More From the Director...
Like many of you, I have followed a long road to this place, here in St. Andrews By the Sea. For twenty eight years, following a dream like most of yours-- that dream of becoming writers who make our way through the world on the strength and integrity of our words, and along the way write something that deprives this world of some of its indifference.
I think back now to the point of origin of this dream.
A long time ago… I barely made it through college and took a job in a management training program to run a Holiday Inn hotel. They sent me to Batavia, New York, a few miles from Attica State Prison. I bought three suits and a brand new car with the plastic still on the seats. My first night there the manager had me for dinner at his special table in the hotel dining room. He was giving me the lay of the land, describing the rhapsodies of working for Holiday Inn. When he told me that you got to work 50 weeks a year in a Holiday Inn and then take a free vacation in any other Holiday Inn in the world, something snapped inside my head and I knew right then that I would never make it in the real world of holding down jobs and building up a retirement account.
I went back to my room and stood at the window for a few moments looking out at my brand new car parked five yards away. Then I packed up my stuff and left just before midnight. I drove all night. In a little town in New Hampshire the next morning, I walked into the library and sat down with a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. I read Hamlet, then slept the night in my car. For the next three days I read three more plays and decided I would become a writer. That was it. Come hell or high water, as they used to say, I was going to become a writer.
I started writing feature stories for Maine newspapers. I was awful until an editor told me that I was always standing in between the reader and the subject of my story and that I needed to move away so the reader could draw close to the story. I sold stories for the next three years while I worked a whole series of dumb jobs that I kept quitting.
Then it was the winter of 1977 and I had moved to a small tourist town way up the coast of Maine. They had a weekly newspaper there and the old editor had died recently. I begged for the job and got it. I was sitting at the editor’s desk my second day on the job. There was a blizzard tearing through the town. Every summer store was boarded up. The little light on my desk was the only light on in town. I looked up from the black Royal typewriter and there was a man walking through the storm, straight to my door. In that moment, I felt my life as a writer begin to turn.
He was a big man, maybe six five, with wide shoulders. He kicked the snow off his boots and asked me if I was the new editor. I said I was. He said he had a story to tell me. He had just sat down when the telephone rang. Someone wanted me to hurry to the dock to take a photograph of the storm tide ripping a restaurant off the pier and carrying it out of the harbor. I asked the man if he could come back and see me the next day. He said he would.
The next morning on his way to see me he dropped dead of a heart attack. Just fell into the snow. And I ended up writing his obituary that week instead of his story.
But I met his widow and she told me he had been a young soldier in the army during the Korean War. They had just had their first baby when he left for the war. Six months after he got there he was captured by the Chinese army. He was a POW for three years, held in a cave for most of that time. He lost over a hundred pounds and was very sick. For a while the POWS were in the hands of a sadistic Chinese commander who would pick one American soldier each night to tie to a pole in the freezing cold. Then he would put a rat in a wooden bowl and strap the bowl to the man’s stomach. All through the night the man would howl with pain while the rat ate its way through him. So this soldier cut a deal with the commander- he said, ‘If I get my men to sign germ warfare confessions will you stop this crazy shit?’ It worked and no other prisoners were executed.
Three years later the soldier comes home to America and it’s the McCarthy era. The United States army accused the soldier of being a traitor. They court-martialed him and all the men he kept alive in the cave, testified against him. This was just a little man from Maine with no education. He loved the Army so much that he refused to hire a lawyer to protect him. He said, ‘The Army will know that what I did over there in Korea, I did to keep my men alive.’ Well, the Army sent him to prison on a life sentence.
They held him for three years then released him. All his life he claimed he was innocent and his wife believed him. Now that he was dead she asked me if I could find the truth. “I need to know the truth,” she said to me.
I thought it might take me six months. It ended up taking me six years. I wrote that as my first published book, A SOLDIER’S DISGRACE. It was a failure. I made the mistake of letting the book be published by a small regional publisher. From that point on I promised myself that I would never publish another book unless it was published by the big publishers in New York. Why? Because writing books is so damned hard, if you’re going to do it, you want a publisher who can distribute your book all over the world. You want people in Paris France to find a copy.
Anyway, here’s how I wanted to end that story: If you believe in what you are writing, keep at it and borrow money if you have to in order to survive. I was about deeply in debt for the six years it took me to write that book. Then one day Paramount Pictures bought the book and I was suddenly swimming in money on the fourth floor of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Hollywood. Champaign in the fridge. Warren Beatty down the hallway. A red convertible for me to drive while I was in LA. The whole deal.
That first book finally taught me to write well enough to get into the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Iowa led to two novels published in New York. I had married Colleen by then and we had two babies in three years. Then two more babies. Colleen’s dream was to stay home with the kids while they were little and so we had to find cheap places to live in this world. I mean to survive on my novels.
We went to County Wicklow in Ireland. A cottage in the country for $85 a month. I had to hitch hike five miles to do the laundry. It was awesome. A beautiful time I long to have back. We were all so happy. Then we were living up the coast of Maine, house-sitting right on the ocean for five years. Four little children under the age of 7. We didn’t even own a bed. Nothing we couldn’t fit into our bomb station wagon with no seatbelts that worked. No health insurance. Hand me down clothes for the kids. We were so happy, so close as a family.
Here’s something- my daughters were 12, 14,16 when I finally bought them their first nice dresses. I had just learned that one of my screenplays was going to be made into a movie. So I took the girls to Hollywood and we celebrated. But I was 50 years old by then and had never been able to buy them nice dresses. That might happen to you as writers. But the other side is that I had spent every day of their lives with them. At home with them. One summer I played 84 rounds of golf with my fourteen year old son, Jack. That’s more than many sons and fathers play together in a lifetime. And as a poor writer I got to spend 13 summers on the ocean in Maine with my children. Afternoons on the beach. Sailing a small boat every summer day. God watches out for writers who want their books to make the world better in some way. I believe this.
