How To Write An Adventure Story.
You would like to write an adventure story. You would like people to look at you the way George Lucas looked at Ace Drummond or Alfred Hitchcock looked at John Buchan. The music of James Bond waits at your feet like a dog waiting for you to throw a ball it can go gallop and fetch.
You sit in a hut near a beach in the Scottish Highlands listening to a tale of how the father of an acquaintance made their way around half the top arc of the top of the United Kingdom in less than a day on a recumbent bicycle and find yourself weighing that up against the highest number you ever achieved in a game of keepy-up — somewhere in the hundreds, but not in the thousands because all the other soccer players would want to go home at some point, have family, friends, and wives — and you wonder if this is good enough. You bean count your athletic accomplishments.
- You are well aware that David Foster Wallace stood up in front of a graduating college class and declared that true heroism is in hours of quiet probity with no audience to see or applaud.
- You are working towards a definition of ‘adventure’ as some kind of ‘critical unit’ — in the second person, no less — as something one-step beyond the ‘lightness’ Calvino characterized in his Six Memos For The Next Millennium.
- As Hervé Gardette said during an episode of “Du Grain à…
