Stay Loyal to Your Writing Passions

On a blog called Daytips for Writers I just ran across a reference to a Ray Bradbury book which jogged my memory of a chat with him on the QE2. Which led me to tell his story on that blog, and now to bring it back here. I'd like to make sure I NEVER FORGET it again.

I interviewed Bradbury when I was writing an article on writers at work on the ship's transatlantic crossing (Francis Ford Coppola was finishing a script on that same voyage.)

Bradbury told a story about staying true to our callings. He was saying that we need to stick with our passions, however odd they may seem to others. He told about being into some cartoon spaceman for years after he was considered too old for that kind of interest. Kids made fun of him and he went home and threw out his collection of Captain Whoever.

Then as an adult he tried to succeed as a writer of mainstream nonscifi fiction. Didn't work.

On a lark, he went back to his old interest, wrote a story about a dragon. Years later he picked up the phone. It was the director John Huston. He had run across the old story about the dragon, wanted Bradbury to write a script for him that had the same feel to it. The story was about a white whale. The movie Moby Dick turned out to be Bradbury's breakthrough. And all because he came back to the fantastical that was his love.

A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing: The Final Installment

(This is the conclusion of an essay, serialized on this site, on my gathering courage for gutsier writing--and doing it on a crossing on the QE2. It ends with my three secrets for writing bolder. If you've made similar decisions in your work, please do share them in the comments. )



Staking out the lounge outside the dining room, I'd waited almost half an hour, when Francis Ford Coppola, in flowing Hawaiian shirt, arrived for lunch. "Hi," I said, getting to my feet, careful not to block his way in case he wanted to bolt and run. Could I speak with him, I said, waving my notebook as a credential, about writing on board the QE2? Was he working on a script?

With weary patience, he gestured us to two chairs, plopped down the sack holding his laptop computer. He has been writing on this voyage, he said, as he has done on this ship before.

Outside the window, fog hung thick over the water. A somber cello played from the speaker in the corner of the room. The father of the Godfather movies settled back in his chair. On this same ship, he said, he wrote sections of Godfather III. This trip, he was adapting John Grisham's novel The Rainmaker.

He likes to work by day at the gaming tables downstairs in the casino. They're the perfect height; and the process of the writing: "it's like a game." The ship is a place, he said, "in which you can have privacy, a chance of not being interrupted." I looked up from my notes. So passengers haven't been pestering him? "Only you," he said, an amused smile.

"I'll let you go," I said, half-hoping he would defend his privacy.

"No, no," dismissing the idea with a wave.

At that point, Ray Bradbury, formal in coat and tie, stopped to say hello. Coppola had a question for him he'd been meaning to ask: what were his favorite science fiction movies of all time?

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Bradbury began, "it's flawed, but the closing minutes are transcendent, with hope for the future...."

Bradbury went on to his table, and Coppola to his, to lunch with his young granddaughter. I went for a walk. Outside, the fog felt damp and oddly warm, the ocean moving in big grey swells. New York's bright skyline, its publishing offices, were more than a thousand miles behind us.

Like Coppola, I decided, I'm going to put aside my privacy, enough to tell an unguarded story. Like Bradbury, I'll stick by what I love, even if the other kids laugh. Like the Welsh, struggling to save their language, I am going to speak in my own voice. In the coming 25 years, I will tell stories that are peculiarly mine: the ones that rise, irrepressibly, to the surface, weird as sea creatures. I'm going to write those stories, whatever shape they take, whatever they cost me. I've half-known this for a while. Out here in the middle of the ocean, I can look back and see that, some time ago, I crossed a line, steamed into this territory that is new and, at the same time, home.

At Sea With My Writing: Part Four

(This is a section of a story running here in serial about a writing crisis on the ocean liner QE2 that resulted in a dramatic change in my approach to my work.)


Next day--I'm losing track of the days, and I'm not working on my book, I'm thinking about it. I've resolved to hold off writing, to think as long as I need. Easier to do here than it would be at home.

A lecture by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury: I remember my excitement when I first read a story of his in high school. Yes, he is working on a new novel on this cruise, he said, while waiting to go onstage. And he has written on this ship before. On an earlier crossing he got an idea for a new novel the night he boarded. He saw a passenger in a hallway, "some sort of English lord," a man whose face had been "horribly destroyed." Bradbury was so upset by the thought of a man losing his face that he burst into tears. And then he began writing. He finished the first 100 pages of A Graveyard for Lunatics on that voyage, working at night on a soundless typewriter.

