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THE PERFECT PLACE TO WRITE?

I had always heard it said that one needs the right environment to write. That is more or less so, but what is the right environment? It’s not easy to define. What is right for one might not be right for another. For me, I started to look for the right environment a long time ago. It was a search down one dead end road after another. It was an education.

I found a number of places I liked where I could have settled down with my Hermes typewriter-Paris, Washington, D.C., Singapore, Papeete, Los Angeles, Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain and a few other places.

I liked them all. I also liked writing aboard my schooner. Not at sea, but in ports and in quiet coves around the Pacific and Asia. In the end I chose Bangkok, but first let me tell you why I made that choice.

One place I had considered was Phuket in Southern Thailand. It is beautiful. It’s picture postcard beautiful. It’s divinely beautiful. I was with my nephew, photographer Robert Stedman, who was looking for property to buy and asked me to go with him. Robert has a design studio in Singapore and wanted to build an escape pad for himself and his wife. A place in Paradise, he said-and Phuket was about as close to an earthly Paradise as one can find. We found an idyllic location on a cliff overlooking the blue, blue Andaman Sea. In the distance, tiny islands shimmered on the horizon as gentle palm trees along the dazzling white sand beach nipped at the blue sky. Here was all peace and joy. “Perfect for a writer,” Robert said. “Why don’t you build here, too? Look at that view. What a place to write.”

It sounded great. I turned it down.

After the long experience of looking for that perfect place in many climes, I now have a place to write, a perfect place to write. It’s in my house in Bangkok, with a closed-in study. It has no view and nothing to distract me. Had I bought property in picturesque Phuket and built a house on the cliff overlooking the sea, I would not have been able to write a single word. I would have spent all my time looking at the sea. I do well in my house in Bangkok or, when I am traveling, in hotel rooms without a view.

So after all these years what have I learned? What then is that perfect place to write? It’s a room with four walls. If there are windows, they must be up high so that I cannot look out. For a writer, a room with a view is destructive. I thought Tahiti would be a fine place to write and went there. What a beautiful view I had at Point Venus on Matavai Bay, with the wonderful sea spread out before me and, behind me, the high mountains of Tahiti rising up into the clouds. It was beautiful. Too beautiful. The sea was a kaleidoscope of changing colors all day long, and it was a thrill to watch the clouds drift in over the mountains. I wrote all right, about the view. I have reams of neatly typed pages of descriptions of my view in Tahiti. No editor wanted stories of Tahitian views.

Then I went to Spain, after the French turned French Polynesia into an atomic testing ground. Here certainly, at Jerez de la Frontera in the south of Spain, was a perfect place to write-and cheap to live, too. I found a studio, a real artist’s garret, on the top floor of an old Spanish apartment building with white-washed walls and a view looking down onto cobblestone streets. But it was impossible to be seated at my typewriter for very long. Nearly every day there was a festival of some sort, with all kinds of activities in the street below. I spent too many of my days checking out the view or else joining in the fun. I moved on to Singapore.

In the beginning, I found Singapore ideal. Everything worked there, like the telephones. I could drink the water from the tap, and the National Library was stocked with English-language books. The library had an excellent file of old Straits Times newspapers on microfilm dating back a hundred years. For accommodations back then, there were guesthouses-spacious, airy and inexpensive. I liked the Leonie Guest House-twelve-foot high ceilings, five-speed ceiling fans overhead and large verandahs. Today, unfortunately, guesthouses as such no longer exist. Aside from guesthouses, I found offers to “house sit.” I knew many journalists, mostly wire service writers, who were forever going on trips or else taking their home leave. They would ask me to watch over their places while they were away. It seemed like a good way to save money, and writers’ flats are usually nicely furnished and comfortable, with lots of books and reading material. In the beginning, house sitting sounded good. But I learned back then that saving money isn’t the important thing. It was far better to settle into my own place where I could rent or else to check into a hotel.

Every time I took over someone’s flat there was always a catch, like feeding their fish or taking care of their pets. The fish I didn’t mind, but the pets were something else, especially when they weren’t the standard type of pets. Keith Lorenz didn’t have the standard pet, like a dog or a cat. He had a monkey. No, it was an ape, an oversized gibbon. His Singapore flat was in the Ngee Ann Building on Orchard Road. The location couldn’t have been better.

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Agonizing First Published Article

In New York, I went to see the managing editor of Argosy, Milt Machlin. During the next twenty-four hours, I learned more from Milt Machlin than I did from all the books I had ever read.

“I’ll tell you what,” Milt said in his office when we first met. “I will pay you five hundred dollars for your story, and one of our staff will rewrite it.”

