5% Fiction

I am a fiction writer, so I think it’s fun to say much of what I do is invent things, make things up. Thinking about it, though, I realize that not so much of what I write is fictional. It’s all of my life but under the guise of fiction.

I am an overly observant person. From people’s appearances to the ways the move and interact with others to the way they interact with me and how it makes me feel, I am constantly observing. I then create characters that feel real to me because…well, they are real to me. They have quirks that either I have or that I have noticed in others.

A lot of this is actually subconscious. I will create a character and it might take me weeks or months to realize the similarities they have to myself or people I have known. I have been reflecting on my current book and see where some of my characters originated. I am going to cite examples from my own writing as an exercise because I think it’s interesting how much fiction actually isn’t fictional. It makes me wonder – when I read books – who the authors’ inspirations were for their own characters.

Mr. Hwang

I am going to start with my absolute favorite character in my book. Mr. Hwang. He’s a Korean man – around 60 years old – who runs a small coffee shop that my main character frequents. Archetype-wise he is the “wise old man” of the book. He’s sweet and caring and treats my main character like a granddaughter.

I wasn’t particularly close to either of my actual grandfathers. One I have met maybe three times in my entire life. The other died almost ten years ago and while our interactions were always pleasant when he was alive, we weren’t close. I didn’t have a  “let me take you for ice cream and show interest in your life and come to your school play” type grandfather.

When I lived in Korea and taught English to businessmen, I had one student – Mr. Lee – who was the absolute sweetest man I have ever met. He was around 72 – my eldest student – and quite wealthy. But he was humble, open-minded, and clever. He expressed interest in my feelings, whether I was having trouble living in Korea. He took me to lunch sometimes and told me that if I weren’t his teacher, I could him “Grandfather.”

Living alone overseas is hard enough, but living there as a young woman – with hardly any work experience – was scary sometimes. I felt so alone on so many occasions, as if I was just floating around a bunch of people who didn’t know me or care to know me or ask me how I was feeling. His caring and understanding were appreciated more than he will probably ever realize. I thanked him many times, and chose – consciously – to incorporate a bit of him into my book. The character of Mr. Hwang helps my main character in times of crisis and is a shoulder for her to cry on. He gives her advice and views the world as a beautiful place. All of that is from Mr. Lee.

March’s photographic memory

My main character has a photographic memory. It works like a video recorder. She can go back in the store of past memories, pull them forward, and rewatch them whenever she wants. However, when she gets overly emotional, she can be bombarded by these memories – painful memories.

This comes from my own life. Since I was a child, being overly observant was a blessing once I channeled it into my writing. But until that time, it was terrible. I remembered the most upsetting and disturbing things I saw on TV or in movies, on street signs (once drove past a pro-life rally and I still remember all the bloody pictures. It made me too sick to eat for a day when I was around 7 or so.) I have the type of personality where I can’t stop thinking about things that upset me. I have read that this is part of being a writer – being obsessed with strange things. But I don’t enjoy it. It’s frustrating. “Think about something else” is advice that is repeatedly lost on me.

Thus, I channeled this to my main character. I thought – what could be worse than being really observant and obsessive? How about – literally not being able to forget any detail from anything that I have ever observed? I talk about times in her past when she watched a horror movie and ended up screaming in agony when the perfect memories of it came flooding to her when she tried to sleep. She catches her boyfriend cheating on her with her friend and the memories resurface at the most inconvenient times and consume her. It’s disturbing and horrible, but it’s her struggle. And her memory ends up being something useful when the story begins to develop. I almost feel guilty inflicting this on someone – despite her being fictional. But I think that’s what makes a good story.

Every mean character

I don’t have too many characters that are purely “evil.” I think often, in real life, there isn’t always a clear sense of bad guys vs. good guys. Therefore, even my most insufferable characters are real – meaning they have SOME redeeming qualities.

But lemme tell you guys…guess where I get those bad qualities from…

Ahem.

From the girls who were mean to me in middle school because  I was taller than everyone, to the men I have dated who treat me like I’m dirt, to the time my parents punished me, to the teacher who gave me a B on that paper instead of the A I should have gotten (because, dammit, I worked hard on that stupid paper for my senior seminar class! The professor was trying to push me because she knew I was a good writer and I rewrote my Beowulf analysis several times to get that A…but for every other class I could crank out a 15 page paper in 3 hours and get an instant A! /still bitter! haha) to that chick who gave me a rude look on the subway, to that guy who hollered at me from his car – “Hey, baby, what’s yo name?”

