What if Novelists Took Steroids? COLUMBUS, Miss. - WELL, Major League Baseball, you're making me depressed. I can't even revel in the satisfaction of the Braves having their longest winning streak since 2000 because every time I turn on "SportsCenter," you're there with your performance-enhancing drugs, with your suspensions, with A-Rod, Ryan Braun and then some more A-Rod. The worst part is that we all knew. We saw the broken-bat home runs. We watched Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds blow up like carnival prizes. Cheating is hardly new to baseball. Gaylord Perry, the Hall of Fame pitcher, and others like him cheated with Vaseline and nail files and sandpaper and God knows what else they could find to hide in their gloves and doctor a baseball to make it wobble and fall like a bad drunk. There have been corked bats and watered-down infields and even the World Series was fixed once upon a time. But all of that was different. It was old-fashioned, good-natured cheating. Natural cheating. The kind that adds a little color to a game that is otherwise, well, a little boring. 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. One in the morning and one at night. Your writer friends will want to know what you're doing. Who you're reading. What has happened to your fingers. And late one night, in some city where you have been celebrated and are drinking with young, stargazing M.F.A."s in a bar with a beautiful brass rail, you will tell one of your friends about the drugs, and you will say that you can get him some. If he wants. No side effects, man. It's cool. Then a few weeks later in another late night in another shiny town, you'll whisper again and this time one of the young M.F.A."s will overhear as she hangs on your every word, and a week later your editor will call. And then your publicist. And then your agent. They'll all say the same thing: Look at the front page of The New York Times. BUT you won't look because you know what it says, and you know there is a photograph of your formerly long, skinny fingers, next to a photograph of your current muscular digits. Your readers are already on Twitter, saying, "I knew it." But you knew it, too. You knew it would end this way. Cheaters always know how it's going to end. That's why they become liars, too. So I will only stare at the pretend bottle of performance-enhancing drugs that sits at the edge of my desk. Because part of the fun of being a writer is not knowing the ending before you get there.