Obsession

Writing obsessively over the last few months, things have fallen by the wayside, including this blog. I haven’t had anyone message me and ask, “Hey, what’s up with that blog?” Do people do that? Maybe not.

The writing obsession is something I’ve mentioned before. Stories get ahold of me and it’s hard to do anything else until I’ve got them out of my head. I think the characters get to be friends, although I don’t know that’s entirely healthy. I know it makes them harder to do away with. That turned into a problem with the time travel series, as I ended up with too many characters. It’s one of the problems I have to deal with as I rewrite and edit. But loving the story is a marvelous thing. I don’t know how anyone could write something they didn’t love.

Obsession can be a useful thing. It’s a great way to get a whole lot of work done on a project. It’s when you have more than one project that it’s a problem. If only I had a way to change obsessions. Of course, if you can switch, then we don’t call it obsession anymore. We have nicer words, like attention or concentration or focus. I imagine focus having all the advantages of obsession with none of the disadvantages. Too bad that’s not the way my head seems to work.

Basing characters on friends

Where do authors find their characters? How do they choose their names? I often base mine on people I know, sometimes even leaving the whole thing intact. Students are a great source. Pick a first name from one student and a last name from another, and I have a character name that I know is perfectly realistic. I have to be careful, though, as my students are from all over the world, and mixing and matching in that pool can produce nonsense.

A few times I have chosen names, especially Japanese names, with the meaning in mind. “Ikenami” means “pond wave,” which as far as waves go, can hardly be a big one. It fit nicely for character that was a tempest in a teapot. In A Scowl Becomes Me, I wanted to name the protagonist’s wife Blessed. So then I named several of the Japanese characters with names that all mean “blessed.” I enjoyed having the protagonist learn the meanings of their names one by one.

More often, however, I choose Japanese names that are as different from each other as possible, as I know foreign readers can have a hard time keeping Japanese names straight. This was especially daunting in The Man Terror Club, as there are so many women and they are all important to the story. I purposefully tried to make them sound as different as possible, while still making them mainstream Japanese names.

I have also occasionally named characters I like after friends. It makes them more three dimensional for me. This can be even more true if the friend lends not only the name, but also the character’s personality or appearance. The female protagonist in my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, was inspired in part by experiences of a friend of mine (although it is mostly fictional). In The Time Well, I have based characters on a few friends. They have tentatively allowed me to use their full names, and seem to enjoy becoming part of the novel. I am planning the sequel now and one friend in particular is helping me understand how her character will react to the twists in the plot. The only real problem is that she is too busy to spend much time reading and giving me feedback.

The greatest problem with using friends to create characters is that I can never recreate the original person perfectly. So how does a real life friend feel when a character based on them does something they would never do? It has to be disconcerting. And that uncomfortable feeling could exceed the flattery of having one’s name or personality appear in the pages of a novel.

More importantly, I suspect all my characters are me. I am in there for good or ill. I wonder how my friends will feel about all being hybrids with me? I imagine our faces contorted and merged with Photoshop. It’s not pretty.

Perhaps the best way for me to think about it, though, is in line with advice I recently got from a friend who is a lawyer. I was wondering if the organizational setting for one of my novels, which is not at all flattering, could be close enough to a particular organization that I would wind up getting sued. My friend asked who the publisher was, and when I said I was self-publishing, he told me that I shouldn’t worry about it. He said that chances were no one would read it anyway. 

Final lesson: some problems are more rhetorical than real. It’s important to keep things in perspective.

When do you write the sequel?

Is it time to branch out into an all-new novel or march on with a sequel? I have several project ideas waiting in the wings, but I have also been making notes for sequels to two existing, but unpublished novels. Somehow, the idea of a “part II” seems premature when I don’t even know if anyone will like the first book. But I will likely need to have characters or situations that set up a sequel in the first installment of a series, which leaves me wondering whether the initial novels are truly finished.

This seems particularly important for my time travel series. While the world I have built does not allow looping back to the traveler’s starting point, it is still more complicated than a normal linear story line. I have already gone back into the first book and tweaked some facts based on my notes for the sequel. How much more will I need to change once I start the actual writing? The risk of omitting something critical to the later story makes me feel that having the complete series in front of me would be wise before I try to publish the first book.

