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.

A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing: Part 6

(This is the penultimate installment of a serialized essay on a crucial moment in gathering courage to write.)




Dinner: carpaccio, kiwi sorbet, duck a l'orange. A very good red wine. ...And Francis Ford Coppola, we finally realized, was eating only one table away. I'd thought that man looked familiar. Big and bearded, the famous screenwriter and director was supervising the dinners of the two children who were with him. He seemed to me a man who wanted his privacy, who did not want to be noticed.

Next morning: lying in bed, reflections of the water outside racing across the ceiling. I could understand Coppola's wanting to be left alone. My first novel Revelation has a bone-honesty that was painful for me. The story of a troubled minister, it is fiction; yet that minister's cast of mind is close to my own. Delicious as publication of that book was, I also came to feel as if my brain had been laid bare. As one reader said to me with a teasing grin, "we know you thought those thoughts." I've since half-consciously wanted to pull the drapes around myself.

But then I discovered it's impossible to write a memoir and maintain more than a minimal privacy. The new book would have to be far more revealing than Revelation, with its mere hints of my inner world. This made me angry, I resented it; but decided to proceed anyway. With a sense that I was doing violence to myself, I began the long work of dismantling the habits of guardedness, fearing of course, as I still do, that I might reveal myself only to find no one interested.

A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing: Part 5

(This is part of a serialized story about a creative crisis on an ocean liner leading me to stronger writing. To begin at the beginning, go to the August posts and begin with August 10, then scroll forward for other segments.)


On deck, midway through the voyage: my manuscript in my lap, the sounds of deck tennis behind me, the passing waves pure navy blue. The thought of actually writing--doing the thing that has been for me a way of life--makes me want to sob.

Skimming a few pages, I jotted a note: cut to the chase faster, make it more visual, more concrete. ...Then pushed it aside, took up a novel of Doris Lessing's, Summer Before the Dark. I was too restless to read, moved to another chair that got more sun. Still couldn't settle; I gave up and started walking the deck, up and down steps, through hallways, out again into the air, covering many lengths of football field.

...And came unexpectedly to a stop before the door of the computing center, deep in the ship's interior. The room was quiet, between classes. I sat down at a PC, got out my notes, started to type: I'm in India, my city Varanasi has erupted in street fighting, been shut down by police and military troops. A million people forced indoors day and night. After six days, I've decided to break curfew, go outside; I've been assured that foreigners are safe. "Stepping out the gate in front of the flat," I write, "I looked up and down the empty road. I felt tentative, as if I were testing the ground to be sure it would hold me...."

Breaking curfew--that, I realize, is what I've begun to do in my writing. Stepping outside of confinement to see where that leads. ...A great stirring of talking and laughing behind me: the computer class had arrived. I'd written only three paragraphs. Yet I felt exultant. It wasn't because of the plain sentences I'd gotten down. Instead, simply by recognizing what I was doing, I felt as if I'd taken a step toward freer expression.

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.