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.

First drafts are the best and the worst.

I am working on a book at the moment and I’m running into the same problem I had when I completed my first book. I hate and love first drafts.

There are times when I get really obsessed with the writing. I am in the midst of one of those times. For the past couple days, any time I sit at my computer, I am typing like a fiend. I am loving my characters and pouring myself into the writing. My main character is awesome and the supporting cast is quirky and interesting. Everyone has their back stories and everything is working.

But I know from the last time I wrote a book that this feeling is fleeting. Actually, I have been working on this current one the past three months or so and have already hit the road blocks I am about to describe.

Writer’s block

Those moments when you don’t know what’s going to happen next and aren’t quite sure that anything you’ve written up to that point is worth keeping. Maybe you should trash the whole thing?

Writer’s despair

This is a piece of crap. Who would ever pay to read this? It will be one that I print for my parents to read and pretend to like. These characters don’t seem real. This character is an idiot and I’m an idiot for creating him. What’s the point of writing this anyway?

Writer’s complete and utter confusion

I have written myself into a corner. I have to erase half of what I have already written. I can’t use these twenty five pages. I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner. Wait…who is this character on this page? Where did I introduce him? What does he look like? I should keep a record of this stuff…except let’s face it, I won’t. It makes me feel like I can’t be as creative if I have too much structure. But look where no structure has gotten you, weirdo. You don’t even know what the hell you’re writing anymore!

Yet I will continue to write and think about writing and act out fight scenes alone in my room like a weird 10-year-old imitating a character in a video game. (I mean…I do it so I can get the descriptions right…and also because it’s fun. Mostly it’s the description thing though.)

I will now describe my book. I have described it to zero people aside from my brother who is the best person to bounce ideas off of. He’s probably one of the few people who can hear, “And they’re from an alternate universe that is kind of on Earth but…really it isn’t on Earth.” and respond with, “Oh, okay.” as though it’s something he hears every day. Maybe he did hear things like that every day, as we lived together for almost twenty years.

My novel is told from the point of view of a girl named March Matthews (because I like alliteration and weird names) and she has a photographic memory. Her memory works kind of like picture and video files on a computer. They’re all stored in her mind and she can flip through them to access them.

There’s one problem, though. Her grandfather has supposedly passed away three years prior to the start of the book, and she has no memory of him. She’s told by family members that she and her grandfather were incredibly close. A therapist suggests that she represses the memories of him because it’s too painful for her to deal with his loss.

March decides to try to recover her memories of him and finds more than she ever expected she would. Human-like beings with extraordinary abilities. A secret organization – ACS – fighting against those beings that her grandfather was supposedly a member of. An alternate world where these beings reside.

March soon learns that she isn’t the only one searching for clues about her grandfather. She gets swept up in a conflict that pits her world against the alternate world – a conflict that may or may not have been started by her grandfather.

Her forgotten memories might be the key to resolution.

…

So, here is an excerpt from my first chapter. March has arrived at her parents’ home for dinner after a visit to a coffee shop where she saw a strange man peering through the window at her. He has followed her home and she doesn’t know why.

Disclaimer – this is really first drafty. When I finish this draft and go back to edit, I will remove the adverbs and repetitive verbs and what not. I probably overuse “look” and “watch” and “stare” and will think of more interesting ways to write sentences containing those verbs later. My main purpose in the first draft is getting the crazy mess of ideas from my brain to the page.

* * * * *

March pulled up to the curb by the mailbox and noticed an unfamiliar car parked on the other side of the street. She shuffled quickly through the memories of the neighbor’s cars and saw their SUV and their son’s Jetta but this car was different. The neighbor’s lights were off so they didn’t have a guest. March peered through her window at her parents’ home and saw four figures moving around in the dining room.

Her suspicion stemmed from the countless times during the past several years that her grandmother had taken it upon herself to invite young men to dinner to meet March. She cut the engine and drug herself to the door. Her mother opened it before she could even find the key.

“March!” she said. She gestured for March to lean toward her. Her mother was a small, slight woman. She hugged March, who had been taller than her since middle school, and released her quickly. Before she stepped back, she whispered what sounded like “Sorry.”

March stepped into the house and turned right to enter the dining room where she saw her father and grandmother seated on either side of an older gentleman who March recognized immediately.

“Dr. Carver?” she said.

“Hello, March,” he replied.

“Look who I ran into at the store today, March,” her grandmother said. Her left eyebrow raised up ever so slightly which – when checked in contrast of her store of unpleasant Grandma June memories – meant she was lying.

March took her seat across from her father and set her bag on the floor. She looked past her father’s head to the cars parked outside. She looked from Dr. Carver to his car and back at him again to be sure the memories were linked.

Her mother brought the first dish in and placed it on the center of a placemat that sat in the middle of the table parallel to two other placemats. Each of their place settings was identical – cutlery parallel to each other, plate at the center of the mat, cup at the upper right hand corner of the mat, each cup exactly three quarters full.

