Lately I have been very obsessed with wanting to write a pirate story. It's something that has been going on in my head for years but recently it's taken total control of my brain, to the point of exhaustion.
I'm exhausted of course because writing a pirate story is not, it turns out, as easy as one might think it is. In the typical persons head I feel like pirates are a sort of joke subject, since almost every film dealing with them turns them into a bit of a joke. This list of Hollywood films, and also cartoons, that makes a joke of pirates even includes my all time favorite, that of course being Pirates of the Caribbean. One takes a look at these films and one thinks that the pirate subject is, almost as a matter of absolute fact, totally within the realm of "low" culture. Turns out this is quite wrong of course. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, painting a good pirate story is just as difficult as painting a story in ancient roman times or medieval times, et cetera. I would maybe even say it's significantly harder. Why? Well, it all has to do with the boats and the ocean, I think. Trying to set a story out on a boat is not that simple, and this is where the problems arise, I find.
The pirates themselves are indeed simple; but their background setting is incredibly complex. And I feel that , if one is going to write a pirate story, one has to somehow keep the readers imagination out at sea and on a boat. You can't let your reader forget that it's a pirate story, since that's really your entire hook in the first place. Yet how does one do that when writing about boats and the ocean is so difficult? In a movie it's simple to keep Johnny Depp's character out at sea , but in a book it isn't so easy. You have to know how to write of the sea, of the manner of the sail boat, of the cannonballs, the workings of the deckhands. There is a lot of stuff going on....
What's interesting about how much of a challenge pirates are to write about though is that it kind of explains, in my opinion, just why pop culture hasn't actually seen as many famous stories about pirates as you would think we would have by now. In fact, even the most famous story about pirates, Treasure Island, seems, to me, to take place more on an island, rather than at sea. I'll admit I've never finished the story , but I read about half and it was all on land. So really what this tells me is that pirates are something everyone sort of has a love for, or a fascination with, but also something that none of us really know how to properly imagine, or write of. For instance, when you look at the Wild West era, you might think that it would be just as hard for someone from the modern day to scribble about as pirates, since it's the deep past now, but it's really not the case. Westerns are actually, in some respects, easier to write than stories in the modern day! There is hardly anything complex in the background is why. The cast is made up of unusually simple minded people and so are the western towns and settings just as simple . You need some Indians, some Cowboys, some bartenders, a few ladies of the night, some rifles, boots, horses, banks ..saloons...and you're good to go. No one needs to hear about complex navigational skills or compasses or difficult maps when reading about the Wild West.
With pirates? Forget about it. Pirates were poor drunks just like Cowboys-- yes-- but pirates also encompassed literally the entire globe. It was, in other words, an international movement. Many languages and nations were involved with piracy. On top of that, the actual pirates who wound up as captains were also often very intelligent people.
This changes the whole theatrical ballgame, because now we're talking about a tale where the writer has to be able to successfully jump from high to low culture, and trust me, that is not very easy in a book, and it's actually not often done. Most books that I've read, even those fancy ones the New Yorker would review, seem to always be all one area of society or the other. The cast is either all wealthy and smart, or all simple and poor. No mixing happens. Pirates do not give us this luxury. Pirates are actually quite complex characters, which leads me to again touching upon this fact that, even in 2017, we have hardly seen them in our biggest pop culture stories .
In fact, if you're going to really talk about serious stories, we pretty much haven't seen pirates *at all*. They're represented in comedies and even that hardly happens. They seriously are everywhere and no where. Pirate costumes sell constantly at the Halloween store, and you see them mocked on children's shows, but where are they really?? No where...
Now another thing that I think is really interesting about pirates, and which has always kept me attracted to them, is the fact that, unlike many other stories pop culture likes to tell, pirates were not only international and mixing social class , but they were also *extremely* multi ethnic in terms of actual crew . In fact, if you want, you can basically consider the pirate age, which of course coincides with the first great European and Asian "sailing age", as being the literal first time that all the ethnicities f the world started y o come together, both to fight and to cooperate. It is literally the earliest version of America that exists.....
So now we have a movement that isn't just transcending social class but also seriously transcending borders & ethnic lines. And this is all, I feel, yet another reason why the modern day is still not really able to comfortably comprehend a really "serious" pirate story. To put it plainly, modern people are still pretty wrapped up with borders and walls and flags and nations and all of this. Pirates don't fit into this prism. Pirates were really some of the first poor sobs to ever reject all of that on a grand scale and in a beautiful - albeit dangerous -- way. In fact, pirates went so far with rejecting the nation state that I think it could easily be argued that another movement just like it has yet to take place. In other words, not only do modern people get uncomfortable with the way pirates reject borders and fight only for themselves and their personal ship, but they maybe even get more uncomfortable than the nice folks in the actual time of pirates did! How come? Because borders in our own time are literaly stronger than *ever before in world history*. If a pirate time traveled to our world today, especially our ocean, he would be absolutely mortified. He would feel like a prisoner. This leaves the pirate character feeling very strange inside a modern persons imagination. A character like Jack Sparrow, for example, could not be any more different than Frodo Baggins. Frodo was in love with his home. He couldn't wait to get back to it. He thought the wide world was terrifying. Jack Sparrow instead seems to have no home besides the Black Pearl. Sparrow is very dubious when it comes to morals. His best quotes all seem to deal with how ambiguous human nature is. "The only rules that really matter are these: ,", he says, "what a man can do and what a man can't do..." This is very difficult for people to accept in our own time....
So I don't know. It's all impossible to say. I desperately want to write something eloquent about pirates, or even just a series of short stories about them, but it's like I never know where to begin and often when I do begin the stories always feel horrifically repetitive. I'll say things like ..."Maria took a suck of her pipe and blew out the smoke, staring at the cold and frigid water of the Lost Sea in front of her. She could not get the tragic memory of Captain Jims boat bursting into flames and getting sucked into the sea by the monster that Poseidon had sent in his fury. She could not imagine what her sister Claudia , who had been on the boat,had felt , as it was going under. She started to weep as she looked out at the cold water, thinking of it. If only she could get the boat back through the Triangle..."
I always write someting like that & I never really like it, I think, because it never fits my outrageous idea of what pirates really *need* to be and to feel like. It's almost as though I have maybe built up the pirates so much in my imagination that now trying to see them on the page feels impossible for me. No matter what I do, my pirates of the page never seem to live up to the imaginary ones that are up here sailing in my head, and believe it or not but this also even applies to the Johnny Depp movies at this point: Jack Sparrow is almost like an actual deity in my brain, but when i see him in the films-- both old and new---I tend to feel underwhelmed now. He's not as good as he feels to me in my head. He somehow pales in comparison now, when I see him in the exact films that originally gave him to my imagination in the first place. How in Gods name does that work?
-- notes
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