A story about writing came up the other day. I had told this story to an online friend some time ago and we had been out of touch for about a year and then she came back a couple of weeks ago. I started to tell the story and she said she had heard it and that she had told it to friends of hers. I asked what their reaction was. “They laughed,” she said. And that, I told her, is why we don’t share much of the process, but here is the story anyway.
That book in the left column “Keep the Round Side Down,” took almost twenty years to write.
It started in the mid 70s as a short story tall tale. I used to write those for fun, practice, if you will, with no intention of ever publishing any of them. It is like the pianist doesn’t go to Carnegie Hall and play scales and these were scales to me. One followed another over the years and I found people enjoyed hearing me read them, as my daughter attests in that nice review she put on Amazon.
In the early 80s I began driving boats and because of the adventures I had with killer whales came to be called Orca by people for a while.
One night I began to fantasize how someone named Orca would get that name and another tall tale developed, only this went on for a while. I wrote several more with the same character. It eventually developed into a novel in which the boy Orca saved a pod of orcas from a catcher crew that was collecting them for a marine zoo, somewhat akin to Sea World. (My interaction with Sea World is another story) I worked on it for several years intermittently, in between other writing projects, boat adventures, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Somewhere in that time a friend told a friend of his about the stories, someone who ran a small Alaska publishing house. I eventually gave her the short stories but not the novel.
That was because in the interim Disney had come out with the “Free Willie” movies and my story looked so much like that, it would have been ridiculed, so I figured that was a lost cause, more practice, more scales.
The publisher eventually came back to me liking the stories but wanting what she called a framing tale to connect them all. I showed her the Orca stories but told her of my apprehension about accusations of copying. I suggested maybe I could rework it with a different ending, She liked it and the book is the result of that.
Now, here is the real part of the story within the story: One day I marched to the Post Office (this was before Internet and such)with the last submission, the book had been written, edited, corrected, revised and this was the last mailing.
I remember handing it reluctantly across the counter to the fellow in the Post Office and once it was out of my hands I walked over to our favorite watering hole thinking I would celebrate. I sat down, ordered a beer began to take a sip, when an almost tangible overwhelming sadness came over me. A realization. It hit me that I had just said goodbye to a whole group of friends. For the past 20 years of my life all those characters had been with me every day in one form or another, friends I could play with at my whim, kindred spirits, mates, foes, lovers, fellow adventurers. And now they were gone, they wouldn’t be there the next day, I had passed them into the care of another person. It had left me feeling empty and alone.
The bartender who knew I had mailed the manuscript for the last time came over and asked me what was wrong, she had sensed my mood. I looked at her and said I just lost a whole bunch of friends today. She smiled at me and she said she thought she understood. I think she did. It goes to that poem somewhere in this blog that John Updike wrote about marching through a novel:
“I love them though I march them to finish them off” but in my own case with the hope they always sail with the round side down.
I put that picture up there just because I like it. It was taken by our friend Annie Daly on the voyage of the Kaisei last summer.
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