climber for a tree company. I absolutely loved it. It was amazing work, and potentially very dangerous. You had to be very precise and skilled and monkey-like. I made good money doing it. Some days I made a thousand dollars. Other days I took home a hundred.
When I was thirty I ran into my chainsaw while I was up in a tree and tore up my leg. While I was recuperating, I got this idea to write a book about dangerous jobs. People get killed on low-paid, often disrespected, blue-collar jobs all the time. The country depends on those jobs, and yet we rarely think about the people who do them.
I wrote up a proposal for a book called
The Perfect Storm
, about a fishing boat that sank during a huge storm outside Gloucester, Massachusetts, the town where I lived. I gave the proposal to my agent, and then I went off to Bosnia. I figuredthat either my agent would sell my book and I’d feel like I’d just slid into home base, or he wouldn’t sell it, and I’d become a war reporter. I flew to Vienna and took the train to Zagreb and I hooked up with some freelance writers. I didn’t have an assignment. I just had this idea that if you jump off a cliff, you learn to fly.
I landed right in the center of incredible world events. I’d saved up some money and I was living cheaply with other freelancers, sharing expenses. In Zagreb the food is good, the land is gorgeous, the women are very beautiful, and the war had a clear right and wrong. That’s about as good as it gets if you’re a thirty-year-old guy.
I started filing radio reports—thirty-second voice spots for various radio networks. It paid nothing, but it was legitimate news reporting. I wrote lots of articles, most of which didn’t get published. The
Christian Science Monitor
published one.
Then one day in 1994 a guy I was living with tracked me down, yelling, “Hey, man, you got a fax.” It was from my agent. I wish I’d saved it. It said, “I sold your book, you’ve got to come home.” I was actually a little disappointed. I didn’t want to leave. But he’d gotten me a thirty-five-thousand-dollar advance, so of course I did. I would have written that book for ten bucks.
It took me three years to write it. I was living in my parents’ unheated summer house on Cape Cod. I kept doing tree work, because I figured I needed a backup plan.
A perfect storm
There’s a bright line in journalism between fact and fiction. I feel very strongly about holding that line. As a journalist, you can’t just
imagine
a scene or a conversation.
Halfway through writing
The Perfect Storm
I hit a terrifying dilemma. I was writing a book about a boat that disappeared. As soon as the boat left shore, I lost the thread. What do you say about a boat that disappeared? Where’s the action? What are people saying to one another? What does it feel like to die on a ship in a storm? I had a big hole in the middle of my narrative, and I couldn’t fill it with fiction.
Everything I know about writing came from reading other people’s good work—Tobias Wolff, Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, Richard Preston. In
The Hot Zone
Preston had faced a similar problem. His central character died, so he had holes in the narrative. He filled them by using the conditional tense. He said to the reader, “We don’t know, but maybe he said this, maybe he did that. We know his fever was 106, so he would have felt that.”
I realized that I could propose possible scenarios to my readers without lying. As long as I was honest about the fact that these were simply possibilities to be considered, it stayed within the rules of journalism. So I found other boats that had survived a storm and listened to their radio contacts. I could say, “We don’t know what happened on my guys’ boat, but we know what happened on this other one.” I interviewed a guy whose boat had flipped over in heavy seas, and he’d found himself with a lungful of air in a sinking boat. He told me what he thought had happened with
When I was thirty I ran into my chainsaw while I was up in a tree and tore up my leg. While I was recuperating, I got this idea to write a book about dangerous jobs. People get killed on low-paid, often disrespected, blue-collar jobs all the time. The country depends on those jobs, and yet we rarely think about the people who do them.
I wrote up a proposal for a book called
The Perfect Storm
, about a fishing boat that sank during a huge storm outside Gloucester, Massachusetts, the town where I lived. I gave the proposal to my agent, and then I went off to Bosnia. I figuredthat either my agent would sell my book and I’d feel like I’d just slid into home base, or he wouldn’t sell it, and I’d become a war reporter. I flew to Vienna and took the train to Zagreb and I hooked up with some freelance writers. I didn’t have an assignment. I just had this idea that if you jump off a cliff, you learn to fly.
I landed right in the center of incredible world events. I’d saved up some money and I was living cheaply with other freelancers, sharing expenses. In Zagreb the food is good, the land is gorgeous, the women are very beautiful, and the war had a clear right and wrong. That’s about as good as it gets if you’re a thirty-year-old guy.
I started filing radio reports—thirty-second voice spots for various radio networks. It paid nothing, but it was legitimate news reporting. I wrote lots of articles, most of which didn’t get published. The
Christian Science Monitor
published one.
Then one day in 1994 a guy I was living with tracked me down, yelling, “Hey, man, you got a fax.” It was from my agent. I wish I’d saved it. It said, “I sold your book, you’ve got to come home.” I was actually a little disappointed. I didn’t want to leave. But he’d gotten me a thirty-five-thousand-dollar advance, so of course I did. I would have written that book for ten bucks.
It took me three years to write it. I was living in my parents’ unheated summer house on Cape Cod. I kept doing tree work, because I figured I needed a backup plan.
A perfect storm
There’s a bright line in journalism between fact and fiction. I feel very strongly about holding that line. As a journalist, you can’t just
imagine
a scene or a conversation.
Halfway through writing
The Perfect Storm
I hit a terrifying dilemma. I was writing a book about a boat that disappeared. As soon as the boat left shore, I lost the thread. What do you say about a boat that disappeared? Where’s the action? What are people saying to one another? What does it feel like to die on a ship in a storm? I had a big hole in the middle of my narrative, and I couldn’t fill it with fiction.
Everything I know about writing came from reading other people’s good work—Tobias Wolff, Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, Richard Preston. In
The Hot Zone
Preston had faced a similar problem. His central character died, so he had holes in the narrative. He filled them by using the conditional tense. He said to the reader, “We don’t know, but maybe he said this, maybe he did that. We know his fever was 106, so he would have felt that.”
I realized that I could propose possible scenarios to my readers without lying. As long as I was honest about the fact that these were simply possibilities to be considered, it stayed within the rules of journalism. So I found other boats that had survived a storm and listened to their radio contacts. I could say, “We don’t know what happened on my guys’ boat, but we know what happened on this other one.” I interviewed a guy whose boat had flipped over in heavy seas, and he’d found himself with a lungful of air in a sinking boat. He told me what he thought had happened with
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