My love of story has been insatiable since I was a young boy and growing up in the story-haunted South with fighter pilots engaging in faux dogfights over the Atlantic. I can remember falling asleep as my Grandmother Stanny told me about safaris in Tanganyika, belly dancers in Lebanon, and the illegal ivory markets of Hong Kong. My mother, who was no stranger to wildlife, collected poisonous snakes and once told me that a copperhead I caught her for Mother’s Day when she was pregnant with my brother Jim was the most thoughtful present she had ever received. In Kissimmee, Florida, long before Disney World, a mandrill grabbed my arm and refused to let go until my mother and Aunt Helen fought the ape off. “Thank God it was not a great ape,” my mother said in the retelling. My great-grandfather on my father’s side, J. B. Hunt, was a sea captain who claimed he brought salmon to the Great Lakes. He also said a painter named Francis Millet rented a room from him and paid his rent with his paintings years before Millet went down with the Titanic, and every Good Friday in Anniston, Alabama, my Uncle Cicero walked with a wooden cross to commemorate the Passion of Jesus. It was a source of great pride to my mother’s family, shame to her, and wonder to me. A poet grew up in the bedroom next to mine, and when she was five, my sister came up after dinner and said to me, “Our parents are both crazy. Both nuts.”

“No, no, Carol Ann,” I said. “Don’t say that. That’s our mom and dad.”

“I’ve been watching how families act on TV shows,” she said. “Our family is nuts. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I’ve led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire. Sometimes it takes the passage of years to reveal their actual meaning or import. They disguise themselves with masks, disfigurements, chimeras, and Trojan horses.

When I write, I wait for the sudden appearance of signs and portents in the air, always on the lookout for secret messages encoded in graffiti or heralds disguised as strangers in the club cars of trains. A bright encounter with twins, a brother and sister, on a morning flight to Rome changed the entire configuration of the Wingo family in The Prince of Tides. The wife of a former mayor of Mobile, Alabama, took me out to her yard overlooking Mobile Bay and told me the story of her three-year-old daughter who could not sleep in the heat of the summer. The mother brought the girl out to the end of the dock to watch the sunset, then turned and saw the moon rising out of the east. As the sun disappeared, accompanied by radiant clouds along the horizon, the moon kept rising, pale gold, then pale silver, then a deeper silver, with the child spinning to see both the sun and the moon. When it was over, to her mother’s delight, she said, “Oh, Mama—do it again!”

I told the mayor’s wife at that instant, “Madam, consider that story stolen.” The story fills the prologue of The Prince of Tides with just the right spillage of light, and it anchors the last chapter with the sudden coming of darkness. Alertness is a requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life. Once when I was a boy, I witnessed an angry father ricochet a basketball off the back of his son’s head after the kid had beaten him in a game of horse. That image was lost to me for twenty years when I wrote a chapter about Ben Meecham defeating his fighter pilot father in a one-on-one game early in The Great Santini. I needed a scene of unendurable humiliation for the son, then I recalled that man bouncing that basketball off that lost boy’s head. As the Great Santini followed his son Ben into the house, he taunted him all the way to his room, mimicking again and again that terrible father who had followed me out of time to present me with a story which had all the immediacy, power, and cruelty to demonstrate what Ben Meecham’s life felt like at that very moment he had beaten his father in a game for the first time. Ironically, my father and I would witness the filming of that alarming scene and watch as Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe would play it to perfection while Blythe Danner looked on in horror in the film version of The Great Santini. A diminutive older woman who was on the set that day approached my father with some trepidation and asked, “How often did you and Pat play games like that, Colonel?”

My father stared down at her and then deadpanned, “Every day, madam. Every single day.” And another story was born.

But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their novels and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself. I know dozens of Southern writers who followed the murder trial of socialite Jim Williams in Savannah, Georgia, but it was the stranger from away, John Berendt, who saw the incredible richness of the story and blended it together with the bizarre and magical atmosphere of the city itself in his book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The story can be living beside you or locked in the house next door or delivering your mail. The gift of the writer is recognition—the awareness when the story has introduced itself to you.

