I should know. I played baseball from the time I was 5 until I was 20. Fifteen years, all at the same position of shortstop. My baseball memories are endless and I still, 23 years after my last game, wake up from dreams where I am in the dugout having some ridiculous conversation, or standing at the batting cage waiting to take my cuts, or walking into the batter’s box to lead off an inning.

I once dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. Would I have been tempted by performance-enhancing drugs? I turned into a writer instead, so perhaps the question I should be asking is, what if there were a drug I could take to make me a better storyteller, or more prolific with a hyphen, or able to slice through a 300-page edit in half the time?

I’m not talking about traditional writer standbys like booze or pills or wild, obsessive lovers. Or hard work. These have all been known to transform a writer from something into something else. I’m talking about a fat pill I could swallow once in the morning and once at night, and then sit back and reap the benefits of a stronger, faster novel-writing me.

Would I?

It’ll get you on the best-seller list and keep you there, my dealer would say. In half the time, he’d say. You will write sentences that will leap off the page and slap readers until they laugh or cry and then slap them again. You will have so many ideas for characters and stories that you will have to hire an assistant to walk around with you and record the brilliance that will exude from your lips while you are in between bites of scrambled eggs, and you’ll need to eat a lot of eggs. Your fingers will become agile and muscular and you will tear through keyboards so fast that you will have to order them by the half-dozen.

Before the papers are finished reviewing your latest brilliant novel, you will be able to pass another brilliant novel on to your editor, who will have learned by now that there is no reason to even read it, just get it to the printer. Really, man. Really. One in the morning and one at night.