Five hundred dollars, and I was broke. I didn’t even know where I was going to sleep that night. “I am sorry, but I can’t do that,” I said.

“Five hundred dollars for a kill fee,” he replied.

“I can’t,” I said, again. I explained that more important than money was my determination to learn to write. Milt invited me to lunch. In the next hour, I got my first true lesson in writing. “I know you are angry at the French, and you have a right to be, but you can’t debunk paradise. Tahiti is planted in the minds of every man as that perfect escape haven. You can’t take that away from people. You can say what you want about the French and the atomic bomb, but you have to go through the back door.” I wondered what he meant. We had another Martini. Milt continued. “What about that famous South Seas bar, Quinn’s Tahitian Hut.”

“Yeah, I know Quinn’s, but what does that have to do with the French and the atomic bomb?” I said, confused, He asked me to tell him about Quinn’s. I told him about some of the outrageous incidents that happened at Quinn’s on a regular basis and explained how the French Foreign Legionnaires had taken over the place and that they had arrived with the French military to fend off the atomic bomb protesters. I mentioned how thrilled the Tahitians were that the French were planning to give them a grand fireworks display on Bastille Day. “There you are,” Milt said. “Write about Quinn’s and add all the other bits and pieces you just mentioned.” That night, Milt put me up on his sofa in his front room. Two months later, my story was the lead article in Argosy, including my photograph of Susie No Pants on the cover.

With that lesson in mind, you’d think I would have learned but I hadn’t. “Damn, Stephens, you still haven’t learned,” Milt said after he had rejected my second story. I was even more disappointed than before.

It so happened, after Tahiti, when the French began their nuclear tests, I decided to move to new ground and chose Singapore where living was cheap. To get there from New York, I wanted to travel overland. So with the little money I had, I bought a second-hand, four-wheel drive Willys Jeep. I booked aboard Queen Elizabeth, and for an extra fifty bucks put my Jeep into the hold and sailed for Europe. In Paris, I found a travel office that boasted it could arrange visas anywhere. I applied for one to drive across the Soviet Union and got it, but two weeks later I was arrested in Russia. The visa was a fake.

After a few months, the Russians, for reasons I still don’t know, released me. I was certain I had another story for Argosy. I wrote it up and sent it to Milt Machlin. He rejected it. I went to New York the second time to see him.

“Look,” he said, “I already told you not to be too heavy.”

“Too heavy,” I stammered. “A Russian jail isn’t a party, you know.”

“Hell, Stephens, you don’t learn, do you? Readers don’t give a damn about that,” he replied. He then asked me to tell him in detail what had happened when I was arrested. I mentioned that while standing in front of an officer and his armed soldiers, I had been stripped down to my drawers. A woman interpreter was present. The officer told me to take off my drawers. The woman looked at me and said, “Never mind. I’m married.”

   Milt smiled, and that became the opening for my article that appeared two months later in the magazine. I collected my five grand. After that, I wrote a couple of stories a year for Milt. I learned to laugh at myself. But still, that didn’t mean writing got any easier. I learned that it doesn’t matter how many degrees one might have in journalism, or what your writing credentials are, or how many stories you wrote before, editors are only interested in what you put on their desks. It’s that simple. The trick is learning what editors want and then giving it to them. I hear the argument over and over – “It’s easy for you. You have published and the editors know you.” I have to disagree. The editors may know me, but that doesn’t matter. What is important is that they know that I can produce for them and I write what they want. That is the bottom line.

That said, what follows is not a treatise on how to become a writer. To answer the question as to how I became a writer I am merely telling how I got started. That’s all. I have no secrets to pass on except to say that what I have learned came through experience. There is no special talent I have. There is no special gift, other than fortitude, and that I have more than good sense. And God did not grace me with a gift for writing. Writing is a trade, a trade that I had to learn. It took hard work and, above all, it took determination. I learned that if one is determined, one is likely to succeed. I found the best way to learn to write is to follow the examples of those who have made it. And as my father used to say: “Just listen, and do as I do.” He wasn’t a writer though; he was a farmer. It’s the same, farming and writing.

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Discouragement from family

When I went out into the streets of New York and began walking, I was heartsick. No one was going to help me. The world was against my being a writer, everyone, my own family, my wife, my wife’s family, friends. I grew angrier. To hell with them all. What did they expect me to do-die? “I’ll tell you what you can do, Mr. Sullivan, and all the rest of you,” I waved a fist and shouted to the city. “You can go to hell, Mr. Sullivan. All of you can go to hell.” I was going to be a writer as long as there was a ‘me.’ I refused to give up. When I make it-not if but when-I vowed that I would help struggling writers one day. I try to keep that vow and some, I hope, have benefited. But let’s get back to my story.

