Tropical storm warnings
by Christine Kling
I’m sitting in my little Florida efficiency apartment tonight listening to the howl of the wind round the sliding glass door and the constant shushing of the rain pouring down outside. Yes, I’ve arrived back home to Florida just in time to say hello to the outer bands of Hurricane Sandy, which is passing over the central Bahamas tonight. It is because of storms like this that so many boats are down in Trinidad right now, where they know that statistically they are very unlikely to experience a hurricane. Here in Florida, not so much.
Sandy has already claimed 21 lives as she steered her way north across Jamaica and Cuba. As to how many boats have suffered, who knows. And right now she is just brushing by the southeastern US, but heading for the northeast coast.
My boat, Talespinner, is outside my condo building here snugged up to her side-tie along the canal, and when I went down at dusk to check her lines and fenders, the water was almost up to the level of the dock – a sure sign that that the South Florida Water Management folks had opened the flood gates to prepare for this long night of rain on the Everglades just to the west of us. I sat down below in the cabin as the wind howled and she pulled at her lines, but tonight we aren’t expected to get anything like they will get out in the islands. Here at the condo docks, liveaboards are illegal but I was tempted to break the rules and spend the night aboard anyway. I felt a bit like a traitor when I put in the drop boards and headed upstairs to cook dinner for my son.
At the time, I wondered if a “real” sailor wouldn’t have stayed there with the boat. While we aren’t forecast to get winds stronger than 45 knots, still one never knows when dealing with a tropical storm. And when I was down in Trinidad visiting with sailors who had arrived there from Europe, South Africa and North America many of them asked me where I sailed on my boat and if I didn’t want to take off farther afield and become a real cruiser.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about this business of being a real sailor and/or a real writer.
I was interviewed by a reporter while I was in Trinidad via iPad video conference (FaceTime) for a story he’s doing on self-publishing, and he asked me that same question they all ask. “Do you have a writing routine? Like do you write a certain number of hours every day?” My answer is always a guilt-laden “No.” There are some days when all I do is work on the boat or go sailing or spend an entire day hanging out with friends.
Surely, if I were a real writer I would write every day like all the experts say I should. If I were a real writer, I wouldn’t feel the need to outline or make all these character sketches. I would just start writing and my characters would talk to me and tell me what is going to happen. I’ve been reading interviews and going to author readings at bookstores for years, and when writers say that they don’t even know how a book is going to end – and that if they did they would’t want to write it any more – I always start to feel like a fraud. Surely I can’t be a real writer if this process isn’t so magical for me. See, my characters don’t “talk to me.” I make them talk. I become them the same way an actor becomes his character. But at the end of the day, I know it is me doing the talking, making the decisions, writing the story. And I find, like my blogmate Michael expressed a few weeks ago, that when I am sailing or traveling or talking to friends, in the back of my mind I am working on my story. I am taking character traits from the people around me, asking questions that bear on my plot, and exploring places that I will need to describe on the page.
Yesterday, I had a long phone conversation with Mike J and he, too, asked me if I’d done much writing while I was down in Trinidad. We all know how hard he has been working on his boat trying to get ready to go out and head down to the islands, possibly down to the Caribbean. I could hear the guilt in his voice when he said that he just can’t manage to switch hats in the middle of the day and work on the boat for a few hours and write for a few hours. I recognized that guilt because I feel it all the time, too. That kind of guilt and self-doubt can be crippling for an author and I’ve heard the warnings in my thought processes lately, felt the outer bands sweeping across me.
Those of us who write on the water lead hybrid lives. There is no dividing line, though, no magic hat we put on to assume one role or another. Whether installing a new head or solar panels, whether flying down to visit sailing friends in Trinidad or sailing across to the Bahamas, we are still soaking up all the details of the real world so we can put them into our fiction. I know this in my head, but it’s in my gut that I feel the fear that maybe this book or this passage or this project is too big, too complicated for me, and I won’t measure up because I’m just not real enough.
So about making those characters come to life and talk to me – I guess we all do this gig differently, and that’s just not my process. But you know what would be really cool? If I could get one of my characters to stand a night watch for me!
Fair winds!
Christine
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