A conversation about Everything That Dunks Must Converge

As the NBA blogosphere has expanded, fan fiction has been a small but pervasive niche. It may never escape it’s niche but with the release of Everything That Dunks Must Converge — a 50,000+ word fiction masterpiece, using NBA players past and present as characters — Bryan Harvey is ready to make it big.

Organized into three acts, Everything That Dunks Must Converge features original illustrations and photoshops from Daniel Rowell, Todd Whitehead, Mike Langston, and Elliot Gerard. The entire sprawling narrative comes from the mind of Harvey, a teacher and freelance writer who has been published at The Classical, The Cauldron, and Hardwood Paroxysm, among many others.

To get a taste of Harvey’s literary style, here is an excerpt from Act 1.

"Bill Walton sat straight up in his chair, stretched out his arm, and moved his pawn from E2 to E4. He knew the center of the board was where the blood would be spilled, and he wanted to do the spilling. He wanted to be in control.He let his hand linger on the head of the pawn, tweaked it like the nipple of some bare chested Hindu goddess and then used the same hand to push a button on the timer, handing possession of the game over to his adversary, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a man Bill had wanted to defeat ever since preschool, when Kareem’s elaborate block tower, that looked like the Taj Mahal, with the ABC’s splattered on its spires, garnered him the attention of the prettiest girl in class. When she planted a kiss on Kareem’s cheek, Bill’s measly block tower collapsed inward out of jealousy.This defeat was later followed by a Pinewood Derby debacle in which Bill’s car, while in the lead, witnessed its own front wheel spin away from the body of the car and his vehicle to victory sputtered and flipped right off the track. Needless to say, Kareem racked up several other victories as the two boys rocketed through puberty and into adulthood. There was the time Kareem broke Bill’s collarbone in backyard football, and the night when he stole Bill’s prom date and subsequently lost his virginity to her. Bill wouldn’t lose his virginity until college as a result, and now the two locked eyes again–or at least Bill tried to lock eyes with Kareem—but Kareem’s eyes slid back to the board like grains of sand, dismissing his opponent, like an hour glass does with moments of no significance."

Harvey was nice enough to spend some time with me talking about the project, its impetus and its future. Our conversation is below, along with some sample illustrations.

Bryan, I know many people will be confused when they start reading Everything that Dunks Must Converge. In a few sentences, explain what the project is and get readers in the right frame of mind to dig in.

First, I guess I should say it’s a novel with a loose grip on reality, inside and outside the NBA. The entire project focuses primarily on the last ten years of NBA competition, attempting to trace the clash between two generations of players. By 2005, the generation belonging to Kobe, Duncan, Steve Nash, KG, and Dirk sat firmly atop the league, but the 2003 draft class and guys like Amar’e Stoudemire were rapidly closing the gap. Wade’s Heat would defeat Dirk’s Mavs in the 2006 Finals. LeBron would square off against Duncan’s Spurs in 2007. Then, 2011 would see the arrival of LeBron and Bosh in Miami, along with the new CBA, which pretty much ended Melo’s run in Denver.

Basketball fans are familiar with all these results, so I think Everything That Dunks Must Converge attempts to play with these familiar narratives by making them less familiar. I also have a soft spot for the things that didn’t happen. Aside from the Melo trade and the Amar’e signing, though, none of the big names ever chose New York as a destination. I think that’s why I started Act 1 with Isiah Thomas running from his own awful decisions.

I know we all have these sorts of fever dreams, imaginative wanderings where the characters we know from basketball become stories that we create. How did this morph from idea to a 50,000+ word novel? Did you envision the project in it’s entirety, or where these collected scenes just things you started to write down?

I didn’t start off with the goal to write anywhere near what ended up happening. I still teach high school, but I used to teach creative writing. We were looking at Edward Hopper paintings as a way of starting stories. I forget the exact assignment, but I needed an example to show students. Lesson planning often involves doing things at late hours and odd times. I couldn’t think of any character names on the spot, so I used the names of some basketball players, which then started to inform the plot.

I posted that story on Mike Langston’s blog. Josh Spilker thought it was funny. We started writing more. Josh and I slapped some of those together in what became an early version of Act One. The thing is when your characters are all real people it becomes hard to know when their stories end, or when you should stop writing.

Are you done writing these stories now? Or does this project go on in your head?

I think these are done. My only regret is that guys like KG and Vince Carter got shorted in terms of story and plot. I can’t explain why Rondo became such a focal point. Any long project like this in the future would focus either on the younger players, the teams that this project left out, or would require some shift in genre or style.

I don’t know that there’s much precedent for a project like this but are there any of your own literary influences that you think people might find in here? And how true did you try and stay to your understanding of these players as characters? Or was this an opportunity to push them towards being the characters you’d maybe like them to be?