March’s mother shuffled to the kitchen and back again with two serving dishes that she placed at the center of the two other mats. She sat by March, surveyed the dishes, reached forward to adjust one, and then placed her hands flat on the table in front of her with an approving nod.

“The meal looks lovely, Millie,” the doctor said.

“Agreed!” March’s father chimed in.

They scooped food onto their plates silently and March noticed that her grandmother kept glancing from the doctor to her parents to March as though she were waiting for something to happen. Once they had all begun their meal, the doctor cleared his throat.

“March,” he said. “It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen you.”

“Isn’t that…good?” March said, looking to her father for support. He smiled.

“It is,” Dr. Carver continued.

“Then…why are you here?” March said.

“March Matthews!” her grandmother said as though she were a child who was about to be grounded. “That sounded rude.”

March clenched her jaw to keep from retorting.

“I just wanted to talk,” the doctor said. “Casually.”

“What would you like to talk about casually?” she asked.

“We don’t have to be defensive, March,” he said.

“We aren’t being defensive. I’m being defensive.”

“It was three years ago today that your grandfather passed away, wasn’t it?”

March stared out the window, unwilling to make eye contact with the man.

“March?” he said. “You must remember something by now.”

March kept her eyes on the window and clenched her jaw harder, so hard that her temples began to hurt.

“Maybe you all can talk after dinner,” she heard her father say.

“She’s okay,” her grandmother said, slamming one of the serving dishes onto the table. March’s mother reached over to adjust it and her grandmother slapped her hand away. “Go ahead, March. What do you remember? Tell the man.”

“I remember…going to the lake with him.”

“Okay,” the doctor said. “The lake.”

“She has a picture on her cell phone of the two of them at the lake,” her grandmother said.

March looked at her grandmother. “I guess that’s what sparked my memory.”

“Then what did we do that day at the lake?” her grandmother asked.

March didn’t answer.

“June,” her father said. “This is hardly the time for this.” Her father had a wonderful way of saying things softly but with great authority. He was the only one her grandmother couldn’t rattle. March and her mother on the other hand were far too affected by Grandma June.

Her mother was staring at the plate blankly that Grandma June hadn’t allowed her to move. Her father reached over quietly and adjusted the plate so that it lined up with the other and her mother sighed and smiled again.

“I’m concerned about her. I think she might be lying,” Grandma June said. “What did August say about me those months before the divorce? The two of you were always off together talking in hushed voices. He told you he was leaving me, didn’t he?”

With each syllable, the pitch of Grandma June’s voice had risen until she sounded almost hysterical. March stared at her, wide-eyed. The woman hadn’t ever said anything like that before. March knew – from stories her mother told her – that Grandma June and Grandpa August had gotten divorced a few months before he passed away, but her grandmother didn’t talk about it.

“Ma’am,” the doctor said. “It is quite possible that March doesn’t remember. Traumatic events can sometimes not be dealt with immediately. As all of you have told me, March was very close with her grandfather. Losing him might have been too much for her. When we can’t deal with something…some of us simply don’t.”

“I’ve heard quite enough,” Grandma June said.

“I’m sorry if I upset you,” the doctor said.

As her grandmother stood to leave the room, March noticed something behind her, through the window. Movement.

She focused on the window, and sure enough, there was someone walking up the lawn toward the house. The figure was tall and lean and she assumed male. He held a flashlight in either hand that were pointed toward the ground, casting light on the fallen leaves. He trudged right over the flower bed and through the shrubs so that he could press his nose up to the window.

March didn’t have to go back far in her memory to remember him. The man from the coffee shop.

Panic began to creep in and March’s breathing became uneven. Had he followed her? Why? Her parents were saying something, having a conversation with Dr. Carver, and they didn’t even glance at the window.

He still wore the sunglasses and the mask, but as soon as he reached the window, he removed the mask. He had a square jaw and a stubbly face. He then removed the sunglasses. He looked at his hands as if he were studying them and March followed his gaze with her own.

She wasn’t quite sure what she saw. He wasn’t holding flashlights as she had originally assumed. His palms were glowing – a soft white light. The light reminded her of street lamps or car headlights. She squinted her eyes and attempted to recall if she had ever seen anything like this before but the more she tried to access those memories, the more her head began to throb right behind her eyes. She blinked hard a few times, but the last time she shut and then opened her eyes, she and the man locked eyes.

March heard herself shriek as though she were elsewhere, outside herself. It was her but she didn’t feel attached to the voice. A white hot pain shot from the back of her skull to the front and blinded her. She jerked her body sideways in an attempt to throw her arms up and felt herself fall. She collided with whomever had been seated by her. Was it her mother? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think. She vaguely sensed the ground beneath her and heard another shriek. She was screaming and she couldn’t get her mouth to close and she couldn’t get the pain to lessen. Her body seized up, and then she couldn’t feel anything.

* * * * *

She’s not dead. I promise.

Or is sheeeee!?

She isn’t. 🙂