This post is about inspiration, momentum, and motivation – and a little bit about process! It seems like a good topic for an early blog entry. So far this website has been about showing who I am, alongside what I do, and I think this gives me a good opportunity to do both.
False Starts
I had never imagined that my first book would be a short story collection. I’d always had… grander plans. For starters, I had been working on a fantasy series since I was thirteen. It was never completed; it had undergone many rewrites and alterations as my writing got better, and after a while I just stopped trying to keep up. Then I wrote a short novel of a couple hundred pages, called The Hedge Wars, which I eventually deemed unpublishable… for reasons I’ll talk about in another post someday.
Then I started writing a dramatic first-person novel called Wild Sunflowers. It was about a young woman named Savannah who was dealing with her boyfriend’s death, but I only ever got about 80 pages into it. Much of it was inspired by Washington and the situation I’d been living in there – but then my situation changed, and then I left Washington. And so the book lost its momentum.
I have to admit that I struggled, at this point. I was inspired by all the wrong things – things that were lost easily. My commitment to a novel seemed nonexistent. But my desire to write was like an addict’s fixation. There were a couple more false starts… a novel inspired by Japanese mythology, and another rewrite on the first book of the fantasy series. But ultimately these things dried up too. One by one, my projects proved to be more than I could handle.
Eventually I had to admit to myself that I had reached a sort of crossroads. Something had to change. I would never finish another book at this rate, let alone have a career as an author. I needed to take a different approach.
So I scaled myself back, and started small. I began to write short stories. And, despite my low expectations, I ended up with a few that were worthy of publication.
Bird’s Eye
The oldest story in Little Boats is the second-to-last, which is called Bird’s Eye. It’s a four page story about a girl who steals a bird necklace from a merchant’s stall and is turned into a bird. It was quick to finish, more of a writing exercise, but I remember struggling to set the tone. I wanted to give it almost a horror vibe. I hadn’t written this type of thing before, and had very little experience laying a curse on a character. So it was surprisingly challenging.
I can’t even remember what inspired it. Probably something I had read online in passing, or seen in a photograph. That can happen sometimes.
My Queen, Your Mirror
The next story I wrote is now the last in Little Boats: My Queen, Your Mirror. It’s a first-person fantasy story about reincarnation and a kingdom under the sea.
I drew from so many sources of inspiration to write it. But the true spark was ridiculous and unexpected, as the best ones usually are.
It was the summer of 2012. I had just moved to Torrance, in southern California. I had only been there for a couple months. I was still learning the area, and I hadn’t met anyone yet.
I had brought a cup of coffee outside so I could admire the local magnolia trees while I drank it. But as I stood there my eye was caught by a movement and a flash of color, and I looked down at the walkway in the back of our building.
An old man had ridden up on a bicycle. He was the flash of color I had seen: he was wearing a white suit with a bright blue button-up shirt in a floral pattern, with a matching strip of fabric around the top of his white hat. He rode up to the sort of mother-in-law unit that stood alone behind our building. It was currently being rented by a woman I’d seen around but never met. He dismounted from his bike at her gate and took something out of his basket: a mirror with a wooden frame. Then he very gingerly placed it in the Adirondack chair beside the gate, got back on his bike, and rode away.
(Fun facts about that man, which I later learned from my neighbor in the mother-in-law unit: he lived in this crazy and weirdly beautiful house on the block behind our building, and often rode his bike around the neighborhood with his wife. They wore matching outfits every day. He had left the mirror because my neighbor was in the business of reselling various treasures, and he brought her things that he thought she might like. I never met him in person.)
I was… fascinated. For weeks my mind turned the event over and over, seeing it from different possible angles – all far more interesting than what the truth turned out to be. But that’s the beauty of fiction.
In the end I had accumulated several ideas for why a brightly-dressed man might carefully leave a mirror in someone’s chair. But I didn’t put any of them onto a page until, one day, a name landed in my lap – and it set the whole story in motion.
This name was Mary-Alice. It came on accident, when I met two of my neighbors. They were a married couple who lived across the hall and down the stairs from us. I met them separately, the husband first, and he misheard my name – so when I met his wife in the hallway she called me “Mary-Alice.” Something about it was enough to push me from “thinking about it” to “inspired into writing.” So I sat down and started writing a story.
I ended up borrowing heavily from the outline I had planned for my Japanese mythology novel. It had evolved into something inspired by many of the world’s mythologies, and reincarnation was going to be a large part of its plot. But I saw it falling apart and knew the ideas would be better served in my short story.
I was happy with the end result, though not satisfied. I felt I could have done better but I didn’t feel that I had done poorly. And anyway, it was the longest thing I’d written in a while. I’d seen it through to its completion. That was important, and it built my confidence – as well as my momentum.
Sea of Yam
The next story also began that summer, though I didn’t complete it until late autumn. It became the first in Little Boats. It’s a fantasy called Sea of Yam, about a teenage boy with magic abilities.
