wells part 3

Summer 2008 Issue
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Gator Bait: Catfish Willie Wells, Alligator Annie and snake wrangling in the Louisiana bayou inspire a lifetime of storytelling

I owe some storytelling debts to my journalism as well. I don’t think I would’ve developed the discipline to write novels without first having learned to write complex, long-form narrative nonfiction drawn from my early reporting years. To write—often under stupendous deadline pressure, in crowded, noisy newsrooms or in the messy aftermath of wars, storms, earthquakes and various other disasters that I’ve covered—taught me how to focus even in the midst of chaos.

I work on my novels five days a week on the train going back and forth to work–about 50 minutes each way. Making the train my office was perhaps the pivotal breakthrough in my novel-writing ambitions. Until then, I’d wandered around for six or seven years with a half-done novel in my briefcase, telling myself that I would make time to finish the thing sooner or later. But between family obligations, work, travel and sanity, finding the time proved impossible. When I moved from London to New York in 1993 to take a job on Page One of The Wall Street Journal, I settled in the suburbs and began commuting by rail. A day or two into this, observing that the route was not particularly scenic, I realized I would be spending a lot of time on this train. I bought a $999 laptop and though it took awhile to gain traction, I realized that I had finally found the schedule that had eluded me all those years and that neither the cell-phone jerks behind me nor the loudly gossiping secretaries in front of me could keep me from my stories. In this I learned another valuable lesson: writing is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Above, Ken's dad Rex Wells poses with a captured gator in he '50s and Right, Alligator Annie and a scarf o' snakes.

In October 2006, I left the Journal after 24 years to take a job as a senior editor and writer with Portfolio, the Condé Nast startup dedicated to illuminating the world of business. It wasn’t easy to leave the good ole WSJ, but I’d always considered myself something of a magazine writer and editor at The Journal. Why not try being a magazine writer and editor on a real magazine?

As for the subject matter–business–I accept that there is a certain stripe of journalist who cringes when hearing the B word. Business is all about earnings reports, accounting contrivances, price-earnings ratios, etc., etc. In other words, business is B for Boring. In some cases, perhaps. But unless you’re living under a rock, you’d have to conclude that, outside the Iraq War, it is probably the fundamentally most important story of our era. The terms hedge fund, private equity, derivatives, e-commerce and subprime have all entered the public lexicon pretty much within the past decade—subprime within the last year or two. The global triumph of the capitalist model, for all of its shortcomings, is one of the compelling stories of the century. Markets don’t just drive commerce; they influence culture, politics, art and science. We are living in a period of unparalleled wealth creation, and a period of growing disparity between the superrich and the impoverished. If grand narrative, underpinned by the human condition, is what you seek to write, there is no more fertile field than business and commerce.

In the December issue of Portfolio, Ali Wolfe, one of the bright young writers that I edit, came to me with a quirky idea. In a conversation with a billionaire, she’d learned that numerous well-known members of the hedge fund set were investing vast sums of money in longevity research and its fringe cousin, the quest to “cure aging.” Digging deeper, she discovered that people who had more money than they could ever spend in this lifetime were funding research and technology that would allow them to spend considerably more time with their fortunes. True, that’s a business story. But it’s also a story of cutting edge science, the cult side of medicine, religion, and the tempestuous politics of aging.

I don’t think about this very much when I’m riding the train into work, my head down, tapping away on my laptop, buried deep in a story about a lonesome bayou that is, metaphorically at least, about as far away from the glitz and thrum of Manhattan as you can get. But when the train stops, I put away my laptop and dive into my day job, working with first-class writers in an energized environment from an office set high above the neon glitter of Times Square. And when the day is over, I settle into my seat on the train, pop open my laptop again, and dive back into the luminous swamp of my fiction-writing life.

My two lives don’t conflict. One cleanses my palate for the other. The only complication is when I arrive home and my wife asks me what’s new at the office. I always ask, “Do you mean 4 Times Square or New Jersey Transit?”

Wells wrote his latest book, out this summer, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, on the train too.