I grew up in the house where a man who called himself the Great Santini initiated a reign of terror that was to last for twenty-one years. I carried my deep hatred of him inside me because I thought he would kill me if I ever let it spill out. I never felt safe a single day of my disgraceful, anxious childhood.

In 1975, I was finishing my first novel, The Great Santini, in a farmhouse in Dunwoody Georgia, provided to me by the great Houghton Mifflin book rep Norman Berg. For two months I wrote at a furious pace, then came to the last chapter and hit an impassable wall—I lacked all imagination about how I would end the book, or to put it in other words, I ran out of story. That night I had a startling dream that took me back to a funeral at Cherry Point, North Carolina. A friend’s father had crashed his plane during maneuvers over the ocean. I remember my friend and his sister and mother weeping as they followed his coffin out of the church, and I remembered shocking my third-grade heart by thinking that I’d be the happiest boy on earth if my father’s plane crashed.

I awoke the next morning, and I had my story. I said aloud: “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.”

I drove to the Darlington Apartments on Peachtree Street, where my father lived in a one-bedroom pied-à-terre. My parents were not fully aware of what I was up to in writing The Great Santini, but then again, neither was I. The week before I had caught my father, in flagrante, with a strange woman after he had forgotten that he had invited me over to watch a basketball game that same night. A better man would have quietly closed the door and never mentioned the intrusion, but I howled with laughter. As Dad and his lady friend hid under the sheets, I marched to the bookshelf, pulled down Dad’s Bible, dusted it off, and read Dad and his lovebird the Ten Commandments out of Exodus with great relish and showmanship.

My father was still petulant over the encounter when I knocked at his door. Dad said, “Thanks for knocking this time, jocko.”

“Good to see you, Romeo,” I said. “I need to ask you some questions about flying an airplane.”

“You came to the right place, pal,” he said.

“I told you I was writing a book based on a Marine Corps family?”

“Anybody I know?”

“Nope, total fiction. But at the end of the book I need to kill my pilot. I can’t have him just flying through the air and have his plane explode. It ain’t artful, Dad. I need suspense. I need danger. I need excitement. Then I’m going to kill the bastard.”

“Bad idea, son,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’ll screw up the sequel.”

“Let’s start, Dad,” I said. “I don’t know one thing about flying. I don’t know if you turn on a key, if you have four on the floor—not zip.”

“You came to the right guy,” my father said, beginning our afternoon together. “Let’s make it a night flight. I used to have to get four hours of flight time at night every month.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Let’s put it in Key West. I loved flying out of Key West. Make it 0330, which would put me in Beaufort at about, say, 0520. We’ll fly the bird at thirty-two thousand feet. Flying is the most amazing thing a human being can do. No one loved it more than your old man.”

“Keep it going, Dad,” I said, writing. Dad shifted his wooden chair around so he was facing me, straddling the chair like a detective questioning a criminal he loathes. But Dad reached out over the chair’s back and grabbed the stick with his left hand. For the rest of this imaginary flight, he would control that throttle with his left hand. He was the fighter pilot and he was in control. I wrote as fast as I could as he described that night flight over Florida.

My father’s face became transformed as his eyes wandered over the gauges in his imaginary cockpit. He described the lights of Orlando, then the lights of Jacksonville, and on his right, the great abyss of darkness that was the Atlantic. Closing fast on Savannah, my father reached for a phantom radio and said, “Atlanta Center. Marine 657 over Brunswick at flight level three-two-zero. Requesting a Tacon approach to Beaufort. Over.”

Then, in a different voice, Dad spoke as the voice of the anonymous controller in Atlanta. “Roger. Six-five-seven is cleared to the Sand Dollar intersection for Tacon approach. Contact Beaufort approach control on 325–0 at this time.”

My father switched frequencies and called the Beaufort tower, pressing the radio near his mouth. “Beaufort approach, Marine 657 inbound. Sand Dollar intersection for Tacon approach. Flight level three-two-zero.”

“Roger,” the air station controller said, and my father surprised me by using a different voice than the Atlanta controller. “You are cleared to approach altitude. Report leaving three-two-zero.”