I know popular authors write sequels long after publishing the first novel. There’s nothing to stop me from doing the same. I am creative enough to knit two stories together after the fact. But how much cleaner could the seams be if I sewed them up tight right from the start? Even straight-line stories depend on the original framework and setting of the story. Would it be best to stay immersed in the world I’ve created and spin another yarn? And how about a prequel?

Am I overthinking all this?

Writing the entire series before publishing any of it may be less important for novels where there are no backward time jumps. I’ve got more than one series started, so it might be useful to let a book sit for a while and work on something else before I write the next installment. It could also be better to stagger the writing and see if I get more perspective by waiting to move on with a storyline. But how many years does that turn into? I can write fast (not Stephen King fast, but fast enough), but as the unpublished manuscripts pile up, along with all the other work I need to do to get the novels to market (not to mention trying to build a customer base), the sequels could turn into a years-long quest. 

But these incomplete stories tug on me. They nag so loud that they’re hard to ignore.

Damned whiney sequels.

The idea: A Scowl Becomes Me

All my male protagonists are alike. They’re all me, except better looking. In all the novels except The Man Terror Club, which has no male protagonist, the men are sensitive and on the romantic side. They are not particularly emotionally resilient. They are confident in their intelligence and often overthink situations, but are not so socially adept and appreciate being propped up by a heroine. None are overly ambitious, certainly not to the point of obnoxiousness. They tend to be middle-aged. Most surprisingly, women are much more attracted to them than they ought to be, so none have to scheme elaborately to attract their female protagonist.

With that in mind, I felt the need to write someone different, someone not as genial, someone supremely confident. And I wondered what would happen if I made him a little off-putting, perhaps an irascible know-it-all. Of course, he needed some redeeming qualities as well: clever, honest, cares deeply about people who manage to break through. I would also need a situation that threw him together with the female protagonist so they could not easily escape. After all, few are attracted immediately if someone’s obvious qualities are a turnoff.

I should have put myself into a snarky mood each day before I started writing. It was necessary, because what naturally comes out of me is the type of character that is warm and empathetic. This novel needed cool and distant. But non-snarky me wrote warm and empathetic for far too many scenes. 

I kept writing anyway. I liked my characters and didn’t want to throw them away. I also wanted to discover how they got to the vague endpoint I had in mind. So my character didn’t turn out to be as big a turnoff for the female lead as I intended. Still, I came up with a way to torpedo their relationship.

I need to come up with another distasteful but redeemable character. I had an interesting idea about an American road trip for a family that’s disintegrating. I have also thought about sequels to The Man Terror Club and The Time Well, although I already know those characters, so they wouldn’t stretch me as much. 

Maybe an ax murderer. I’ve already done a nice-guy kidnapper and a well-meaning serial killer. Perhaps someone not so stabby, another curmudgeon.

Editing: Under Shōko's Bed III

I thought I sent Tricia Callahan a clean manuscript of Under Shōko’s Bed to copyedit. I had stuck as closely as I could to The Chicago Manual of Style and had looked up all the spellings I was unsure of on the Merriam-Webster website. I was ready to give Tricia an easy payday. But it turned out I had not learned the meaning of thorough. Words I thought I knew turned out to be spelled wrong (e.g., police canvass a neighborhood, not canvas), I had too many echoed words, my punctuation was wanting (e.g., I thought I had fixed all the dialogue sections so that only dialogue tags connected to dialogue with a comma, but there were multiple places I had missed), among other problems.

By far the thing I had the most trouble with was punctuating italics. It is very difficult to know when the punctuation should match the italics of the sentence or phrase versus the roman of the surrounding text. I was able to glean some general principles from Tricia’s edit, though, and can use those to guide me in my other novels. Under Shōko’s Bed, though, is unique in my novels in its use of italics. There are imagined dialogues that use italics to help the reader know they are not actual dialogue. I doubt that I will ever have as much trouble with editing and italics again.

In all her thoroughness, Tricia was the consummate professional. She even created a “Style Sheet” for me to reference as I went through the changes. This included a list of characters, places, abbreviations, words she looked up, and a complete timeline of the scenes. Luckily, I had been very careful with the timeline as I wrote and there were no problems. I had even gone so far as to make sure that art exhibits, etc. in the characters’ pasts were real events. And in my behalf, I should say that most of the problems in the manuscript were small things that the average reader would never have noticed, but which would have driven me crazy when I finally found them. It’s nice to know there’s someone who can point them out to me so I can fix them.

