Obsessions and Writing

Kaliane Bradley's Ministry of Time

1.

A writer happens upon an old Daguerreotype photograph of a long-dead explorer—he is very handsome but also very dead. A commander of an epic arctic expedition undertaken by the British Royal Navy to try and locate Northwest Passage, the man in the photograph, Commander Graham Gore, along with 129 other officers and crewmen, died in 1848 in what has been described as “mysterious circumstances.”

Mysterious meaning, no one knows exactly what happened except that they floundered on ice offshore of King William Island. There has also been talk of cannibalism. There really is not a lot of information about their sad end.

But, oh that photograph!

UK Writer Kaliane Bradley cannot get his gorgeous face out of her mind….And who can blame her? There is so much that is interesting about her thrilling debut novel The Ministry of Time—one of Obama’s summer picks and a Good Morning America Bookclub book. And first and foremost is the story of how she came to write this novel in the first place.

One of my beloved writing teachers was Maurice Carlos Ruffin. I studied with him and Vanessa Hua last summer at the Sewanee Writers Conference. In addition to writing best-selling novels, and teaching, he also has a Substack called Sitting in Silence. And in a recent post he talked about what he calls the single most important winning personality trait of writers.

Can you guess what it is?

I could and I was hoping I would be right!

And I was.

That trait is a “certain obsessiveness.”

I completely agree that in my workshops, the best writers I have met—and for that matter my favorite novelists in general— all share that trait. Being obsessed with things, doing research, continually circling back to certain topics—they are people who can’t seem to stop thinking about certain things.

He says he meets a lot of students and thinks: “It’s not just the voice. But if they have a certain obsessiveness about their work, he always thinks to himself, they will be okay.”

Right now I am reading Rachel Kushner’s new book Creation Lake and in the review in the WSJ, the reviewer writes: “Rachel Kushner's novel “Creation Lake,” has a thing for Neanderthals.”

That’s what a certain obsessiveness means.

In the case of Ministry, Bradley starts writing after becoming absolutely obsessed with Captain Graham Gore. She studies his picture with an increasing sense of wonder, noting his curls, his “dramatic nose,” and slight smile. In an interview she asks: “Did I stare at the picture too long?” And then without missing a beat: “Maybe I stared at the picture too long.”

As you can imagine, Ministry is really funny.

And since the captain is so cute, it is a romantic comedy too.

But, like Kushner’s book, it is also a thriller, and there are interwoven chapters that are from the Commander’s point of view on that ill-fated mission. This book packs a punch! I can definitely understand and agree with all the hype about it.

Another interesting thing about the novel from a craft point of view is that she only started writing it as a joke. Apparently at the time, she was working on a very serious literary novel about her mother’s experience as a refugee of the Khmer Rouge and later as a Cambodian refugee in England. This was the book she felt compelled to write and yet it didn’t work. While she felt it was the book she “should” write, it was not the one she felt obsessed to write. She called it “a miserable experience.”

It was during Covid when she fell under the spell of the Commander and was led to seek out arctic explorers fan groups online. For fun she started sending them humorous vignettes of Commander Gore encountering climate change or political correctness. The people in the online groups encouraged her to keep going and nine drafts later she had an amazing success—yes it will be a movie!!

Ruffin talks a lot about this as well in his Substack podcast—about enthusiasm. Obsession drives excitement in the writing and enthusiasm in the telling. This is the pulse. The quickening.

2.

As I was reading Bradley’s books, I was thinking of my obsessions—past and present. And I recalled one of my ongoing obsessions, one with a particular bronze statue whom I refer to as “my boyfriend,” because I love him. And like Bradley’s Commander, my Greek guy is also surrounded in mystery and romance.

The Getty Bronze.

I wrote this essay about him over ten years ago.

Utterly compelling, whenever I used to come home to LA, one of the first things I would do was pay him a visit. He is so breathtakingly handsome – truly a lifetime of visits would never be enough. Physically perfect and with the most exquisite patina, it is that hand, pointing toward his victory wreath that always gets me.

(sigh~~~~).

Found in Italian waters of ancient Greek origin, he was purchased somewhat legally by J. Paul Getty. The Italians want him back. But Greece must surely also have a claim to the statue.

Talking about these things with my my non-bronze beloved, he says: “He is beautiful I guess but a little quiet… I think we make a better couple!” To which I agree, and then he asks: “I wonder where he would like to end up?”

That is indeed being the real question.

I wrote this above ten years ago—and yet these lines could have come from my current manuscript, Shipwrecked!! It is a harder sell when your obsessive interests revolve around art (or in Kushner’s case neanderthals) and yet…

Ruffin challenges us to think about things we keep thinking about for years. Things we cannot get out of our minds…. he reminds us of Kaveh Akbar’s fantastic novel Martyr… which revolves around Akbar’s obsession with the death urge. Love and obsession that bleeds over onto the page!

What are the top three to five things you are obsessed with? he asks.

Ruffin recommends Donald Maas’s craft books, specifically, The Breakout Novelist: How to Craft Novels That Stand Out and Sell. I like Donald Maas as well.