Jamie Ford admits he was taken aback by the runaway success of his debut novel "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" and was sidetracked for a while on his next work by the self-consciousness this produced.
But an invitation to write a story for a literary event led to the tale of an orphan boy who thinks he sees his mother in a movie, which grew into "Songs of Willow Frost", out last week.
Ford revisits historical Seattle in his story of William Eng, who travels through the Depression-era city in search of his mother Willow, whom he has not seen since she was carried half-dead out of their apartment when he was a child.
Ford spoke with Reuters about living up to a debut book that spent more than two years on the New York Times best seller list.
How did you come up with the character of Willow?
She definitely took some time. I looked at that time period. I began with the orphanage and began with the character of William. This was coming 19 years after a flu epidemic and it seemed like a really volatile time. To place a Chinese woman here ... I guess I always sympathise with characters who are caught between worlds. I'm half-Chinese. I either never feel Chinese enough or never feel Caucasian enough.
It just seemed as if there was a bunch of really interesting history and Willow was a great character to walk the reader through all that. Plus, the more I read about (actress) Anna May Wong, the more I felt for her being a Chinese woman who had dalliances with white men - producers, directors - but because of miscegenation laws she could never marry a Caucasian man and she was really shunned by a lot of the Chinese community.
For this particular book, what were some of the difficulties of writing and what were the joys?
One of the difficulties was, you know, the second book. Just trusting my gut. That was hard. When I wrote "Hotel" nobody cared. When I wrote this one there was suddenly a high level of expectation. The joy was that I'm happy writing. I love the process, I love the research. Occasionally something unexpected will happen and a new character will walk onto the stage. I'll feel "Oh, I've made a new friend today". My wife didn't read the manuscript until it was completed but I remember telling her those moments when I really liked this character and I feel terrible for what I've done to this character. You engage with them. In my mind, my characters have immortal souls - they're in some parallel universe, doing their thing. When they get to that point where they seem fully formed, it's a very joyful moment.
Did you expect "Hotel" to do as well as it did?
Yes, I expected it to be a tremendous success and I went out and bought a Porsche, knowing I could pay for it later. No, seriously, if I had sold 15,000 copies I would have been over the moon. My measure for success was to have someone buy it and like it that didn't share my same last name.
Did it make it harder to write "Willow"?
It did. You know, I wrote another book in the middle. I changed the process a little bit because I was a little wary. With "Hotel", nobody saw it until it was done. But when I was 100 pages in I showed (the other book) to my wife and my agent and got a lot of feedback. I left the door open and there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen and I ended up rewriting it for about 18 months. It just got to a point where it was all scar tissue. But in the meantime I would turn in a draft and then I would be researching the next book, which was this book. Once I read a couple pages of what I thought might be a good beginning to this book at the Humanities Washington forum, I showed those 12 hastily scribbled pages to my editor. She loved them and she said, if you'd like to take a break from the other project and pursue this, go for it. And I did. It feels as if I vented all that angst in that other book.
Any advice for aspiring writers?
When I have aspiring writers or students ask me for advice, I've told them to go to a garage sale, buy three really horrible out-of-print books, pay no more than a quarter apiece for them and force yourself to read them with a writer's eye. By doing that, you'll notice mistakes or quick, sloppy writing or whatever you notice. And you'll notice that in your own writing. I found that if you think Michael Chabon is a brilliant writer and that all you read is Michael Chabon, when you try to write, it's like trying to lose weight and only looking at beauty magazines. It's really discouraging. That doesn't mean you should read crap all the time but don't try to play Mozart the first time you sit down at the piano. Start with scales.
'Doctor Sleep' was a challenge for Stephen King
Pop culture consumes authors, musicians and actors and quickly moves on. Only a few have staying power, and Stephen King is one of those rare figures.
With the release this week of "Doctor Sleep," his much anticipated sequel to "The Shining," the 66-year-old King continues to release and inspire new projects more than four decades after he first started to scare the bejeezus out of everybody. A stage musical he wrote with John Mellencamp is about to begin touring the country, "Under the Dome" was a surprise television hit of the summer and a film project based on his novella "A Good Marriage" is in the works as well.
"I always knew that if I hung around that I'd get hot again," King says with a laugh. "Sooner or later everything that goes around comes around. I just thought of guys like Billy Joel. I thought if Billy Joel can come back, I can come back."
With "Doctor Sleep," King revisits a grown-up Danny Torrance and the extra creepy best-selling novel that became a milestone film for Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson. In this update, Dan is a recovering alcoholic and a mentor to a 12-year-old whose shining is stronger than his own.
King spoke with The Associated Press earlier this summer about how he approached the tricky task of writing "Doctor Sleep" and the home life that has produced two more literary voices:
Writing a sequel to a beloved book so many years later had to be tricky. How did you approach it?
