Doug's Book Chapter Four

Opening Ideas

So in April I felt I was committed. I had only a dozen captions written – the ones I’d done a few years earlier for Shirley, and of those maybe half were straight away dubious because in the cold light of the new idea for the book, they just didn’t seem to fit in well. The pictures might be the initial drivers for the book, but the stories were going to be important. I had a deep pool of stories and pictures to draw on, the decision was which pics and stories to use.

I did three things over a week or so. I worked on a list of contents – short stories, long stories, buzz words, one liners, little facts, big facts, anecdotes – I scribbled them all down whenever they crossed my mind, it might be in a random order but I didn’t care. These would be the basis of my text. I ended up with a long list, some of it subsequently bit the dust, some of it made it through. Some of it is below

Snow Leopard, Patagonia Right Whales, Madagascar, Belugas, South Sandwich shoot Blue Planet, Life in the Arctic with Inuit, Narwhals Trials of Life, Ice formation
Harps People of the Sea, Bear and dead Humpback in Blue Planet, Orcas Peninsula Frozen Planet, Tongan Humpbacks Planet Earth, McMurdo Diving, Polar Bear Den Emergence Planet Earth, Climbing Adventures – Everest, Bolivia with Dave and Paul, Himalayas, Cotopaxi Human Planet stories, Crabeater Seal encounter Signy
Bear and dead humpback on the Alaskan beach, Nice light and bergs, Dive Lake Baykal and the adventures to get there, Dive under ice first time Write about diving like Petit does about wire walking – ie all the subtleties of being in tune with the water, the seaweed mentality expounded, Mt Everest or some high climb
Life on Signy when I worked there with British Antarctic Survey in 1976,
Diving with Leopard Seals, Life on the Red Sea platform / Mantas

Some were clearly going to make the long story category, others were one liners just almost as memory joggers

Tagging Wedds and how cute are the wee pups with their mewing calls
How cold is it in the freezing water? Lips numb, early days were in a wetsuit remember, Skidoo sinking pic of hole in ice / thin ice / doo underwater, Daft questions that people have asked, Parhelion and what causes it. The wonder of it all, The rate and extent of ice formation around Antarctica at the onset of winter. The greatest seasonal exchange of energy on the planet, Differences between Arctic and Antarctic. Continent surrounded by land and the other a frozen sea surrounded by land. One has icecap seven miles thick, the other has ice maybe only 3m thick in winter. Stripes on the front of an ice cliff or in a glacier. Layers of snow that are like a window back into the past, bubbles of air that are a record of the climate thousands of years ago. The depth and age of the Vostok cores, The story of how I got the shot of the lep chasing the emp on the ice floe at Cape Washington, Signy Thin Ice Race
Climate change and how I’ve seen it, both in the south and the north, weather patterns, displacement of penguin species, lengthening of the summer
Snow petrels and how they epitomize the Antarctic for me, Me and narwhal filming from the kayak how I did it for Trials of Life / how secretive are the males / Narwhal use of tusk? One of these animals that no matter how many pics you’ve seen, the first time in reality is totally stunning. The tusks coming vertically out of the water on a flat calm night, Belugas underwater – what are they like to see, ghosts
How to get close to walrus when they’re hauled out. Poor eyesight, stay low and it helps to have rolled your anorak in their piss the night before to disguise your scent.
Just how shit it feels to live high, Never been that attached to South G despite it being a paradise. It was never quite the “real” Antarctic, -16 lowest temp
Life in the submarine under the ice. Looking up at the ice 600’ above in perfect darkness. Unaware of any movement except when it angled up or down slightly in the water. Under the missiles with the condoms collecting dripping lubricant. Sheer lack of space for the men, hot bunking, My thoughts on the loss of Arctic ice does it matter? Orcas and crabbies, Why is it not lonely through a winter, Communication out of Signy in the early days – 100 words per month out and 100 in, Inverts of Signy, lack of fish – Glyppies, colorful anemones a contrast to the darkness, Penguins to what depth and for how long, Why I prefer subjects no smaller than a rabbit. No need for sets, easier to focus on. A word about ethics and setting things up.
Amazing Wilson’s petrels, being blown to ratshit hundreds of miles from the nearest land, yet able to get back to the same tiny hole beneath the rocks in square miles of identical scree slope. And at night too. What miraculous energetics. Souls of landlubbers lost at sea while Wanderers are souls of seaman.
Looty carving – sheer skill, carve away what isn’t a narwhal and you’re left with its essence, Kaktovic bears and watching Bruce being chased. Can be too relaxed.
McM timelapse and how cold the dives were. What was the longest. Dive techniques and Mcm. No lines, strobes down the hole, gin clear, Bear swimming and the sense of achievement. How we kept it a secret as 2 other bear movies being done at the same time, Tabulars and their formation, The float away story, Drifting away with Brando in Alaska, Getting my first pair of caribou boots on Life at the Edge, freezing my bollocks off in that hide on the cliffs.