Still, even with all of the problems Tricia found, it was not uncommon to go for pages between errors. In the end, I was able to input all the changes into Scrivener in a single day. So it was a very worthwhile edit. It’s a better manuscript now. Every writer deserves to be humbled. We need to be reminded that perfect text is almost always out of reach. The deeper humbling, though, will likely come when I self-publish the novel. I do not have readership locked in.

The idea: The Man Terror Club

The idea for The Man Terror Club came to me as I was waking up one morning ten years ago. Who knows what odd places thoughts steal in from when you’re only half awake, but I wondered how an elevator operator might fight back if she was being sexually harassed. As my somnolent imagination meandered, it strayed toward acts of physical resistance and retribution, and the title The Man Terror Club popped into my head. 

It may be the most evocative of all the titles I’ve written, but I worried about creating the story. That title deserved a brilliant book, and I wasn’t yet confident enough in my first two novels to believe they had prepared me to produce something of that caliber. I experimented with the idea in 2010-2012 as a short story, but I didn’t feel ready to write even that much. 

So I waited.

I got more serious about writing in 2017. I rewrote Under Shōko’s Bed and Neyuki and improved both novels. How much more experience would I need before I could do justice to my idea? I thought it best to write at least two more novels before I tried The Man Terror Club. The problem was I didn’t have two other stories that moved me as The Man Terror Club did, so I finally resolved to just do it. In the spring of that year, over two months, I produced the first draft. I did not have the entire plot firmly in mind from the beginning, although I knew things would take a dark turn and end in murder. I envisioned each of the pre-murder chapters as a short story focused on a different member of the club. As I wrote, though, the women’s stories blended together and lost their short story flavor. 

Still, each chapter for the first three-quarters of the novel is told first person from a different character’s point of view. (After that, narration stays first person, but already-introduced characters narrate sections of the chapters.) I didn’t realize at the time that I was flying in the face of writing pundits who warn neophytes and even more advanced writers never to write first person with a large cast of narrators. You should have few narrators and preferably only one. But what I attempted, eleven narrators, is not unheard of. William Faulkner used fifteen first-person narrators in As I Lay Dying. Of course, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, while I remain unpublished. Nevertheless, I wanted to try.

Perhaps the most surprising experience of writing The Man Terror Club was how much I came to like the characters. While all the women have been betrayed, abused, or discarded, they remained kind, giving, and caring. Their love for each other heals them, and that healing is most of the story, not their terrorism as they lash out at the evil men do.

With my ongoing interest in the characters, I have even been bouncing the idea of a sequel around. I am taking notes and considering key characters, plot twists, and terrorist acts. I worry it may be premature to start a sequel before the first novel is even published. But The Man Terror Club, while not finalized, is just about ready for professional editing. I don’t think the fundamental story will change. And I want to spend a few months living with those women again. They are lovely people (who do extreme things), and more of their story ought to be told.

Editing: Neyuki II

My editor, Fran Lebowitz, got the manuscript of Neyuki back to me a few weeks ago. It was a long time coming, but she gave me great feedback, including her overarching reaction: “I really loved the book.” I can satisfy most of her comments with simple revisions, but there are a couple of things that are more challenging to fix.

Fran would like to see the characters before the catastrophe that makes their lives spiral out of control. I had originally started with the momentous event, thinking that would be an effective hook. Based on her comment, I’m trying to write a whole new opening chapter. I am woefully dissatisfied, though, with the new beginning. Bucolic life in rural Japan does not capture the imagination and refuse to let go. It doesn’t turn pages. So day after day I peck away at ideas that may show the protagonist’s pleasant life in a way that can also hint at the coming conflict and keep readers going.

The longer term challenge for the novel is that it deals with sexual deviance and violence. Those are not the story’s principal themes, and the book condemns the characters who do those things, but they are integral to the plot. I know I risk triggering terrible thoughts, emotions, and memories for some, particularly survivors of sexual abuse. Some will say we should avoid such topics, that whatever worth the writing may have, it’s not important enough to overcome its degrading nature. Some worry about copycats. Those fears are not lost on me. But I know such deviance exists, I feel it’s good to denounce it, and I think Neyuki is a story worth telling. Yet I suspect no North American publisher will touch it. I could try to find a publisher in another country (the UK, for example), or I could publish it myself. Over time, though, the topic may become even less tolerable and the novel might forever stain me in some readers’ eyes. Even so, I’d like to find readers who will be moved by the story.

Whatever I decide, I hope to have a revised version of the novel completed this summer. It would be wonderful to publish it before the winter snows hit Japan.