When I went into it I thought to myself, if I do this I can probably never satisfy the expectations of the audience because so many people who read "The Shining," I got them while they were young and malleable, they were young adults, teenagers. I meet people all the time who say, "That book scared the s--- out of me," and I'll say, "How old were you when you read the book or saw the movie?" and they'll say 16. And if you were 16 then, you're probably 50 now and a little bit case hardened when it comes to scary things. I was curious. I wanted to see what happens to Danny Torrance, so I took my shot.
What do you think of the book now that you're done with it?
I like it. I think it's pretty good. I kind of approached it with the idea of it's a movie sequel where the story's supposed to be different but it's supposed to have the elements of the original that were successful, and I thought that's a real challenge. Let me see if I can do something that's really good, that has some of the elements that scared people in "The Shining" and create a story that's entirely on its own and that people could pick up and read even if they never read "The Shining" in their life. It was fun to take the shot.
That's going to be one of the literary events of 2013. Do you enjoy the attention of moments like those?
The short answer is no, I really don't know how to cope with that. I think one of the reasons writers are writers is because they're introverts basically. I'm pretty comfortable in a room by myself, creating stories. I don't have any sense that people are looking over my shoulder. It's a one-man game. When you write a book you don't have a whole team of writers in the way there is, for instance, on "Under the Dome" or some of the film projects that I've worked on. So I like that a lot. But I would be lying to you if I didn't say when you meet a big group of people that come to a reading or a talk or something like that, there's a certain validation. When they put their hands together, you say, "You know what? Somebody was out there the whole time and they were paying attention." That's a good thing and it warms you up.
You aren't the only King with a new book this year. Both of your sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, published novels last spring.
Joe knocked it out with "NOS4A2." I love that book. He's in his wheelhouse now. No question. Owen published his first novel, "Double Feature," in March and it's an entirely different thing. It's funny. It's fall on your knees funny, just roll on the floor funny, and that's a different kind of sensibility entirely.
In a past interview, Joe described his upbringing with Owen and their sister Naomi in idyllic terms with parents who encouraged reading and imagination. Was it really like that?
We all had our noses in books. And we lived way out in the country. There wasn't a lot in the way of TV the way that there is now with these satellite deals and everything. We were a little bit constrained there. We all loved the movies and I'd pick them up at school on Friday afternoon and if there was a Spielberg picture or something, we'd go to Portland and see "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or whatever it was, and just have a blast. ... I used to get them to read me books on cassette tapes. I would pay $10 a cassette or something like that, and they would read me all kinds of stuff. And, of course, Joe has blocked out all of his memories of me chaining them up in the cellar and driving nails into their little legs and stuff.
World's longest-running cartoon to go digital in Japan
The world's longest-running cartoon is to go fully digital, its Japanese broadcaster said Friday, abandoning hand-drawn celluloid-based animation after a run of 44 years.
Fuji Television Network said episodes of "Sazae-san" aired from October would be produced entirely digitally. The move will mean there are no hand-drawn cartoons left on Japanese television, according to the Association of Japanese Animations.
Until the 1990s many cartoons were created by artists working directly on celluloid, a painstaking process that meant characters had to be drawn in many different postures to give them impression of movement as the camera was repeatedly started and stopped.
Two decades ago, computer animations began to become widespread, slowly squeezing out the traditional method.
"Sazae-san", which first aired in 1969, revolves around the life of the Mrs Sazae of the title, a cheerful but klutzy full-time housewife who lives with her parents, husband, son, brother and sister.
The 30-minute episodes, which can readily garner more than one-in-seven Sunday evening viewers, tend to focus on tiny incidents in the family's everyday life and are dotted with seasonal festivals.
"Doraemon", a Japanese cartoon about a robot cat from the future that has a following across Asia went entirely digital in 2002.
"Sazae-san", whose broadcast denotes the end of the weekend for many Japanese, began the switch in 2005.
Bangladesh Book Fair offers treat to bibliophilesBookworms in the city are in for a treat! More than 20 publishers from neighbouring Bangladesh are showcasing a rich diversity of novels, essays, short stories at the Bangladesh Book Fair here.
The third Bangladesh Book Fair, that began Thursday, is drawing book lovers to try oeuvre of around a lakh of books, with titles on Bangladesh Liberation War and the country's folk tales stealing the limelight.
"There are 28 publishers and books exclusively from Bangladesh," Kazi Moshtaque Zahir, First Secretary (Press) of the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata, told IANS.
Organised by the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission, Bangladesh Exports Promotion Bureau in collaboration with the Academic and Creative Publishers Association of Bangladesh, the week-long exposition will also bring intellectuals and literati (like Rabeya Khatun, Faridur Reza Sagar) from the nation as speakers in two seminars.
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