Navigare una storia

Sailing a Story

Dedicated to those with a keen interest in cinema and storytelling!

“Sailing the sea and sailing a story are the same thing… sailing is not a science, it’s an art; it’s a relationship of mutual confrontation and mutual yielding with the elements.”

Sailing in a story.
Freewriting lessons at sea.

I have always loved sailing and inventing stories. Since I was young, I’ve sailed along the Dalmatian coast and as far as the Ionian Islands with my friends. For us, sailing meant learning to handle a boat, sharing stories of the past and journeys never taken, cooking, swimming, staying in the bunks of youth, and facing the fear of a night bora wind.

For me, imagining, narrating, and writing a story to become a film has always been my profession, one that occupies all of my time. It’s called obsession.

For a long time, I’ve refused to “teach” or explain what writing a film means to me in the many masterclasses I’ve been offered because I felt I was explaining something I wasn’t practicing myself.

Recently, something happened to me while I was on a boat—something they call an epiphany. The tiller in my hands suddenly appeared as the tiller of a story. And in sequence, every element of sailing found a perfect analogy with what I do when I imagine and develop a story for a film: the wind, adjusting the sails, the keel, the course, the pace of the boat on the waves.

Sailing appeared to me as exactly like sailing in a story.

I thought: here it is, I can finally explain what I do when I work, what my job is—but I can only do it on a boat.

I immediately recalled a film I love, Master and Commander by Peter Weir. Onboard that ship, they sail, fight, play music, eat, drink, discover new lands, study insects, lose their way, and find a possible new destination. They make mistakes, they fix them, and they carry on.

Everything I do when I “sail in a story.” I don’t construct it, I don’t build it; I navigate through it.

I thought: now I can share what I do when I write—I sail. I wanted to give it structure, to share this unexpected possibility, but I could only do it on a boat. I envisioned it immediately: oceanic, complex yet simple, fast yet spartan, with a captain steering it as I used to sail in my youth because every story, I thought, is a boat filled with nostalgia.

I quickly and happily found the boat and the people to share this idea with: “sailing the sea is like sailing a story.”

The boat is the Moana60 Spirit of Community APS, a legendary 60-foot oceanic boat that has conquered the ocean countless times, captained by Nicola Pino—because he’s called captain, not skipper—and managed by his community. From July 14 to 28, we will sail both the sea and a story, cruising along the Ionian archipelago with Zakynthos as our base. For any information, you can contact the Moana60 Spirit of Community APS, a nonprofit association offering very affordable participation fees.

This is the idea I’ve developed with Nicola Pino and the Moana.

Onboard, I can explain to myself and my shipmates what the keel of a story means, the tiller of a story, its course, what it means to tell a story against the wind or with the wind at your back. I can explain how the “perfect pace of a boat on the waves” relates to the balance of a story, how feeling the boat under your feet for the first time is like sensing the truth of a story you’ve only vaguely imagined. Step by step, tack by tack.

They call it a creative writing masterclass, a term I dislike—but I like it because, in Master and Commander (mandatory viewing before boarding), there is everything one needs to learn about storytelling.

This, then, is what I offer aboard the Moana60: to transfigure sailing into writing and vice versa, until they blur into one.

Even the destination of the voyage is always a hazy desire at first, just like the ending of a story, because real destinations and real endings are hidden in a locker that’s never been opened—like in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—something you find when you’re looking for an anchor and instead discover the ending.

Umberto Contarello