I Am Writing a Book

How I visualize one of my characters, Christian... probably AI

 

Well, not a real book in the sense of paper pages since I doubt it will ever be published, but that's not my real point. I was curious what it's like to write a real story with dialog and all of that. I've found that it is harder than I expected but much easier than I expected too. The harder parts are sort of technical like keeping everything straight with timelines and all of that. Surprisingly, the easier part has been writing the story itself.

I've written things before like how Aric and I got together, but that didn't have dialog in it and the character development wasn't very deep -- it was already longer than I wanted so it was purposefully abbreviated. I started something else which I got quite a ways into but ultimately decided that it really didn't have a central conflict that was compelling. It did give me some experience writing dialog though which was useful. That and dreaming up characters out of whole cloth has been an interesting experience.

In both cases I borrowed somebody else's world as a basis. I really hate that it might get labeled as "fan fiction" because from what I can tell that is a very creepy world. At the very least if you're going to borrow somebody else's world you should respect that world in my opinion. Much that I've seen is like it's fine to write about whatever you want to write about, but at least have a reason that it's rooted in somebody else's world. So many premises I've seen absolutely do not. I mean, is it so hard to create your own world when the premise and situations are completely different? I've seen this quite a bit with Red White and Royal Blue it's like have they even read it? But it's a good way to generate hostility if you point that out. I've thought about whether I could or should just create my own world. I think I could but for one thing: Dante's name is important. For now, I'm happy in the in between.

I'm almost done with the first pass of writing with one chapter left to go out of about 70 chapters and 400+ pages. I expect that with editing it will hopefully get shorter. I read somewhere that it's a good idea once you get at my stage, you should put it on the shelf for a couple of weeks or even a month before taking it up again. I already understand why since it's so long since I wrote some things, it's hard to remember what happened before. As of now it's taken me about 3 months to get to where I am now.

So while I was working on my previous attempt, I heard about this new movie called Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I had signed up to Starz to watch Mary and George and it was streaming there too so I watched. I loved it, suffice it to say. It's the tale of a young Mexican American teen who is full of anger and self doubt and feelings he can't name when by chance he meets another boy who completely changes his life when he offers to teach him how to swim at a local pool. If you haven't seen it, stop here and watch it or get the book which is even better by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (the audio book is narrated by Lin-Manuel Miranda who also produced the movie. I'd wager he was completely smitten by the book too).

What I loved about it is that it transported me to a world I have no experience with. Aristotle -- Ari -- and Dante are sons of Mexican immigrants or at least second generation (the Japanese call this Nisei -- I wish we had a cool word like that) growing up in late 80's El Paso Texas. Dante is a free spirited boy who shows Ari a world that Ari couldn't comprehend. I won't recount the whole premise of the book, but suffice it to say that boy finally gets boy.

There was a sequel which I eagerly read after, which was what happened after boy got boy. The ending was unsatisfying to me but actually pretty typical. All of these teen romance stories face a dilemma that the likelihood is that they'll break up organically because of circumstances they don't control. In the sequel it was them going off to different colleges far apart. The sequel didn't exactly say that they broke up, but it was kind of the implication. I have no idea if the author intends a trilogy or not but it was almost 10 years for the sequel and the author isn't getting any younger so who knows?

That's usually where everything stops for these kinds of stories -- how do you handle being separated? If you look at things like Young Royals, people want to believe it's forever but there are so many obstacles in their way for that to even vaguely be likely. It seems that Alice Oseman is going to give it a go though with Heartstopper which they claim they are starting to write, but I'd say that's pretty unusual and it will be interesting to see how they handle it.

So anyway, I had an idea of how to handle it better and came up with a central dilemma. What if they instead of breaking up, they put their relationship into limbo and took it school year by school year where they were allowed to see other people and indeed break up if they found somebody? Sort of an open relationship, but not exactly since breaking up is an OK outcome too? Painful, but OK. Sort of to keep expectations down.

So it has one conflict: how to stay together while they are apart, but that didn't seem like enough so it occurred to me that it was the late 80's and not the best time to be young and gay so what if the most horrible thing possible happened: that Dante caught HIV? That is definitely a dilemma and a half. Young and invincible is what HIV preys on, especially with pretty and free spirited boys like Dante. 

I really liked this idea because it's a peeve of mine because so many gay men want to completely erase anything to do with that period as if it didn't happen because it's "not happy and I only want to see happy".  If you want to write something commercially successful, writing about being gay during the AIDS crisis is probably a good thing to avoid. But I have no illusions that this will be for anybody but me so I don't care. Never mind that Angels in America is probably the best piece of gay theater ever written. Never mind that The Living End is a funny gay/AIDS take on Thelma and Louise. If it has the A word or the H word, people will complain and avoid.