This time my inspiration was pretty simple. I was listening to a Coldplay song, and I started to picture a person in the ocean with all these glowing images swirling around them. I remember that it had nothing to do with the lyrics and everything to do with the beautiful sweeping instrumentals.
Over the next couple days, with enough obsessive thinking, I built a story around that person in the water. It started with a rough outline. I only knew the basics of what I was going to write. My protagonist was a sixteen-year-old boy named Yam, who attended high school in a small coastal town and had to put up with all his classmates (and his mother) resenting him for being different. Then the character of Tiger Snard grew herself very organically out of Yam’s little world and began to teach him how to use his magic.
I wrote a lot of it without a plan. And, looking back on it, it seems like I scrapped most of what I did plan. I had intended to give Yam a love interest but the idea didn’t feel right, so I scrapped it. The whale that washes up on the beach was originally a squid, but it seemed too unlikely (even in a story about magic), so I scrapped it. And so on.
The end result stunned me. I felt like it was the best thing I had ever written, and I couldn’t believe how close I had come to fully conveying the tone I was going for. It was a turning point for me, as a writer. For the first time I was able to look at something I had written and think “Yes!”
But even following this feeling of success, it was still a while before my next story was written.
‘Till Tomorrow
This one did not begin with a thunderclap of inspiration like the others. And I started it almost a year after the completion of Sea of Yam, in early autumn of 2013, following another period of false starts and running on metaphorical hamster wheels.
We were still living in the apartment in Torrance at that point. My ex and his father had a sailboat in nearby Wilmington, the last of a long line to be renovated and sold, so we spent most Sundays there in the marina. The docks were a display of boats – shiny and new, chipping and barnacle-encrusted, weathered and lived-in… all this and more, among the catamarans and racing sloops and trawlers and rowboats. It was ridiculously inspiring.
On top of this, my mother had moved to San Juan Island in Washington, and I’d visited her there enough times to love it. It is just so ridiculously beautiful. And this, in combination with the most dilapidated boats in the Wilmington harbor, brought ‘Till Tomorrow to life.
The story started timidly, with three sentences in present tense and a protagonist with a weird name. I called it The Last Man on Earth at first, but that title didn’t work… for many reasons. So it became ‘Till Tomorrow.
I didn’t really know where it was going. I knew only a few key things: it was set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, the main character couldn’t remember who he was, and it involved a lot of resourceful living. It built itself up from there. I watched the plot grow out of nothing and surprised myself with the choices I made.
It turned into a long story. Almost a novella, and some people have called it that. It took many turns that I hadn’t expected. Looking back on my notes for it, I scrapped almost every initial idea I had. The story pretty much dictated itself and bucked all my plans. But the end result replaced Sea of Yam as the best thing I had ever written.
By then, it was May of 2014 and we had moved to a Los Angeles apartment on the edge of South Pasadena. It had taken me months to write that damn story.
But it was worth it. I was ridiculously happy with ‘Till Tomorrow, and I felt that it would make a perfect centerpiece to my book. Now all I had left to finish were details.
Mirrors and Teeth
The most recently written story in Little Boats is very short. I wrote it while I was still putting the book together, which gave me time to include it – and I’m glad about that.
It’s called Mirrors and Teeth. It’s about a recently-made vampire who goes to seek revenge against her husband. I really have no idea what sparked me into writing it, aside from my love of vampire fiction. I just remember: quickly forming the plot in my head, realizing how short of a story it would make, and writing it in an afternoon.
My mom said it was creepy, and I thought, “Perfect.”
The Moral of the Story
Little Boats initially went live on KDP with six stories, but I removed one when I released the paperback version. It was a horror story about a woman who goes on a date on Halloween. She is meeting a man she connected with on a dating site, who murders her after dinner. I wrote it as a writing exercise. I didn’t like it a ton, and felt that it should be cut from the final version of the book. I’m still happy with that decision. It really wasn’t a very good story.
Ultimately, I’m proud of Little Boats. I put a lot of work into it, from the writing to the formatting; I feel like it’s a good beginning to my career as a writer.
And the most important lesson for me was that I needed those short stories. I needed to prove to myself that I can finish something, I needed to practice putting together a plot, and I needed to find my voice. I look at what I’m writing now and I know I wouldn’t be this far into it if I hadn’t worked my way up to it with short stories. Just ‘Till Tomorrow by itself has built such a feeling of accomplishment in me. Without that I would be burning out and giving up, with a million false starts and one unpublishable novel to show for my dreams.
So I guess my point here, at the end of this long long blog post, is that momentum is important. And in this case I don’t just mean it in the “don’t stop moving or else you can’t start again” way, I mean it in the “you have to start small to build something big” way. Writing is like a muscle – you can’t just roll into the gym and start lifting the biggest weights. You have to train first. Write a couple bad books, churn out some short stories… whatever it takes, just don’t stop writing. That’s the message I have to constantly send myself. That’s, I think, the whole message of this post.
Just don’t stop writing. Muscles only get strong if you use them.
Books only get written if you write them.