More distraction

As summer approaches, my winter/spring distraction continues. As evidence, I wrote the first draft of this post over two months ago. Of course, it is odd that the COVID-19 pandemic has dictated that I stay home and work, when that is what I do most of the time anyway. I feel sympathy for those who are going stir crazy stuck in their homes, but I admit I am feeling none of that. I have stories to write, and I sit at my little table with my little computer and fill my extra hours tapping away on its keyboard oblivious, for a few hours at least, to the world.

My stories do not fill all my time. And the time they don’t fill is so tumultuous and upsetting. It disquiets me to watch the numbers steadily grow: infections, hospitalizations, critical cases, deaths. The restrictions on populations around the world, the unemployment, the economic pain are reaping a horrible toll. It’s hard not to pay attention, in the same way as a gruesome accident tugs at your eyes. Part of this pandemic, of course, seems quite accidental. People bear the blame for other parts, though. Some don’t follow instructions to practice social distancing or self isolation. Some assume they’ll come through it all just fine and don’t consider how those they in turn infect are going to come through it. Perhaps the worst are the few who could have led effective government responses, but were too vacuous or motivated by immediate political gain. They don’t seem to have the sense that there is a longer term problem. They have always gaslighted their way out of problems and assume that will be sufficient here too. It’s not. In democratic countries, such “leaders” can be voted out of office in disgrace. And those who don’t follow through on this weighty, consequential step will be failing us all.

With all this commotion, I admit I have to push hard to get past the distraction and lose myself in a story. But I have been able to push regularly enough to finish another novel and work on edits of a few more. The novel I’ve written isn’t about a pandemic, although a number of its characters die. I joked with a writing buddy that I should get a t-shirt that says, “I kill people. Wanna be next?” At least I am not dispassionate about it. After all, if there is no passion involved in losing characters, what were they doing in the story to begin with? Still, killing off characters at the same time that a pandemic is decimating the real world is sobering. 

I wonder how many pandemic stories are being created at this very moment by writers in scores of countries around the world. Their stories will ring with an immediacy they would not have had last year. Even though my writing isn’t immediate like that, I hope I can touch readers.

Distraction

It has been a late winter of distraction. My primary care physician told me in the middle of February that the pain and bleeding from my kidney could be cancer. He followed that up with pathology supporting his assumption. (It was a middling stage of cancer, but I don’t know if the stages they use in Japan are the same as the stages in America.) He sent me to a urologist. The urologist did an ultrasound two weeks ago and said he didn’t think it was cancer. I just got the results of a CT scan two days ago. A kidney stone is causing the bleeding and pain (which is what I had suspected in the first place). My primary care physician is on my “Grrr” list, but I followed up on his concerns, which was the important thing.

So what do you do with your writing when mortality is close enough to feel its breath on your face (in my worst imagination this happened a lot)? What do you do when you are too distracted to write? 

Write anyway. 

I have two simple suggestions for that.

First, edit something old.

You can’t stop working, right? If you’re a writer, you write (or revise or at least edit). I sit down to write every day (and I succeed almost every time). I figured I was too distracted to lose myself in an invented world and populate it with characters, but I had novels that needed work, so I edited. It’s calming to sink your mind into a story you know like a comfortable old friend when you want to escape the prospect of death. Mortality also gave me a little kick to get things finished. 

It did not help much with the push to publish, though. That’s a lengthy process. Lengthy processes are not foremost priorities when you don’t know how much time you have left. (Yes, it’s sad to admit I was that concerned, but imagination is important for a writer, isn’t it?)

Second, write something new.

This week, I got to where I had nothing I needed to edit. It perplexed me, assuming I could never muster sufficient concentration to write anything new. But tried it anyway. It was an act of faith. (My wife’s constant upbeat attitude also took root.) 

And I wrote! I started only a handful of days before I got the “don’t worry about it” diagnosis, but I could write fresh scenes for Novel 7 each day. With a little extra push, I could force my way through the distraction, because the story is strong. I’ve been knocking the idea around for a couple of years, and I think I have worked out enough of the kinks that it’s realizable.

The one thing I did not attempt as I waited for test results was writing more blog posts. If you’re keeping up with the blog, though, don’t assume missing blog posts mean things are going badly. It also happens when I visit family at the holidays or get so wrapped up in writing I can’t tear myself away. The stories matter more to me than the commentary.