His speech was, like my stateroom, exactly what I wanted. He told the audience how in 1929 when he was 12, he "fell in love with the future," and began collecting Buck Rogers spaceman comic strips. "All the kids in fifth grade made fun of me." And so he tore up his collection, then regretted it. Doing that, he said, "I killed myself. I killed the future. I listened to the damn fools."

He returned to Buck Rogers, whatever the other fifth-graders might think. When his big break came, years later, it was because of boyhood passions he'd held onto. Director John Huston, on reading a Bradbury story about a dinosaur, called to ask if he'd like to write a screenplay, in the same spirit, about a white whale.

A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing

(This is the opening section of an essay I wrote a few years back about an Atlantic crossing on the QE2 that altered me and my writing, that gave me greater resolution and courage. The piece was published in The Spectator in Raleigh and won an honorable mention in literary magazine Rosebud's creative nonfiction contest. A Washington Post travel editor asked to publish it, but changed her mind when I told her it had come out in a local paper, and that I was writing about a subsidized press trip. I will be publishing this here as a serial. This is Part One.)






Even from the farthest reach of the dock on New York's 53rd Street, the Queen Elizabeth 2 was too long to photograph. I couldn't, with a wide-angle lens, get the whole ship into the frame at once. So I shot it by halves, the front and then the back, not sure what I'd do with two mismatched ship halves when I got home.

This ship, the QE2, is the last of the world's transatlantic liners. The Cunard brochure had described it as three football fields long. I don't measure things in football fields. I keep score in numbers of words, copy-inches, books. It's as a writer that I was heading to sea, and not only as a travel writer with a notebook, but as a novelist bringing along a manuscript that had been too long in progress. I was running late, by years, in getting another book out, felt pressed, frustrated, discouraged. I planned to look at the manuscript, away from my usual life, see where I stood with it. (Working aboard the QE2 was an idea that had also occurred to Francis Ford Coppola, Ray Bradbury, and other writers I would soon meet toting manuscripts on this voyage.)

But there was still another reason for my taking this trip: I am approaching the anniversary of my 25th year as a freelance writer, two and a half decades typing out of one little office or another in Raleigh, North Carolina. This crossing was to be both a celebration and, optimistically, the start of my career's second half, another 25 years. I wanted to spend a week living the writer's life the way it's supposed to be, working onboard ship in a grand, leisurely way ...And heading for new territory. My destination on this voyage was the country of Wales, a place I'd never been. One of my tasks there was to research an article on the struggle of the Welsh people to keep their language alive. I sympathized with their cause; after so many years of writing for publication, I'd come to wonder how much of my own voice was alive.

(Note: I'd love to hear from anyone who has had such a question about his or her voice...and how you've dealt with the issue. )

Boldly Loyal to My Claxton Fruitcake

I adore Claxton fruitcake. Not everyone does. Some of my subtle, understated friends give me a hard time about this preference (also for milk chocolate over the bitter stuff.)

I have boldly refused to back down. This year I was given bars of my favorite cake by both my mother and my friend Carrie. A week and a half after Christmas, I have perhaps a quarter of one of them left.

Why do I love it so? I find it superbly dense and moist and fruity and nutty (70% fruit and nuts)and it has a faintly liqueur-like taste that I love (which probably comes from the orange and lemon included).

Also, if you hold a slice up to the light, it looks like stained glass. Tell me one other cake that can make that claim.


Sticking by my fruitcake publicly is good practice for taking larger stands, I think.

In an earlier post here "Stay Loyal to your Writing Passions", I repeated a story I heard writer Ray Bradbury tell on a crossing on the Queen Elizabeth 2. It was about his going back to the love that had gotten him so much ridicule in fifth grade. It was that enduring interest that made his career and allowed him to do his best work.

I don't know that fruitcake is going to do that for me. But who knows? And, like I say, it's good practice.


I hope you had a good holiday. I've been a nonblogger for two weeks, longest away ever, and I come back much refreshed.

Welcome to Mary, Lori, Muhammad, Harriet, Adityakiran, Edgington, and Shellelori.

---

Add to del.icio.us - Stumble It! - Subscribe to this feed - Digg it

---