I had entered a world of my father’s that was a complete mystery to me and where I had never ventured before. Every word he uttered I took down, every number, and I could feel the tension build in the cockpit between us. Then I looked up at my father, whose intensity and concentration were in perfect congruence, and I said, “Dad, now you got to help me kill the guy. We’ve got to kill the pilot.”

My father looked up and pointed his finger to something he could see, but I could not. “Right there, son. High on the left of the instrument panel—the fire warning light.”

“Is that bad?” I asked, writing furiously.

Dad looked at me as though I was a moron, then said, “It could ruin your whole day.” He made an involuntary movement with his right hand to his face that I didn’t understand.

“Why’d you do that, Dad?” I asked.

“I’m pulling up my oxygen mask to check for smoke. Any smoke in this cockpit and I’m outta here, pal.”

“No smoke, Dad. No smoke at all,” I said. “Is there anything else I can add to make this flight more difficult?”

“Fog,” he said. “A pain in the ass. Hell, I can’t bring this plane in from this direction.”

“Why not?” I asked as I wrote.

“Too many civilians if I bring it in this way. Got to go around.”

“Who cares about civilians if your plane’s on fire?”

My father glared at me with contempt and said, “Fighter pilots do, pal. Part of the code.”

“Oh, I see. Good code. Now, Dad, something bad’s got to happen to this airplane.”

“Okay. I’ve started this bird down the slope, my boards are out, I’m ready for anything.”

Then something shifted radically in the nature of both the interview and the history of this mythical flight taking place on a wooden chair in my father’s cramped apartment. His left arm jumped and he had trouble controlling the stick as he reached for the radio and said in a measured voice, “Mayday. Mayday. Six-five-seven. I’m in the soup at two thousand. Have severe engine vibration and oven temp. Am going to guard channel and squawking emergency. Out.”

“What’s guard channel?” I asked, writing.

“It’ll put me on every radar screen on the East Coast,” he said as he fought the stick, his left arm fighting against the convulsions taking place deep inside his aircraft.

He reached for the radio again, every nerve in my father’s body alert with the mortal danger of the situation. “Six-five-seven is out of five thousand feet at ten miles. Unable to contact GCA. Request a straight-in approach. Give me full lights. Losing power and engine vibration severe. Tower. Engine explosion. Cockpit lights out. I can see the runway.”

Dad replaced the radio and then took the stick to fight it with both hands. I looked up and saw that he was sweating profusely and fighting against that fighter jet with every skill he could summon from a lifetime of flying. Both arms were shaking with the death of that fictional plane. My father took me by complete surprise by looking me straight in the eyes and snarling through tightened, grim lips: “I can bring it in.”

“What?” I said, looking at him.

“I can bring this bird in, pal,” he said. “I’ve done it before and I can do it again.”

“Sorry, Dad. This is for the book. You’ve got to die.”

“I’m not letting you crash a twenty-million-dollar airplane just for your goddamn book,” he said. “It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

“It’s not a real plane, Dad,” I said. “You’re sitting in a chair.”

“Then let me turn it starboard. I’m too near civilians again. I’m not going to let you kill any civilians on my watch.”

“Turn it starboard, Colonel. No civilians die.”

“I want to die on land,” he said. “I never wanted to dump a bird in water. I know a place. A tomato field. I’ll take her in there.”

“Take her in there, Dad.”

He took her in, and we both fell back exhausted in our chairs. I thought I knew every story of my father’s, and I had hated every one of them. He was the worst father I had ever seen, and I have not been shy about proclaiming that. But, until that day, I had no idea I was being raised by one of the goddamnest fighter pilots in the history of the Marine Corps. My father and I looked at each other, and I believe we both realized we had just completed our first great day as father and son. There would be many, many more, but this was the day my father took me into his life as a Marine Corps aviator and did me the high honor of asking me to be his wingman, at last.

“Let me take you to the Colonnade for dinner,” I said, mentioning my father’s favorite restaurant. “You earned it, Colonel.”

“I need to take a shower,” he said. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and so was mine.

My father had just delivered me of the last chapters of my new novel by offering me a great story. I could reward him with food, because it is my most religious belief that a recipe is just a story that ends with a good meal.