Where the cards lead. . .

When you hear the term “fortune teller,” do you picture a mysterious gypsy woman seated in a tent draped with veils and staring into a misty crystal ball? Well, imagine instead, an ordinary Canadian mom, a condo dining room and a deck of cards.

Before I began work on my latest novel (before I even knew what I was going to work on next), a friend persuaded me to let his mom “read my cards.” We visited her apartment, and I sat across the dining room table from her. She laid the cards out on the table between us and explained the meaning of significant cards and their placement. According to the cards, I would either come into some money soon or go on a trip. Either prediction seemed good to me.

To help my fortune come true, my friend invited me to visit him in Japan, where he’s lived for about eighteen years. I knew that if I went to Japan, I’d want to write something about it. I just wasn’t sure what. When I imagined Japan, I pictured kimono dressed women, samurai warriors, ancient temples and lots of history. I also pictured the bombing of Hiroshima, paper cranes, modern sky scrapers, bullet trains, manga and anime. How could I choose one thing to write about, and how could I gain enough knowledge in a short two-week trip to justify writing about it?

Simple answer: make the character someone who goes on a similar trip, and have her experience the things that I experience in Japan. I wanted to make her a different kind of person than I am, though. She’s more abrasive and in-your-face, and she doesn’t care what other people think about her (or at least, she tells herself that she doesn’t). In fact, she starts off her trip by getting off on the wrong foot with everyone around her. One thing I like about her, though, is she’s not afraid to try things that are unfamiliar — whether it’s a Japanese toilet, an unidentifiable food, or some newly learned Japanese words.

Here I am looking very large next to some Japanese friends who helped to show me around the historic town of Seki-cho, a place my character also visits (along with the other students who are on the exchange trip with her and who she tries to avoid).

This coming Saturday I’ll be launching the book, Manga Touch, sharing some Japanese candy and snacks, and talking about some of the experiences my character and I shared on our trip to Japan.

Ideas can come from both ordinary and unexpected places

Hello out there!

I’m guest blogger this week, so I guess I should introduce myself. I’ve loved reading and writing since I was in elementary school. I wrote my first novel for Orca, The Reunion, in 2002. My sixth novel, Manga Touch, is hot off the press. Coincidentally, both these novels include elements of Japanese culture. The first one takes place in Canada partly during WW II, while the new book follows a modern Canadian girl on a trip to Japan.

People often ask where writers get their ideas. The Reunion started with an old photograph. As a university student in the early 1980s, I had a summer job for a non-profit organization called the Cowichan Valley Intercultural and Immigrant Aid Society. A woman there was doing an oral history project, interviewing people of Japanese ancestry who’d lived in a nearby town called Paldi (on Vancouver Island). One morning I walked into the main work room and saw several photographs spread out over a big table. They were all old black and white photos taken in Paldi in the 1940s. I picked up a school photo from 1944. Some of the kids looked Japanese, some looked East Indian, some looked European – a real cultural mix. My eye was immediately caught by a smiling girl seated in the front row. She looked just like a friend of mine. But the photo was taken about 20 years before my friend was born. I picked up another school photo. This one, dated 1946, had no Japanese faces. The Japanese kids were gone.

Tomoko, the woman working on the history project, explained how Paldi had been a sawmill town where people of different cultures lived and worked together and became friends – pretty remarkable at a time when there was a lot of prejudice in places outside of Paldi. Then, during World War Two, the outside prejudices touched Paldi. Canada was at war with Japan, and there was fear that people of Japanese ancestry might be spies. The government decided that the Japanese people (even if they were born in Canada) should be sent to live in internment camps in the B.C. interior. So, the Japanese kids I’d seen in the first photo, along with all their families, disappeared from Paldi.

I found out later that the girl I’d noticed in the first photo was my friend’s mom and that she’d grown up in Paldi, celebrating Sikh festivals with her own family, who came from India, and celebrating Japanese festivals, such as New Year, with her Japanese friends. I wondered what it felt like when her friends were taken away.

I went on to finish university and do other things, but I never forgot the faces of those kids in the old Paldi photos, and I never lost the urge to find out more about them and to share their story with other people. When I finally began work on writing a story about Paldi, I started with research. Not a lot was written about Paldi, so I read through old newspaper stories about the war and the Japanese internment, I visited an internment camp that is now a museum, and I interviewed people. And the first person I interviewed was my friend’s mom. As I sat at her kitchen table looking once more at old Paldi photographs and listening to my friend’s mom talk about her childhood in Paldi, my story began to take shape.

Next, I’ll tell you about how the novel, Manga Touch, started with a fortune telling…

Getting Started–Part 2 by Darlene Ryan

As I said before, the outline is like a map. It gets me pointed in the right direction. Here’s a scene from Responsible described in the outline:

Kevin does what Nick asks him to do—stick a dead mouse in Erin’s locker—even though he feels bad about it. Erin confronts Nick and stuffs the dead mouse in his pocket.

Here’s the same scene from the finished manuscript:

I slid the burger box out of my pack.