Money. Being a writer has a lot to do with learning to live on no money. You already know this. You feel it everyday; I mean, the sacrifices you are already making for your writing.
Things will work out for you. I was just beginning a college teaching career at Colgate University. A wonderful job with wonderful students and I thought we would stay forever. No more worrying about money! But I got fired after a year (the politics at that school were brutal). Suddenly there we were with no money again. I couldn’t buy the kids winter coats. I finally found a job working on a construction site on the ocean in Maine. I was 43 by then. We built a mansion that winter. A 12,000 square foot house with 10 bathrooms. 10 hour days working outside all winter. Some mornings it was 26 below zero when we started.
Someone told me I should write about this. I didn’t know why, but I did. It became a cover story for Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. And I got a book contract from Little Brown and wrote a book about that year. THE CLIFF WALK. A family story. Then Disney bought it for a movie. Disney and the best producer in Hollywood, Kathleen Kennedy who had done “Schindler’s list.”
We were suddenly able to go back to Ireland! Off we went.
That book in 1997 led to something amazing. My father and I had been estranged for fifteen years. Then he saw me on the Today Show and he sent me something in the mail. A small black and white photograph of him on his wedding day, sitting beside his bride. On the back of the photograph he wrote, “Peggy and Me.” He told me that she was my real mother. He’d never said anything to me about her for all these years. It turned out that my mother had died 16 days after giving birth to me and my twin brother. She was nineteen years old. Nineteen. I was now old enough to be her father. No one ever told us about her because they didn’t want us to go through the world knowing we had killed her in childbirth. I mean we lived two hundred yards from her grave and no one ever took us there.
So this became another book, Of Time & Memory. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in NY. A magnificent editor there who taught me so much. And writing a screenplay adaptation of the book has become my life’s work now. I want to make it the one masterpiece that I leave behind.
About a month after that book was published I was up early with the radio on, National public radio. News of a bombing in Northern Ireland in the town of Omagh. The IRA had chosen that day to set off the bomb in the center of the town because that was the particular morning when mothers took their children into town to buy their back to school uniform. 39 people slaughtered. Most of them mothers and children. Hundreds wounded. We never think about the wounded. There are now fifteen people in that town who had both feet blown off in the blast. And there are more than twenty people who were so horribly disfigured that they wear masks over their faces. If you were to go to Omagh tomorrow you would see the people in their wax masks.
I heard that radio news and I knew that I had to go there right away. Because I wanted to bear witness to what had happened. Because I had been there with my own little children and we had been so happy.
Twenty hours later I was walking through the wreckage of the town. So much suffering. It was unreal. The children all wear little patches on the school blazers; these patches were scatter all over the streets like leaves.
I ended up attending thirteen funerals, walking in the long processions to the grave yards. Then I stayed in a hotel for a month and began writing a novel about it. NIGHT CROSSING. I fictionalized everything except the name of one woman who was killed in the bombing. She was holding the hand of her three year old daughter, and two weeks from delivering the twin girls in her belly. All of them were killed. I went to her funeral. They buried the four of them together. The only square grave I had ever seen. (Bono sings about this bombing in U-2 Slane Castle concert). Someday I am going to go back to find out how the husband ever survived such a loss. If he survived at all.
After that book I wrote two more novels, one with Simon & Schuster, the other with Doubleday. Neither of these turned out to be as good as I had hoped when I began them. That’s part of what makes writing so difficult and at times unbearable. But we can only do our best. And I have come to believe now that if we can say two or three things in a book or movie that matter to us as writers, then we haven’t failed.
Our job of course is to write books and stories and poems that go on to remind people that they aren’t alone. I mean, years from now, many years, someone you never knew will read something you wrote and see that you felt the same way. The same loneliness. The same confusion. Your work has dignity because you struggled with the important feelings and questions.
At the Retreat I will try to persuade you that you can write your way through the world. If you work hard enough. If you are willing to throw yourself away for your writing. If you can set aside all the desires that we are constantly encouraged to adopt as our own. The desire for a new car, a bigger couch, better hair, etc. We have to turn our backs against that. It’s not easy; think of it-- the whole system of capitalism falls to pieces if we are satisfied with what we already have.
You can make it if you persevere. And it doesn’t come down to talent. I’ve seen young writers squander their talent. Hard work can’t be squandered because it carries its own rewards. Hard work and defiance are the most important things.
Defiance. When my novel, FALLEN ANGEL, was sold to Hallmark Hall of Fame, my agent in LA told me to forget about asking to write the screenplay adaptation. I’d sold four books to Hollywood and I’d never fought for the chance to write the script myself. This time I wasn’t going to be placated. So I got the chance. It was made in 2003 and became the highest rated television movie that year. It ran again the next year, only the second time in many years that Hallmark has run the same movie twice in two years.
So you can prevail if you find your defiance. And if you work harder than you have even imagined.
And sometimes the hard work brings you some fun! Making the movie was terrific fun. Think of this. I drove to the set in northern Ontario into a small town and when I arrived I found that the whole town had been transformed into the fictional town in my screenplay. Even the names of the streets had been changed. It was like walking through a dream. I had written the novel locked away in a room for a year. Then I’d locked myself away for another nine months to write the script. And now it was all alive, right in front of me. And bringing Colleen there was the most fun I’ve ever had in 28 years of writing. Making movies is fun! You should think about doing it. And selling your screenplays enables you to provide for the people you love.
Okay, the end. I hope you make it to St. Andrews. I’ll have your breakfast waiting for you each morning.
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