The Great Escape

My dad was really into World War II movies and when I was a kid I used to watch them with him. We saw all the classics - Von Ryan's Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Bridge on the River Kwai- but his favorite was The Great Escape. I probably saw this movie 5 or 6 times as a child.

Which makes it so strange that I only remembered half of it. I rented the movie as an adult and realized that, as a child, only the first half of the movie had made any impression on me at all. In my memory the whole movie was the POWs digging a tunnel in an effort to escape the Nazi internment camp. I was especially gripped by the image of Charles Bronson, who did most of the digging and was in fact dubbed "The Tunnel King" even though he - irony alert - was horribly claustrophobic. When the tunnel was complete and the night for the long-planned escape arrived he panicked and refused to go back into the tunnel this one final time. A friend had to drag him.

I suppose all this would make an impression on an impressionable child such as myself. I liked Charles Bronson. I identified with him. To the degree that all I really remembered about the movie, despite multiple viewings, was him on his belly in the tunnel. I forgot the whole half where they got out and scattered across Europe with the Nazis in hot pursuit. I even forgot Steve McQueen on his motorcycle, which was a seriously kick-ass sequence.

Now why, you might logically ask, is all this in a blog about writing? When I speak to MFA students I always mention this movie as the perfect analogy to writing. The process of writing (especially something long - like a book, like a novel) is much like digging a tunnel out of a POW camp. You work alone, at night, crammed into tiny spaces and moving in small increments, digging your way forward with any tool you can find. Hell, half the time you're digging with a spoon, like I think poor Bronson did at the end. Would any logical person try to dig a tunnel with a spoon? Periodically the tunnel collapses on you and your friends have to pull you out as you sputter and cough up dust and curse the fact all your hardwork was for nothing. And then you start again. The Great Escape people started three tunnels - the Nazis found one, another collapsed midway through beyond repair. Despite their careful calculations, the third tunnel came up 20 feet shy of the woods and they had to, at the last minute, change their plans and just make a run for it.

So many analogies to writing. The solitude of the work, the endless digging, the claustraphobia, the need for faith even when 2/3 of your projects don't come to any fruition at all and even the measly 1/3 that you do complete don't end up remotely like you'd planned. You dig for months and still end ups 20 feet shy of the woods. You plan and plan and end up making a run for it.

And I think most writers and teachers of writing focus on this process because you have to, it's compelling. The digging of the tunnel is so compelling that they forget the last half of the movie. They talk constantly about writing but never about selling, about publication. Maybe they can't bear to. Maybe the second half of the movie is just too upsetting. Because it seems like after all you've gone through to get to that point, life should pat you on the back a little. It seems like when you stick your head up from the tunnel with your completed book under your arm, the world should applaud and say "Nice job, man...you dug all that way! With a spoon! In the dark!"

But they don't. You finish digging and you stick your head up and the first bullet comes whizzing by your ear.

You spend the rest of the movie trying to get to Switzerland, to the promised land of peace and plenty - or at very the least, good reviews and a book that stays in print. Your friends are shot. Captured. Disappeared. The odds are astronomically against you...

Because here's the second way that The Great Escape is a perfect analogy of writing. There's attrition at every point. I'm going to get the exact numbers wrong, I'm sure, but the percentages I'm getting ready to quote are pretty accurate. The Great Escape was based on a true story, an actual breakout. Originally they planned to take 200 men out but that soon proved impractical and the planned number dropped to more like 100. The Nazis caught them a little over half of the way though the breakout so only about 60 actually went into the tunnel. Of those sixty about half were captured and returned to the camp. About half were killed. Three escaped.

Again, much like the numbers for publishing a book. Of all the people who talk about writing a book, only half actually start one - and that's probably a generous estimate. Of the people who start one, maybe about half finish. Again, I'm bordering on the wildly opptomistic with that estimate. Of those that finish, a fair percentage of them are gunned down (i.e., their books never get sold at all) and another large chunk are returned to the POW camp (i.e. the books do okay, but not great, and the authors end up right back where they started, spoon in hand.) Maybe about 3 out of 200 make it, i.e., are successful enough in the marketplace that they can be said to have won the war and these - another irony alert - are known as breakout books.

By this point in my little pep talk most of the students are looking at me like I'm nuts. Or at least very mean. But I don't consider this analogy particularly depressing. It's just the way it works. Writing a novel is hard. Publishing it is harder. If you can't accept that truth you shouldn't go into the tunnel in the first place. The men in the Great Escape knew it wasn't going to be easy to break out of a Nazi POW camp but they tried it anyway and there's a certain nobility in that, a nobility that makes the title apt. It was a great escape, with the greatness based more on the vision they shared than the numerical results of the breakout. And besides, I belatedly learned that this whole escape was designed to coincide with D-Day, a created distraction to pull the Nazis away from the coast and have them chasing down these prisoners all over Europe. There was a hint of self-sacrifice about the whole mission from its inception and yet they went into the process with heart.

I try to be one of those writing teachers who talks about the last half of the movie, who discusses the realities of not just writing, but what happens after you write. I try to tell the students things I wish somebody had told me. Still, I know every writer has his or her own path and no one can really tell anyone else anything...it's a ridiculously individuated process. But I hope that there are certain times in their own process whether it's at a point of despair that the damn book will never be finished or a point of overwhelm that seventeen agents in a row have rejected them that they remember the analogy of The Great Escape and know that a) they are not as alone as it seems they are and b) there is something noble about this mission, no matter where you end up.

And it's not like there's absolutely no hope. Charles Bronson was one of the three who made it.