I originally started writing it as a blog post and sort of an outline but then started writing some dialog too and it was starting to get bigger and bigger until I decided that I really should just put it into Google Docs so I could take advantage of the better writing environment and ultimately be able to collaborate with people helping me with editing. My guess is there are much better programs to write actual books especially given a bunch of problems I found along the way that could be helped by tools (for example, keeping timelines, what's still to be done, etc, etc).

So I had a plot with a good conflict -- it's sort of hard to argue with life and death as a conflict -- and started writing. I wrote a lot of it linearly especially at the beginning but then I'd get ideas that caused me to fast forward which immediately exposed that keeping a timeline was needed. Since the story spans their years in school and beyond, it was really hard to keep track of what was happening when, but I imagine that that can happen with more compressed time frames too. I also noticed that as the set of characters became bigger, I needed to keep track of them: who they were, how old they were, a little of their backstory if needed that I might not actually write about, but needed to know myself. I needed to keep track of ideas I had but hadn't got to yet, and things that were problematic with respect to continuity. Certainly not the Silmarillion, but enough to keep track of things.

One of the interesting things for me is that I had to remember what actually was possible back then. It's, I'm sure, a central problem of any historical fiction, but the modern age was just starting to come around back then with the internet which they were perfectly placed to take advantage of (email primarily) being at school. I've had to do quite a bit of checking of "could they do that then?" I didn't insist that it be pedantic but I didn't want it to have gross errors. either

The internet was one of a chain of happy coincidences that I realized as I was writing it. The one I liked the most was the appearance of Hale Bopp, our last great comet, and how it so almost perfectly fit my timeline of some of the crucial events -- I actually had to do some surgery on what I wrote when I realized that it would have been in the sky night after night to get the timing approximately right so that I could use it as a metaphor.

There were also a lot of things that were easy to take from my and Aric's life too. It's in no way autobiographical but has themes that I can relate to which was pretty fun. I tried to keep a lot of lighthearted humor to it. I had taken to reading my husband Aric passages from what I've been writing, and in one passage Ari is trout fishing and shows them how he pinches a worm in half to thread it on the hook and while I was reading both the characters and Aric simultaneously shouted out "Ewwwwwwww". Mission accomplished.

At some point I came up with an idea: what if Dante came out about being HIV+ publicly? What if he did it in a way that went viral and changed their lives completely? At first I was pretty skeptical because it had all of the trappings of jumping the shark, but I decided to go with it just to see what might happen. What did he do? A senior project for his art major. Was it plausible it could go viral? I was recently reminded of Pedro Zamora from The Real World who ultimately died and how much that touched people and now am comfortable saying "Yes, it could be" because coming out publicly as HIV+ back then was not a normal thing and could easily pique interest if it got in front of the right eyes. I feel pretty comfortable about it now, but on many occasions I thought I should just delete it.

What was interesting is that it lead to a story arc that was wholly mine. It allowed me to explore what might happen when an improbable set of new characters met the established characters and how they'd change each others lives as they became more and more intertwined. It was interesting to me to see one of the characters who I really didn't understand when I first started writing about him and didn't expect him to be much more than an ancillary character. He then bloomed into being a third main protagonist much to my surprise. It will be interesting going back in the early chapters when he first arrives on the scene with knowledge of how he ends up. I'm hoping that my naivety at the time will reflect the two main protagonists not knowing who he is, but I suspect I'll need to make some adjustments to keep things consistent. This is another thing I've been learning about writing is that it can be hard to keep things consistent over the hundreds of pages of characters and their development and make certain that it's plausible. That and not repeat yourself or have multiple instances of the same revelation. I'll have to be careful about that in the editing.

Another aspect is just research. Google of course makes this super simple these days so I can appreciate how hard it must have been before the internet came around. I still don't understand now how the hell I got anything done in those days before it too but somehow managed. With the comet, I literally had the Wikipedia page on it for weeks to keep the timing right. There were many other things that I had to keep open for days and weeks at a time too.

One thing I realized the other day is sometimes things would just flow from a place I had no idea where it was coming from where my fingers were just translating a flow of consciousness. There were also plenty of times that I'd sit around and try to game out what was happening and what needed to happen -- for quite a while I'd get up in the middle of the night, watch a youtube vid and then stare at the Chromecast screen saver thinking about what I wanted to do. But what I realize now is that that stream of consciousness is very reminiscent of writing code where I'd make notes or sketch out a skeleton and that sort of thing but normally it was just filling in the blanks that didn't really require too much thought. When I realized this, it gave me some appreciation. I've always thought that writing code is a creative endeavor with need for spacial and time awareness, and this kind of proved that out to me in what pretty much everybody would consider to be a creative endeavor. One difference is that writing is looking for conflicts to be resolved. With coding you'd generally like to avoid conflicts upfront. Another thing that is similar though is that there is no such thing as multitasking. You're either in the zone or you're not and interruptions are death and take a long time get back into the zone.

