. Krasner wasn’t the only Rhode Island-based author with his roots in sports to make an appearance during the day. Ben DeCastro, the “voice of the PawSox” and author of “Because Your Mommy Does CrossFit,” did two sessions for free, donating his stipends back to the school to use as it pleased. 

The writer’s process

Jaime Questell, the author of “By a Charm and a Curse” and a graphic designer from Houston, Tex., spoke to another class about her writing process and what inspires her. 

“Music is very inspiring to me,” she said. “I like music just in terms of helping me process, but when it comes to my writing … I’ll be listening to a song and I’ll see a scene. For ‘Charm and a Curse,’ I was listening to a song and I saw a girl falling, which led to the start of the story.”

Her favorite part of producing a book is the very beginning — research, determining what details you want to use, outlining and more, said Ms. Questell, who’s currently working on a fantasy book featuring familiar animals that were bred to do different things.

“For example, oversized rabbits that pull sleds,” she said, adding that she actually researched how many big rabbits would be needed to pull a sled.

Asked about the hardest scenes to write, Ms. Questell said they were the “weird, in-between scenes” — what she calls “connective tissue.” 

Last year she was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD), which, coupled with a pandemic, has made the job of writing more challenging.

“It’s been hard to figure out how to work when I’m experiencing this thing that makes me want to work, but five other things,” she said. It helps to write down notes about her characters beforehand, about how they see the world and interact with it, she said.

“But you don’t have to be stuck with what you originally put down. When I have to change a beat, I don’t feel like I’m breaking my novel; I’m sort of shifting it.”

Asked if COVID has changed what she writes about, Ms. Quesrell said it makes her want to focus on things that she misses, “like hanging out with my friends. COVID has highlighted how important interpersonal relationships are for me.”

8th-grade authors

In addition to all the professional writers the students heard from, eighth-grade student authors and readers conducted book talks and writing workshops with younger students throughout the day.

The organizing members of the All-Day Audible with Authors event were Tanin Longway (literacy coach), Sarah DelSanto (technology integration specialist), and Jillian Waugh (library media specialist). The event would also not have been possible without the support of  Principal Joao Arruda and Assistant Principal Lisa Goodwin.