I don’t know if there’s a precedent in terms of length, but the NBA blogosphere is definitely alive and well with NBA fan fiction, incredible art, memes, and gifs. Some of this stuff reinforces the idea of narratives, but some of it definitely exaggerates the idea of narrative to the point of absurdity. Seeing the artwork of Jacob Weinstein and J.O. Applegate definitely helped in terms of being more imaginative and not necessarily worrying about is this real.

Act One of ETDMC also mentions movies like Celtic Pride and Space Jam. Plus, with movies like Game of Death, where Bruce Lee encounters Kareem, blurring the boundaries between sport and entertainment is kind of a basketball tradition. If someone’s not really into basketball, I guess they could think of the book as a much sillier version of In Our Time or Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where continuity and plot lines aren’t exactly the focal point.

I was thinking of precedent in terms of scale or scope. I project like this with so many fictional threads requires a level of commitment and fidelity that I would imagine is extremely rare. Did you see the big picture as you were writing? Or did the vignette ideas sort of arrive independently and need to be stitched together thematically?

Okay, most of the early stuff, from Act One, definitely stemmed from just a series of vignettes that were pretty much just fun, isolated blog posts, and I really had no intent of connecting them. When Josh Spilker reached out to me and we started putting the stories together as one thing, I felt the need to connect them. I think that’s when I looped Amar’e’s story into Isiah’s story, which made them a story about the struggle to make the Knicks great again.

Act Two has a bit more intention at weaving individual stories together, as seen in the bits about Wade and LeBron, and Act Three moves even more towards trying to tell some overarching story about the league. I think that can be seen with how I returned to talking about the Pacers and Clippers and Rondo, as well as the teams winning rings. It also seemed that in the five years after the CBA the narratives attached to individual players and franchises became harder and harder to view as separate things. Like, isn’t the story of a young Paul George or Lance Stephenson also the story about LeBron and vice versa? How does one talk about Dwight Howard without bringing up his relationships with either Kobe or Harden?

I’ve actually been fascinated by that idea in the past, that the NBA is something of a narrative ecosystem with all of these stories existing interconnected. Although, it can be painful when the predator-prey dynamic manifests — learning that the rise of the Pacers was just an explanatory chapter in the story of LeBron and the Miami Heat. From a technical aspect, who did this project come to its present incarnation? Why The Atavist platform? Why illustrations and these particular artists?

I like that word “ecosystem.” I don’t think I used it, but there are some scenes that make their way through marshes and swamps. For me, the Pacers’ narrative worked as a way of attempting to make protagonists out of individuals the casual fan might deem as unnecessary to the greater whole, or forget about in a few years.

I had never used Atavist until this project, but it allowed for video annotations, footnotes, and artwork. It was also pretty easy to use, and I hope will allow for You Can’t Eat the Basketball to act as a long form multimedia publisher in the future. I reached out to a handful of artists I thought might be interested. A lot of them had worked on the Hardwood Paroxysm Quarterlies. That’s how I linked up with Daniel Rowell, Todd Whitehead, and Elliot Gerard.

Elliot gave permission to reuse his Rondo piece from the HPQ3, which was awesome. Daniel and Rowell just kept offering up more and more illustrations and images. I was blown away by a lot of what they did, especially Todd’s Act Two and Three depictions of Dwyane Wade and Lance Stephenson, and Daniel’s artwork for Duncan’s Coda is extremely detail-oriented. Mike Langston is a longtime friend, and I’ve always enjoyed his photo shop skills. To be honest, all four of the guys who contributed artwork are just genuinely fun, creative people willing to try anything and who pushed me to write more too.

How long had you been working on this? And now, with it out and published, do you feel creatively sated? Or is has awoken a narrative hunger?

The earliest chapter drafts were from 2009 or 2010, but I don’t think any of what I wrote then hasn’t been altered or extended. The last portions I wrote sometime in September or August of this year. I really don’t think I have much left to say fan fiction wise about the last ten years or so, unless it’s about the Bulls or any other franchise that wasn’t featured prominently here. One thing that makes me not want to stop is the collaborative experience of working with guys like Todd, Mike, Daniel, and Elliot.

What’s next for You Can’t Eat The Basketball?

It would be great to organize some sort of collaborative project for either next spring or summer, where multiple writers come together, with perhaps each writer handling a chapter, or pairing each fictive chapter with a something more traditional or data-based. Other than that, I think it’s a matter of what happens on the court dictating where any future projects go. In other words, I think it all depends on Russell Westbrook.

You can find all three acts of Everything That Dunks Must Converge here.

Cover art by Daniel Rowell.