On bad days of writing, days when I achieve little to no writing or, worse, days when the writing is so bad that I am ready to throw in the proverbial towel, I try to delete that day from my memory and start over the next day, as though that previous day never happened. I look at things I’d written previously, that have been published, to convince myself that I am indeed capable of writing cogent prose.
I returned to the Island in 2004, after doing research in eight countries for a story in National Geographic Magazine about the growing popularity of Buddhism in the West. Living at the Milton Mazer House, off of Music Street in West Tisbury, I set to work. Six months later, it was not going well. I was overwhelmed and paralyzed by the amount of material I had gathered on tape, in books, and from my own field notes.
Then it started going too well. I had pounded out 13,000 words for a 4,500-word assignment. My editor told me to go back to work, and quickly. That night, as I tossed and turned in a fitful sleep, a mantra kept echoing in my brain: “You can do this; you can turn this defeat around.” In my panicked frenzy, I started thinking of advice from friends in the publishing world.
A veteran editor had suggested: “Imagine you’re at a cocktail party” – which I could easily imagine on the Island – “and someone who knew you’d just come back from two 10-week tours of the world asked, ‘Who taught you the most about Buddhism? That’s your lead.’”
Thinking of that tip, I came up with my opening line: “The man who taught me the most about Buddhism wasn’t a monk with a shaved head.” At 3 am, I shot up in bed, grabbed the notebook and pen always at my bedside, and wrote it down.
Though I planned to go back to sleep, I watched my pen fly across the paper until I had written the next several sentences.
“…He didn’t speak Sanskrit, and he didn’t live in a Himalayan monastery. In fact he wasn’t even a Buddhist. He was Carl Taylor, a lifelong San Franciscan who looked to be in his late 40s. At the moment, he appeared cold, sitting upright in a bed rolled into the gardens off the hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital. It was a blue-sky summer afternoon, but in this city that often means a bone-penetrating chill. Carl was dying of cancer.”
I moved to my laptop and by 9 am I sent those words to my editor, to which he replied with one word: “Wow.” Meaning I was on my way and I should keep writing. Eventually, those exact words appeared in the magazine.
Most of the time, as writers, we wrestle alone with our manuscripts, praying for our Muse to deliver solutions on silver platters. Thankfully, Martha’s Vineyard has long been a repository of gifted writers, some of whom are more than willing to share their expertise with other struggling wordsmiths. This was the case for me when I had had a brief but process-changing opportunity to draw wisdom from one of the island’s most prolific and renowned authors.
David McCullough, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote and lived on Music Street, around the corner from that Mazer house where I was living, once shared a tip that to this day informs how I write. Back in my first years living year-round on the Island and working on that Geographic story and then my first book, photographer and Island fixture Peter Simon (also now passed) had invited me to join a group of Island writers who met irregularly for cocktails, gossip and the inevitable shop talk. One time the group invited McCullough to speak about how he crafts longform, meticulously researched books. In turn, he invited the group to his home. We gathered around on a lawn in his backyard, like devotees sitting at the feet of their guru, listening intently to his every word, and then he gave a brief tour of his writing shack..brief because it was tiny and shack because it actually had been a tool shed, converted into an airtight office efficiently organized to utilize every available corner.
He said he thinks of writing as though he was a bricklayer. You have to secure each brick with mortar before you can add another brick. You have to make sure each layer is solidly in place before you can build the next layer. The metaphor was obvious: the same holds true with any sentence or paragraph or chapter – all held together with transitions rather than mortar. And while I still had days of difficult writing I tried to delete from my brain, I found the mortar and the bricks I needed to complete the National Geographic story, which was published in December 2005.
As a world-traveling working journalist, I’ve written often about places of interest in some 35 countries. These places have left indelible impressions on me, informing my outlook on the world around me and the world within me. The Vineyard, which I have written about for the New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, and others, continues to teach me the essentials of the writing life – and of my life.
Perry Garfinkel, the author most recently of “Becoming Gandhi” (Sounds True, 2024), was a features editor at the MV Times in the late 1990s and now lives in Berkeley, California. perrygarfinkel.com