Sad at heart, I returned to my government job and my apartment in Washington. “When are you going to France for Life magazine?” my wife asked when I returned home. Not wanting to admit failure, I said to her that another writer had come up with the idea before me. “Too bad,” she said. She couldn’t begin to fathom my hurt.

So it was back to my government job and a degree from Georgetown University in Political Science. But I didn’t give up the desire to write. Every morning before dawn, while my wife slept, I wrote my short stories and magazine articles exactly as the books said to do and secretly sent them off to magazines. I had to hide the rejection slips that came back. I read more books on how to write, but the rejects continued to grow.

Then came my first break. It happened that one of my colleagues at work had a cousin who ran a writing service called Technical Writers Associates. The cousin was looking for someone to prepare a script on the operation and maintenance of the McCormick International five-ton road scraper-not exactly Jack London’s Call of the Wild, but at least a writing assignment. I took on the task and finished the script. I could now call myself a technical writer. It was then I got the idea to query The Writer’s Digest about writing an article for them on technical writing. The magazine accepted it.

I received my first check for writing, a respectable $200, from The Writer’s Digest. What a thrill. I spent twenty dollars to have the story framed and mounted behind glass and I was pleased to tell my wife that I could make it as a writer. “You still fooling around with that writing stuff?” she said and returned to the Vogue magazine she was reading. The real damaging blow to my self-esteem came when my wife and I attended a party the following Saturday night, and she told everyone that I had landed my first big sale. The lady of the house gave me a big hug and announced out loud for all to hear, “I won’t ask how much, but I hope it’s a million.”

“The trouble is that you are ungrateful,” my wife said after detecting something was wrong when we got home. “If you want to write so badly, then maybe you had better go off some place and write.” I followed her advice-after our divorce. I packed up and went to Tahiti to live and become a writer. That is more or less what happened.

After setting up my Hermes typewriter on a bamboo table in a grass shack on Tahiti, I wrote to magazine editors with story ideas from the South Seas. Would you believe, editors were interested. They were interested all right, but it was not what I had in mind. Reporters began to arrive in Tahiti with letters of introduction from New York editors. They came to write about me, an author living in paradise. It didn’t matter that I had written only one magazine article in my whole entire life. I was a writer in paradise, and that’s all that mattered. Stories about me appeared in newspapers and magazines, but not with my byline. And there were no paychecks.

Still, I wouldn’t give up.

Even beautiful Tahiti, it seemed, was working against me. In the 1960s, the French government decided to tum French Polynesia into their private nuclear testing ground. In defiance to protests from the rest of the world, or maybe a kind of morbid celebration for their Bastille Day, every July they planned to detonate a few super bombs. What a story! I queried Argosy, a good solid men’s magazine in New York, and the editor was interested. Hallelujah! l wrote the story. l didn’t simply write it. I labored over it. I checked it and rechecked it. There was not a mistake on a single page, not even a smudge mark. Despite my unerring devotion, it was rejected. I had reached the lowest ebb in my writing career. No one was buying my stories. I was heartbroken. What had gone wrong? The editor had wanted the story and when I sent it, he didn’t want it. What to do now?

And I was broke, penniless in paradise. Most often I didn’t even have enough money to buy stamps to post my manuscripts. The un-mailed manuscripts stood on my desktop like a row of grave markers in a cemetery. Years were slipping by. I was in my thirties and I had sold only one story, and even that one could hardly be classified as literature. The only income I could muster up was the occasional fee from tour guiding when a cruise ship came into Papeete, or at other times as an extra in movies filmed in Tahiti. Films about Tahiti and the South Seas were becoming popular with Hollywood-Mutiny on the Bounty, the TV series Adventures in Paradise, Tiare Tahiti and a whole raft of others, but an extra in movies wasn’t my calling in life. I had to do something, and I was tired of accepting free beers from the girls at Quinn’s Tahitian Hut bar when a ship was in.

I knew inside myself that my writing was improving. I spent hours perfecting my craft, writing every day, without fail. I even read the dictionary, page by page. I treated it like it was a novel. I practiced writing by keeping a journal with descriptions of people and places. I copied down the dialogue from the people I met. But none of this sold stories. I had to go to New York to talk to the editors, to find out what they really wanted. I sold my Hermes typewriter and cameras, booked a berth aboard a Messageries Maritimes cargo ship to Panama and hitch hiked through Central America to New York.

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