It feels like people talk a lot, in their relationships and in therapy. But my family wasn't like that. My dad wasn't and I wasn't. Things were said, but via the language of action.
I wasn't in a position that some other memoirists are, dealing with families who fed them meth, or kidnapped them, or did something that would make the writer not want to see that family again. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to celebrate them. I was proud of who we were, in the wilderness, floating down rapids or hiking over glaciers, and everywhere else.
It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.
My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.
Maybe it's easier to think about dishonesty and what kind of trouble you can get into as a writer when love and honesty collide and you sidestep that collision, either because you want to protect somebody or you want to blame somebody - which are the usual impulses in love: protection and blame, frequently at the same time - so you don't exactly tell the truth.
When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.
You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.
Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.
My dad felt pretty strongly that I know about the basic workings of a plane and so he taught me how to read and set the instruments, as well as the basics of taking off and landing.
It was a life with purpose. And it was also a lot of fun. Fishing is fun. Hiking up mountains is fun. Building a wall out of river rocks dug up from the bottom of a glacial lake is not fun. Not at all. But it does give a work ethic that you can take anywhere in the world.
If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.
When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.
If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.
