Why We Write (12 page)

I support every effort to make writing
live
for people—to help people understand how books enrich their lives, and to encourage writers to write books that do actually enrich people’s lives. If the crisis in reading helps writers focus on what it
is they actually have to say, that will not solve the problem but will still be a good thing.

N
o matter how many more blockbuster books he writes (he’s had four bestsellers to date), or award-winning documentaries he makes (
Restrepo
won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2010), Sebastian Junger is likely to be best known, always, for his first book and for its movie adaptation. Who among us hasn’t used the phrase “a perfect storm?” Who among us can hear that phrase without conjuring George Clooney at the helm of a tiny, toylike fishing boat being tossed about in the churl and chop of monster waves?

Another phrase that will be forever associated with Sebastian Junger is “quintessential war reporter.” Junger has reported from some of the world’s most dangerous war zones, including Nigeria and Afghanistan—where he wrote for
Vanity Fair
and filmed
Restrepo
with his close friend and colleague Tim Hetherington, who was killed by mortar fire in 2011 while reporting from the front lines of the Libyan civil war. About the death of his colleague and dear friend, Junger told me, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Sebastian Junger

Why I write

When I’m writing, I’m in an altered state of mind.

I’m at my desk. I usually have some music playing, and a cup of coffee. Back when I smoked I had an ashtray and a cigarette; when I was trying to keep from smoking I always had some Nicorette gum in my mouth.

I’m usually not writing fiction, so I’m not wracking my brain for good ideas. My good ideas come from the world. I harvest them but I don’t have to think them up. All I have to do is take these things I’ve seen—things people have said to me, things I’ve researched, artifacts from the world—and convert them into sequences of words that people want to read. It’s this weird alchemy, a kind of magic. If you do it right, it will get read.

When I write a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter that’s good, I know it, and I know people are going to read it. That knowledge—Oh my God, I’m doing it, I’m doing this thing again that works—it’s just exhilarating. Lots of times I fail at it, and I know it’s not good, and it gets deleted.

But when it’s good…it’s like going on a date that’s going well. There’s an electricity to the process that’s exciting and incomparable to anything else.

Up a tree without a paddle

I wrote my first novel in seventh grade—longhand, in a green-and-white composition notebook. My teacher read it aloud to the class, chapter by chapter. No wonder I didn’t have any friends.

I didn’t give any thought to writing as a profession until the year after I graduated college. I’d written a good thesis; I was on fire the whole time I was writing the thing. I moved to Boston and freelanced once in a while for publications like the
Boston Phoenix.
I got a few short stories published. I got an agent and proceeded to not make a dime for him during the next decade or so. I didn’t achieve any kind of critical mass, creatively or financially. I hacked through a lot of underbrush with a dull knife. In a decade of writing I might have made five thousand dollars. I learned what it feels like to work and work and work with no guaranteed outcome. Or no outcome at all!

I did a lot of random jobs, trying to figure out what to do. I worked in a bar. I worked construction. I managed to get a few assignments from the editor of the
City Paper
, and my articles got some attention. Then, in my late twenties, I got a job as a high 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 figured
that 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 the crew of the
Andrea
Gail
, so I could tell that to the reader. I filled the holes legitimately, not with imaginings. Solving that problem was superexciting for me.

Success brings joy—and misery

The Perfect Storm
came out in the spring of ’97. The publisher had hopes for it, but no one knew it was going to be as big as it was. It was on the bestseller list for three or four years; it was number one for a while. The movie sold to Warner Bros. for decent money. It felt like doors were just flying open for me. It was a complete writer’s fantasy.

I was very proud of the book, but going from being a private person to being in that kind of spotlight was pretty excruciating. I was scared of public speaking, and suddenly I was on a book tour, speaking every day, sometimes in front of thousands of people, absolutely petrified.

The media does this weird thing. If they decide they like you, they paint an unrealistic portrait of you that no one could possibly live up to. I’m five foot eight, and people I met kept saying, I assumed you were six foot three. What was it about my book that made me tall? If you have a healthy amount of insecurity, it gives you a much bigger dose. It caused me to do a lot of painful self-examination. I felt myself shrinking. Every day I was miserable. It never got better.

So I didn’t make the mistake of writing a second book right away, which is what everyone expected me to do. I went back to reporting for magazines overseas in Kosovo, Liberia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Chad, and other places. I was writing about situations that were seriously desperate. What I and other
journalists did could potentially save lives by drawing the attention of the world. There were plenty of reporters with more experience, but if I wrote about Sierra Leone in
Vanity Fair
, for example, it often got attention because of my new visibility as an author.