There was a mouse inside, gray and black with a long hairless tail and blood, dried brown on its neck. I looked at it, curled in the bottom of its Styrofoam coffin and I thought, I could just shut Erin’s locker and tell Nick I hadn’t been able to pop the lock after all. No. No. I could tell him the janitor had been doing the floors and I couldn’t even get to her locker.

I looked down at the grungy gray and yellow tiles. Nick wouldn’t believe that. No one would believe that.

I could just shut the locker, throw the box in the garbage and go home. Of course I’d never be able to come to school or go anywhere else ever again. I’d heard rumors about what Nick did to guys who went up against him. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a mouse like this stuck in my locker. I’d probably be the mouse, curled up in a ball with blood on the side of my head. It was me or her. What the hell else could I do?

I hauled my sweatshirt down over my fingers again and picked up the mouse. I thought it would have been stiff, but it was as floppy as a stuffed toy. I set it on Erin’s math book, right at the front of her locker so she’d at least see it first thing. That way she wouldn’t be feeling around for her books and get a handful of dead rodent instead. She was going to freak no matter what.

I felt like the mouse was looking at me, sitting there on the middle of the locker shelf. A cold shiver rolled from my shoulders all the way down my back. “Sorry,” I whispered as I closed the locker door. I wasn’t sure if the sorry was for the poor dead mouse, or for Erin.

I couldn’t get going in the morning so by the time I got to school it was almost first bell. Nick was standing at the bottom of the main stairs with Zach and Brendan and some geeky kid from grade nine who talked way too much. I thought his name was Oliver. I knew Nick was just hanging there waiting to see what happened when Erin opened her locker.

I walked over to them. I just wanted to go to my locker or homeroom, but it would have looked weird if I had. I didn’t look down the hall. We’d know soon enough when Erin opened her locker.

Nick was going on about video games and playing Doom Master. He thought he was hot stuff because he’d gotten to level six in the game. I’d gotten as far as level fourteen. That wasn’t something I’d ever told him, though.

I didn’t see Erin until she was right behind Nick. “Uh, Nick,” Zach said, pointing. I looked around. It seemed like half the school was hanging around, watching. I wondered if Nick had put the word out.

Erin was holding the mouse up by its tail with her bare hand. If she was scared I couldn’t tell. In fact, she was sort of smirking. “Geez, Nick,” she said. “I thought you could come up with something better than a dead mouse.”

Then she reached over and stuffed the mouse in the pocket of Nick’s Zipperhead tee shirt. “Here you go,” she said, giving the pocket a pat. Yeah, she was definitely smirking.

Nick jerked. He grabbed the mouse out of his pocket and hurled it down the hall. It landed with a splat by the water fountain. He wiped his hand on his jeans. He was breathing hard and there was sweat on his forehead. Erin wasn’t afraid of a dead mouse but Nick sure as hell was.

If you’d like to know what happens next, I hope you’ll buy a copy of Responsible and then stop by my website and tell me what you think.

Getting Started–Part 1 by Darlene Ryan

Writers, for the most part, can be divided in two groups; those who outline and those who don’t. I outline because I’ve learned the hard way that if I try to wing it, I’ll never get to the end of the story. (It’s why I have to follow a map when I’m traveling, so I can actually get to Montreal or Boston, instead of ending up at the Museum of SPAM* in some town I’ve never heard of.)

A book begins for me with a what-if. For Responsible, available this month, the what-if was, What if you did the right thing and it messed up your life? I thought about this person, trying to do what’s right, and Kevin Frasier began to take shape. Some writers create pages of background for every major character. Not me. What I need to know before I start writing is who the person is—what does he need, what does he want?

Once I knew Kevin I could work out the rest of the story. At this point in the outline process I know where the story starts and how I want things to end. And I usually have a couple of what I call “crisis points” figured out for the middle. I write down everything that occurs to me as I’m outlining—lines of dialogue, even an entire scene—but for the most part the outline lacks all the details that make a good story. The difference between it and the actual book is the difference between saying, “I had a car accident,” and saying, “I was waiting at the light at the intersection of Main and Fulton Avenue when two police cars chasing a moose ran the light and crashed into me.”

How long the outline ends up depends on the book. For me, this is part of the creative process. I keep going until I know the story. By that time I’m usually getting itchy to start writing. There are a million decisions to make writing a book. I like to get a lot of them out of the way before I start writing.

Next time I’ll show you how a scene was described in the outline and how the finished scene turned out.

* There really is a Museum of SPAM. It’s in Austin, Minnesota.

Word on the Street

Here are some great action shots of Orca authors at the Word on the Street Festival which happened in Vancouver last week. Thanks to Jacqueline Pearce for the photos!

Andrew Wooldridge and Dayle Sutherland man the Orca booth.

Masses brave rain to flock to the Orca Word on the Street booth!

Richard Van Camp signs a copy of Welcome Song for Baby.

Jacqueline Pearce reading (to a full tent!) from The Truth About Rats and Dogs at Word on the Street.

Orca author Kari-Lynn Winters (centre) talks poetry with Tiffany Stone and Tickle Trunk Player Lori Sherritt.