My Story

Everyone loves a good story.

Stories are the basic currency of society, the fundamental unit of human culture. We express our values and look for insights by sharing stories. Whether through fiction or nonfiction — on the printed page, at the cinema, or around the dinner table — stories are how we explore ourselves and grapple with the challenges of life. Storytelling is the most human thing we do.

With that in mind, I’d like to tell you my story.

This particular chapter starts back in January 2012, while I was honeymooning with my new bride, the incredible Emily Lau. After a few days in Barcelona, we boarded a cruise ship for a week-long tour around the Mediterranean. We thoroughly enjoyed visiting Mallorca, Sicily, Sardinia, and Rome. We bought colorful souvenirs and ate the most wonderful food. We wandered the village streets and basked in the sights and sounds and smells of Europe.

But on the fifth night, our cruise ship hit the rocks and sank off the coast of Italy, bringing an abrupt end to our idyllic voyage.

The evacuation went horribly wrong: the captain abandoned ship, and the lifeboats left us behind. With nowhere else to go, Emily and I climbed a rope down the side of the sinking ship, where we held on for three hours, waving at the helicopters circling overhead. Even after rescuers finally arrived and brought us to back to the mainland, our struggle continued. With no passports or credit cards, and not much cash in our pockets, we found ourselves stranded. With no help from the American embassy, we made new friends in Rome who helped us find our way back home again.

Days later, finally sleeping in our own beds, we still couldn’t escape the trauma. Night after night, we relived the experience in our dreams, waking every morning in cold sweat and racked with anguish. On the advice of a friend, we found a therapist who diagnosed us with post-traumatic stress disorder, and we spent the next several months in therapy.

This brings me to the heart of the story.

Our therapist taught us to let go of our anger and our quest for justice, and instead to look for meaning. Overcoming PTSD requires a person to make sense of the tragedy by integrating it into the story of their lives, not by asking “why did this happen to me?” but by instead asking “what does this mean for me?”

I explored those questions by writing.

Every morning, for the next year, I woke up at six o’clock and spent two hours writing before going to work. I wrote in the evenings and on the weekends, throwing myself into the storytelling process. I wrote down everything I could remember about the disaster, but more importantly, I grappled with questions of fate and forgiveness and meaning. Emily did the same thing, though her medium is music, so she spent her contemplative hours composing and recording.

On the one-year anniversary of the shipwreck, January 13, 2013, we released our finished products. I published my book, Abandoned Ship, and Emily released her album, Isle of Lucidity.

These two companion pieces represent our artistic epiphany together, and the process of producing them changed our lives.

It was a shocking realization, at first, to finally understand that our most painful experiences could become the themes of the stories and songs that would enrich and beautify our lives.

What else is literature even for, if not that?

Although I studied creative writing in college — playwriting in particular — I had always had a bad habit of flitting from idea to idea and never really finishing anything. After college, I started working as a software engineer and put my creative writing ambitions into deep-freeze, always daydreaming about stories I’d like to write, but never investing the time to finish a first draft.

But now that I had actually finished a major writing project, I finally understood what had been missing from my craft for so many years. Writing Abandoned Ship filled me with a sense of purpose, a deep feeling that I was writing something important. I was telling a story that only I could tell, and my passion for the project drove me to work hard, through draft after draft, struggling with writers block, and trying desperately convey the emotional heart of the story. I felt a sense of responsibility to tell our story, and to tell it well.

I want to share that experience with you. I want to help you tell your story, whatever it might be, and I want you to find purpose and meaning in your writing.

My experience writing Abandoned Ship also showed me that the landscape of writing tools has basically gone unchanged since the invention of the typewriter. The past few years have seen many innovations in publishing, but tools for writing still don’t do much more than arrange lines of text on a page. The fundamental elements of writing craft — character, setting, scene, concept, theme, and voice — are conspicuously absent in today’s word-processors.

Shaxpir is my humble attempt to change all that, making a tool for writing that actually fits into an author’s own creative process, from brainstorming to outlining to prosecraft.

I’m just as passionate about this product as I am about my memoir. Shaxpir is the next chapter in my story, the next stage of my life’s work, and I’d like you to be a part of it.

Benji Smith
Founder & CEO