I rummaged through all my pictures, my old slides and my newer digital images. Picking out not just the stunners but also those that brought a story to mind. I whittled them down to about 450, then self, Roz and Simon made our own personal choices of the best. Even at that stage, Roz was adamant that if the book was 240 pages, we wouldn’t need more than 180. I was convinced it would be closer to 210. So we tried to settle on 200 or so pictures that we all liked. 130 stood out – well liked them. But we all had our own thoughts about the others. They’d have to wait until I finished more of the words.

And thirdly I did my own reviews of picture led books about places or animals, either from volumes I had myself or by poking around the shelves of Borders and Waterstones. I wanted to get a feel for the competition.

I made notes, and while I’m not going to tell you here which books these comments refer to, most of them are still available on Amazon.

Don’t like the old fashioned typeface. Don’t particularly like how some whole pages with the pic all the way to the edge while others have a white border. Some full double page spreads are effective but often the layout looks a bit sloppy and inconsistent as to whether it has a white border or not.

Typeface Meta is quite effective. Proportions of this book are pleasant to the eye. I like how he’s chosen the months and then emphasised different things in each. Layout a bit messy at times – too many boxes and sub paras but the writing is good and informative

Weird type face, why on earth would you choose something as idiosyncratic as that? Not a very good display of pics – many rather dark. Horrible when one overlaps the other occasionally. Some good ones but rather a drab book really.

Heavy book, clumsily written somehow, looks dated layout. I think this book has persuaded me not to use black as a background colour to any picture pages, it just makes the book seem very dark. Not a whole lot of variety. Too many meaningless close up macro shots.

This is better. I like the design, the space the pics have been given. Not keen on the font however, looks old fashioned. The writing’s better, we don’t have each dive described bubble by bubble. But it’s still falling short in terms of detail.

And I also wondered ……. Who’s going to buy this book of mine? And I decided:
The same person who hangs on to the end of the wildlife series for the Diary pieces, and says afterwards that he / she thought “they were the best bit of the show”.
Each caption / pic can be a stand alone but once you’ve read them all, you know more about me as a person
more about me as a film maker
more about film making in general
more about the big series in particular
more about the other people who make the films
more about the ecology of the wild places I’ve filmed in
more about the animals
more about the need to look after both the places and the animals

Going at it like that was instructive. I felt a few basic “rules” were coming through

Books need pics of people as well as places and animals.
The writing style has to be informal, intimate.
The content has to be worth reading.
Don’t underestimate the intelligence of the readers. Be confident they’ll want to hear what you have to say.
But you have to talk to them interestingly otherwise you’ll come across as a boring pedant.
Humour is tricky.

Doing that kept me busy, but it didn’t get me actually writing. There was a danger that despite the mail to Roz and Simon, I was going to fall behind the very rough timetable we’d given ourselves for the writing.

I knew deep inside the writing was a hermit’s job, I was going to have to take myself away somewhere quiet, hit the groove and stay in it until the back was broken of the words. Yet here I was, lining up a self funded trip to Sri Lanka with Didier at the start of May to try fro some Blue Whales. But at the very last minute, with only 24 hours to our flight, our scientists Anouk warned us that new permits were needed from the Sri Lankan Navy to work in the area we planned to visit. Getting them was going to take two weeks at least. Warning bells rang loud in my head, no way I wanted to spend 2 weeks of a 3 week planned shoot chasing permits. I baled out, cancelled my flight for the following day ……… and now suddenly had three weeks empty.

It was a sign from the gods. I locked myself in my flat, switched off the phone, did a mega trip to the supermarket to stock up on food, saw it like Ewan McGregor going cold turkey in Trainspotting, and started writing.

Short stories and long fell out of my head. Roz was great, she’d feed back fast but mostly simple encouragement to carry on in the vein I was in. So I did …………