Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [387]
As it is, it’s silly, but I would like to be cloned. I’d love to have one person who was chained to a type writer, computer, whatever. And the other one would be a public writer who would go around talking about writing. And the other would be a relatively normal human being. Something like that. It’s the truth. Most of us who are writers get writers and other creative people; I meet with a lot of creative people.
I was talking with a dear buddy of mine, Quincy Jones, two weeks ago. We were at New York for the funeral of Miles Davis. We were talking about how you get caught up in what’s called success. Once you have that blessing, it’s so hard to do what you did in the first place to get it. Quincy said he couldn’t remember when he composed anything. And I know he hasn’t; he’s so successful. Miles, bless his heart, was still playing his horn right up to the end. But lots of people who are very successful have a hard time working as well as they did before. I would tell you the truth. The best writing I ever possibly could do was when, after The Digest gave me the help to go to Africa and to go to Europe, and I was not known and I could just take my time and nobody there was pressing me. God, I don’t know how long it took me. I told all kinds of lies to editors here about when I would finish. But I was working slowly, slowly.
Let me tell you one thing more before we go. And I would like to share this ’cause we’re talking about the essence of writing now.
When I had done all the research, nine years, working in between doing articles for other magazines and stuff, I was now ready to write. I didn’t know where to go, didn’t know what to do. I knew I had a monumental task. And I got on a ship—this is where I started this freight ship thing called the Villager. And I went from Long Beach, California, completely around South America and back to Long Beach. It was ninety-one days. And I had written from the birth of Kunta Kinte through his capture. In the course of this, that’s where I got into the habit of talking to your character, I knew Kunta. I knew everything about Kunta. I knew what he was going to do. What he had done. Everything. And so I would just talk to him. And I had become so attached to him that I knew now I had to put him in the slave ship and bring him across the ocean. That was the next part of the book. And I just really couldn’t quite bring myself to write that. I was in San Francisco. I wrote about forty pages and chunked it out. You know writers know, and I know we’ve had this experience where you just know that ain’t it. That ain’t what you want to say. And when you write well, it isn’t a question so much of what you want to say, it’s a question of feel. Does it feel like you want it to feel? The feel starts coming into something around the fourth rewrite.
And then I wrote twice more about forty pages and threw it out. And I realized what my bother was. It was—I couldn’t bring myself to feel like I was up to writing about Kunta Kinte in that slave ship and me in a high-rise apartment. I had to get closer to Kunta. I had run out of my money at The Digest, lying so many times about when I’d finish, so I couldn’t ask for any more. I don’t know where I got the money from. I went to Africa. Put out the word I wanted to get a ship coming from Africa to Florida to the U.S. I just wanted to simulate crossing.
I went down to the country that was born of the U.S. People went there. What was it? Liberia. And I got a ship called, appropriately enough, the African Star. And I got on this ship. She was carrying a partial cargo of raw rubber in bails. And I got on as a passenger. I couldn’t tell the captain, who was such a nice man, nor that mate what I wanted to do because they couldn’t allow me to do it. But I found one hold that was just about a third full of cargo and there was an entryway into it with a long metal ladder down to the bottom of