The Loneliness of the Writer (and my murdering work experience supervisor)
I so wanted to write. I produced several short stories and worked on my own full-length adventure novel, complete with the requisite nuclear threat, manly hero and car chases through London.
A survey of 1,500 American workers in 2018 to identify the loneliest professions turned up what at first glance might seem surprising results. The five loneliest professions were:
Law
Medicine
Science
Engineering
Civil servants.
I confess I would never have picked these because as a teenager my real ambition was to be a writer, a profession stereotypically known for loneliness and depression. Teamed with that was my primary sporting pursuit was sailing small catamarans single-handed in my home town of Darwin. Another choice for loneliness, indeed, I’ve only occasionally been involved with team sports.
I was a voracious reader as a teenager and in my twenties, most usually airport-style thrillers, the drug which hooked me was Clive Cussler and most especially Raise the Titanic. Dirk Pitt, Cussler’s hero, is a rugged, handsome, talented loner, an engineer, a man of science and fact coated with a thick layer of bravado and derring-do.
Later I migrated to Tom Clancy, whose primary antagonist Jack Ryan is again a man of high intelligence, devoted to facts and figures, but still happy swapping punches with the bad guys, stepping up to alone save the world against impossible odds. The everyman writ large as a courageous warrior. In my loneliness, this was my dream role model. Even today I’m a fan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels.
Later in life, I discovered Clancy was a life long conservative Republican - he dedicated books to leading conservatives like Ronald Reagan, kind of burst my bubble.
However, Dirk Pitt never failed to spark my imagination, he was a former military man and engineer who worked for an oceanographic organisation called NUMA, the National Underwater Marine Agency, in the best vein of fantasy prompting real-life Cussler invested some of the many millions from his books to found NUMA in the real world.
I so wanted to write. I produced several short stories and worked on my own full-length adventure novel, complete with the requisite nuclear threat, manly hero and car chases through London.
I think the idea of the tortured lonely writer hidden in a garret turning out immaculate, and profitable, prose appealed to me. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Ernest Hemingway said:
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
Although of course, he didn’t actually travel to Sweden to give the speech, indeed, he didn’t want to accept the honour at all to start with, he thought others were more worthy, but financially he really needed the money.
Crime author Sara Paretsky has said:
“Writing is solitary work because it needs concentration, quiet and commitment. Being alone to write a novel or short story requires intense alone time. It’s essential to your craft.”
As a lonely child at boarding school aged 16 or 17, this all resonated with me, it seemed to fit with my alone ranger self-image.
On the flip side however later in life, I’ve realised that whilst great writers generally practice great discipline around their work, writing regular hours each day, ensuring a certain page output each week, the reality is slightly different to the alcohol-soaked musings of Hemingway as he propped up Harry’s Bar in Venice.
Jeremy Nobel, a doctor who also writes poetry, writes in the Harvard Health Blog:
“It may not seem possible to be able to write your way to better health. But as a doctor, a public health practitioner, and a poet myself, I know what the scientific data have to say about this: when people write about what’s in their hearts and minds, they feel better and get healthier. And it isn’t just that they’re getting their troubles off their chests.”
Dr Nobel has slightly pricked my bubble.
There’s no question that my love of Clive Cussler’s escapist fantasies combined with my affinity for sailing led to my viewing marine oceanography as a possible career path after school. And yes, engineering is number four on the loneliest jobs, science is number three - two checkboxes ticked.
So in Year 11 at 15 years old I spent 10 days doing work experience at the CSIRO’s marine oceanography laboratories in Sydney. They’ve since moved to Hobart to be closed to Antarctica, a key focus for their research. I had a ball, away from home, staying alone in a motel close to the laboratories, and spending time with a range of smart people who loved the ocean. I was Dirk Pitt in training.
One of my work experience supervisors was Dr Rory Thompson, I still recall him, an American accent, tall with a long face - pretty glamorous in my eyes - perhaps a hint of my hero Dirk Pitt.
The only obstacle to my career ambitions was a pretty poor showing in physics and chemistry in my end of year exams that year, meaning I had to drop them for my final Year 12. Without those subjects science at university was out, so a Bachelor of Arts beckoned instead.
I sometimes wonder how my life might have turned out if my application to school work had matched my daydreams of swashbuckling adventure on the high seas. I drifted into working backstage in theatre and that became my career for the next twelve or more years.
And Rory Thompson? In 1983, the year after my work experience and he moved to Tasmania with the CSIRO he murdered his wife, cutting her up into small pieces and disposing of them down the toilet. He died in jail in 1999, having authored a jailhouse auto-biography a few years earlier entitled ‘Mad Scientist’.
Perhaps not pursuing marine oceanography worked out for the best.
Today’s Quote
“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”
Henry Rollins
I seriously hope you have made many friends in these last couple of years since you’ve written. Anyone who quotes Rollins has got to be good people. Thank you for expressing what seems so difficult for many of us to dare to articulate; and there are so many of us. I’m rooting for both of us.
May I contact you?