Greetings, writers—
I feel like people better at Substack than I am would celebrate a 100th post by recording a video or making the newsletter super special (“The Foolproof, Low-Effort Way to Write a Bestselling Novel in 90 Days—GUARANTEED”) but you guys, I don’t work that far in advance. I’m writing this while I’m packing; I’m getting on a plane in a couple of hours.
For almost twenty years I was terrified of flying. My coping mechanisms were valium, miniature two-dollar bottles of whiskey secreted in my pockets, and touching the outside of the plane with my right palm as I stepped into the cabin with my left foot. Also: uncharacteristic and possibly excessive friendliness to flight attendants and passengers alike, because God, if He existed, would not want such a nice person to die.
Still, I cried on planes a lot. Once, when unexpected turbulence hit while I was in line for the bathroom, my legs gave way beneath me out of sheer fright, and it was twenty minutes before I could stand again. Another time I had one too many drinks in a LaGuardia bar with a prison guard from Utica (it was only his second flight, and he was scared, too), and then because we each took one of my valiums we spent the whole flight in a nightmarish interstitial space between consciousness and un-. Somewhere over Pennsylvania he came up to my row to tell me that there was a demon on the plant’s right wing.
During those years I could think about flights I’d already taken and still get scared. There were the dreams, too, hundreds of them, and these I still have. “The quality of this flight is about to change,” the diplomatic pilot said in my most recent dream, right before we began spinning down to the ground. The funny thing is that in these dreams the planes hardly ever actually crash. Instead, they end up traveling on the highway. I’m there in my window seat, cruising down I-5 in a 747, going 55 miles an hour.
I can’t pretend that I’m totally cool with flying these days, but I’m 85% cool with it. I still do that thing with my right hand and my left foot. I’m still very nice to everyone on the plane. Instead of Valium and alcohol I put on a podcast. But that 15% terror lingers, and not entirely without reason: on Wednesday, Jon’s plane took off, turned around, and immediately made an emergency landing because some part of the hydraulic system caught on fire.
Not so long ago I heard or read about someone who booked flights specifically so they could write during them. They said they could get so much work done. This seems insane to me for all kinds of reasons (discomfort, expense, and hello, carbon footprint), but in my attempts to figure out who this person was, I found another person who claims to have written an entire novel on a plane, and she has some advice for the next time any writer is in the air:
Stay off the wifi. (Obviously. I would add: don’t even look at the movie choices. Why would you want to watch something on a four-inch screen?)
Pick the uncomfortable seat. If you can’t relax because you’re squished, you might as well get some work done!
Drink the coffee, even if it “is stale and tastes a little like feet.” It’s free, and it’ll keep you awake.
“Let your seatmates inspire you.” Honestly, I don’t know about this one.
Bring legal pads to write on.
Talk to the flight attendants about what kinds of books they like. Mine them (and everyone else) for character details.
These strategies—plus one about reading the Sky Mall catalogue that I left out—helped Jo Piazza cowrite a novel called The Knockoff, which the NYT called a “fizzy, girly, nicely executed bit of escapism.”
Thinking about flying makes me remember one of the opening scenes of Rachel Cusk’s novel, Outline. (Can I call her the grande dame of autofiction? How old do you have to be for that?) The narrator’s flight is about to take off. Here’s how this is described:
On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom. When the recorded voice came to the part about the oxygen masks, the hush remained unbroken: no one protested, or spoke up to disagree with this commandment that one should take care of others only after taking care of oneself. Yet I wasn't sure it was altogether true.
On one side of me sat a swarthy boy with lolling knees, whose fat thumbs sped around the screen of a gaming console. On the other was a small man in a pale linen suit richly tanned, with a silver plume of hair. Outside, the turgid summer afternoon lay stalled over the runway; little airport vehicles raced unconstrained across the flat distances, skating and turning and circling like toys, and further away still was the silver thread of the motorway that ran and glinted like a brook bounded by the monotonous fields. The plane began to move, trundling forward so that the vista appeared to unfreeze into motion, flowing past the windows first slowly and then faster, until there was a feeling of upper full, half hesitant lifting as it detached itself from the earth. There was a moment in which it seemed impossible that this could happen. But then it did.
I love this passage so much. The “field of strangers,” the religious metaphors (and how “no one jumped up to escape while there was still time”), the narrator’s doubt (should we take care of ourselves first?), the seeming impossibility of flight… I could do a whole exegesis, but let’s just say I think it’s really masterful.
Today, try to describe something quotidian and familiar with the kind of holy attention that Cusk pays to the moments before a plane’s takeoff.
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. Help me celebrate 100 because I’m so bad at doing it myself. If Good Ideas has given you any good ideas, please comment, hit the heart button, subscribe, or share this newsletter with a friend. 💙
Happy 100th!
Loved the flight takeoff description and congratulations on 100. Little details are wonderful but still working on the big thread vision to knit it all together.