…

Every bad or irritating event or person I write has an origin somewhere. It might be from my own experiences or from horrid things I observe or hear about. But it isn’t all fictional.

It seems apt to end this with something a guy I dated a while back once said.

“I’m afraid if we break up some day…you’re going to write about the bad stuff I did to you in one of your books.”

Don’t worry, horrible ex-boyfriend. I won’t use your name.

25,000 Words Written

There has been much talk of goals around me of late. I’m typically bothered by it. “You should have goals,” people at work will say – bosses, coworkers with better titles than mine (which are most of my coworkers). “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have goals,” my mother says – and she is also a coworker with a better title than mine. “Write your goals!” says my father, who prefers a direct approach – which is either refreshing or intimidating, depending on the circumstance.

Yet, I find myself without goals in my professional life. Of course, if you count “making enough money to pay my rent and buy enough food to keep me alive” as a goal, that is mine. I do feel fulfilled by the work I do because I am helping others on a daily basis. But if I sit and think “What is the one thing I want to do?” the answer is always the same. It always has been.

Write. I want to write.

My ultimate dream is to be able to be a full-time writer. I don’t want this to be a dream that is realized because I marry a man who makes enough money for me to quit my job and write full time. I want it to be because I publish something that people want to read and have fun reading.

The problem with this is that people don’t think it is an acceptable dream. In the ever-loving and ever straightforward words of my businessman father – “Write a book? I meant a real  goal, Amber.” (I should mention here that he is always supportive of my writing, he is just terribly practical and well-versed in the difficulties life can throw at you. But you can bet that when I get published one day, he will basically be president of my fan club, carrying around my book and telling people his daughter wrote it. My mom, too. Co-president of my fan club. She is, incidentally, my current biggest fan, and she reads rough drafts of my chapters regularly.)

“So, perhaps I don’t have goals after all.” I began to think this and was disheartened. Then I ran across something kind of great.

One of my favorite YA authors, Marissa Meyer – author of the Lunar Chronicles – recently blogged about a letter she had written to herself when she was twenty-four.

She had written to encourage herself to keep writing, pretending that she was five years older and published. The letter is wonderful and reflects a lot of how I feel these days – at the same age she was when she wrote the letter to herself. It’s a difficult time, starting something that you know is going to be good but that isn’t there yet. It’s hard to keep sight of the end when you don’t know quite when that will be. It’s easy to get discouraged.

At the end of the letter, she included two lists that she made. Motivations for Writing, and Fears that Keep Me from Writing (and ways to work around them).

Using that as an inspiration, I have decided that it isn’t ridiculous to have goals as a writer. Though many might disagree, I don’t think it’s ridiculous that these are the goals that are most important to me. I love my work at my company but I am a writer first and always.

I am going to make my own lists. 25,000 words into my current project seems as good a time as any to reflect.

My Motivations for Writing

1. Telling the stories that these wonderful characters I have dreamed up want told, thereby giving them the respect they deserve by chronicling their adventures.
2. Offering readers the same escape from reality that books always have and always will offer me.
3. To entertain people of all ages with stories of magic and impossible things.
4. To give myself a world to enjoy other than my own (unmagical) one.
5. To improve as a writer and find my own voice.
6. To fulfill my university creative writing professor’s prediction that I am going to be a successful writer – don’t want to let him down!
7. To convey life, love, happiness, sorrow, and fun – and any other possible emotion – the way I see it in the hopes that it allows someone the chance to say “I feel that way, too,” and reminds them that they aren’t alone.

Fears That Keep Me from Writing (and ways to work around them)

1. Self doubt – fear that I have no original ideas or ways of saying things, that I’m just not that good. (Remember that no one is that good in the first draft. Remember that you like writing for the process – and the process includes crappy writing that can be fixed later!)
2. Comparing myself to other writers. (They’re published and you’re not, but that won’t always be the case. Remember that you have the potential to be on those shelves with them, even if you aren’t quite there yet!)
3. Revising before I’m done with the first draft. (Stop being so OCD. The best writing you do comes when you don’t over think. Remember that manic, can’t-stop-this-momentum, worry-about-the-edits-some-other-time free writing produces the most unexpected – and therefore most fun – results.

There we have it. Thank you, Marissa Meyer, and I hope to look back at this in five years when I’m almost thirty and find that some of it has come true!