Another thing is the constant uncertainty. Does this make any sense? Will it make sense to somebody just reading it? Are these characters believable? Is what they're doing believable? Is there enough characterization? Too much even? Am I getting details right about things I really don't know much about like places I've not been or technical stuff that I'm not familiar with? I mean, at some level you have to suspend disbelief for just about any kind of fiction, but I'd prefer to minimize the unforced errors. I guess with the editing pass I should have better feel of these than where I am now. 

Then there is the inherent problem for me is that the world I'm borrowing is heavily influenced by their Mexican American upbringing. I am eternally grateful for knowing a new word "pocho" (half assed Mexican), which I think is a hilarious concept even though it was fighting words, apparently, and while I've used it when it seemed appropriate I've tried to stay away from trying to make it seem like I understand MexAm slang or vibe because I know it will come off inauthentic and I'd rather it be written neutral than some gringo's cringy approximation. Ideally it would be good to find somebody who could help me out on that, but for now I'm not going to be tossing around vato this and vato that and will be cool if that doesn't happen.

One novel thing happened though: probably the most pivotal scene involves a performance of an oration to background music. I realized that the music I chose had to at least be plausibly timed to the words. This lead to me to hunting down the music and speaking the words to the music over and over to make sure it could work. It helped a little that one of them -- Barber's Adagio for Strings -- can seemingly be more or less adagio. How the character found the Goldilocks tempo is an exercise for the reader, I guess. Another part uses Mendelssohn's Lobgesang and I realized after rehearsing it that he would practically start singing his words over the chorus. That was really fucking cool. Lobgesang has been the earworm from hell though for months.

Another interesting thing came up with this which is that it often toes the line with spirituality. I am utterly not spiritual and never have been. The inherited characters seem to be fairly neutral about it, though they grew up around Latino Catholicism so they're sort of imbued by it already. Given the events it's not surprising to me that they'd embrace some amount of spirituality and imagery. This has been very weird for me to write to say the least. I also used a fair amount of magic allusions which when I rewatched the movie, I noticed that the original had some too. Another is that we both like the awe of the stars. I picked up on that and had lots of references to meteor showers, and the biggest event of them all in their young life: Hale Bopp, the great comet.

So did I suffer from writers block? Maybe? I'm not on any timeline so if I get mentally exhausted I just take a day or two off, and sometimes I don't know what way things need to go so I just sit on it until I get an inspiration. What I'd typically do is go work on something else in the book until I found the solution of where to go. Sort of like Gandalf in Moria: "that way!" There were definitely some chapters that were hard to write that I put off for a long time because they were so emotional. Researching for them wasn't fun either. Even though I hate that people dismiss anything HIV related out of hand, real shit does happen and that it's fucking hard. But probably the hardest ones for me were the more triumphant ones. My last chapter to write (not the last chapter) is one of those. I think it's hard because obviously it's going to work out, but I don't want it to be too cliche so there needs to be build up and conflict leading up to it which is pretty hard for me.

So this post is what is known as procrastination. I pretty much know what happens, but it's still hard. Christian, you're really going to sleep your way through town before you click your ruby red slippers together, aren't you and finally allow love? Oh that's another thing: I've fallen in love with some of my own characters. I guess you're supposed to do that too.

Epilogue

It's 8/21/2024 and I've officially finished writing and have checked off my todo list. I read somewhere that it 's a good idea to just put it down for a couple of weeks or a month before starting to edit it. I'm not sure exactly how to edit it either since it's not just about spelling and style choices and all of that, but whether things should be cut, whether the continuity is correct, whether the flow makes any sense and whether details that I remember well from previous sections will be remembered by the average user since most users only read something once. That and is it repetitive? I think some amount of repetitive is ok since readers don't always remember but too much and especially introducing it again as new information is bad. 

I'm actually pretty good at figuring things out on my own. I designed the software for a laser printer not knowing a damn thing about computer graphics before the internet and designed email authentication with zero training in network security stuff which is used the world over, day in day out. But this seems different. I had complete imposter syndrome for both of those too, but even if I fail with this I'll be happy.

I still have a ton of reservation about borrowing somebody else's world. When I first started this it was an experiment if I could do it at all and I never expected it to get to something 470 pages long based in that world. I know I could and maybe should rewrite it with my own world but would probably need to move it from El Paso to somewhere else and I'd  need to create a different backstory, but the name Dante itself is really important -- names as destiny. It would be hard and error prone, but it would be more authentically mine. I think I'll leave it be and think of something new to write since this has been fun and challenging.

Hey Benjamin if you ever read this, thank you so much for inspiring me to do something so completely outside of my experience. It's been fun to finally do something years after I gave up Silicon Valley rat race.

More to come...