One of my daydreams–one that I suspect I share with most other people who have aspirations and daydreams–involves narrating a retrospective of a wildly successful career (as supplied by my other daydreams, unfortunately, because my real life isn’t heading that way right now) in the form of an interview. Perhaps someone like Barbara Walters or Larry King, or maybe even David Letterman. I admire David Letterman’s easy, casual interview style, and I like to think we’d get along well and I wouldn’t disappear during an early commercial break.
It’s never Geraldo or one of that ilk. This is a happy daydream.
For a peek into my lame psyche, I offer a snippet of what I imagine a this might be like.
Host: Tonight we’re fortunate to have on our show Mr. Danny O’Bigbelly, author of the New York Times bestseller ‘The Great Dragon of the Eastern Desert’. Please welcome Mr. Danny O’Bigbelly!
(Audience claps. I hobble onto the stage, slightly blinded by the lights. I’ve been coached not to look into the spotlights, but I can’t help it.)
Host: Nice to meet you.
Me: It’s great to be here. Is it OK if I turn the seat cushion over? I think the performing monkeys left a little memento on this one.
Host: You go right ahead. Make yourself at home.
Me: Thank you. There, that’s better.
Host: So, you are in town promoting your new book?
Me: Yes, doing the whole book tour thing. It’s a lot of work, and it’s not usually my sort of thing, but my publisher says that it’s very important.
Host: It’s like people are throwing parties for you all over the country. Why wouldn’t you want to go?
Me: Well, I’m not much of the partying type, and I miss being with my family.
Host: So, tell us about your book.
Me: It’s a combination of a few stories that I’d been working on for several years. I thought that they were separate stories for a long time, but one day I realized that some of the story lines could be combined and some of the characters could be coalesced; combined into a single character. I think this makes the stories a lot more interesting, because one of the things I like to explore is character development, and characters don’t usually get a chance to develop much in a short story. But if you follow the same character through a big chunk of his or her life, then you can see how each part of the story builds upon the foundation laid by the previous stories.
Host: This sounds pretty hard. Trying to take a bunch of stories and weaving them together.
Me: It would have been a lot more complicated if I was more imaginative or creative, but in this case I got lucky. Once I realized that my imagination was lazily reusing the same characters and themes in several contexts, it wasn’t very complicated.
Host: So, can you tell me something about these characters?
Me: There are two principle characters, and several other characters that play important roles in their lives. The first is a young girl, who is on a quest to prove her right to claim her nobility. She is a princess who lives in a complicated society where adolescents are given several trials of courage, intelligence, and character before they are permitted to claim their titles. This system has been in place for a long time, and it has generally worked very well, and the citizens in this society have accepted it. But there is a fly in the ointment, so to speak. The queen has acquired an unfortunate habit of assigning impossible challenges to potential members of the nobility who are not members of her own house.
Host: So this is sort of fantasy story? Dungeons and dragons and things of that ilk?
Me: No sorcery, and no dungeons, but perhaps a dragon. I wouldn’t want to spoil the book for anyone, but one of the quests that the queen has been using is to send people into the Eastern Desert to kill the great dragon rumored to live there. This desert is a horrible wasteland. Nobody knows whether people who seek the dragon are killed by the dragon, or whether they are killed by the desert itself, or whether some other fate befalls them. All they know is that nobody has ever crossed the desert, and nobody who has entered the desert seeking the dragon has ever returned.
Host: Does she know she’s being set up?
Me: Yes, but she feels trapped.
Host: What if she said no, I won’t go?
Me: She wouldn’t be a princess any more. She would lose her title and become a commoner. Which is not a disaster, but it’s not what she wants. She wants to be princess, and perhaps someday the queen, and she wants her family to regain their nobility. She’s the last surviving member of her family. As a princess, she would be rich and powerful.
Host: OK, so she’s got her work cut out for her. What about the other main character?
Me: He is a bit more complicated. He’s a middle-aged man who was once a martial artist and teacher at one of the great schools in a far-away land. He has, however, been sent away from the school.
Host: What did he do?
Me: He didn’t do anything. Again, it is a question of the power that society, custom, and tradition have over us. In this school, when the current headmaster leaves or dies, one of the current masters is chosen to replace him. But in order to avoid the sort of rivalry and potential for bitterness that often occurs when one member of a group of peers is promoted over the others, all of the other masters are dismissed and replaced with new master chosen by the new headmaster according to his vision and criteria. Most headmasters simply re-appoint the former masters, but not always
Host: So, he didn’t make the cut?
Me: He wasn’t given the chance. He was judged to be a strong candidate for leadership of the school, so strong that his presence would undermine the authority of the new headmaster, so he was sent away before the headmaster could even make the decision. But he wasn’t thrown out or driven away. He was sent away on a specific mission.
Host: Does it involve a maiden threatened by a dragon?
Me: Oh, no. This all happened before she was born, in any case. No, his mission was to serve as a repository for the knowledge and arts taught at the school, so that if anything happened to the school, such as the death of one of the other masters, he could be recalled to serve, or train a replacement, or perhaps simply help choose a replacement. In the right circumstances, he might even be recalled to serve as the headmaster. In the meanwhile, he is prohibited to teach and obligated to keep his former position secret.
Host: It sounds complicated.
Me: It’s really not, and in fact it works well for him. Outside of the routine and ritual of the school, he is finally forced to find his own way. And he does, and he finds peace and happiness, and he finds interesting things to do. He doesn’t achieve the fulfillment of achieving the goals he worked towards for many years, but he finds new, unexpected goals.
Host: But there’s more to it. I can tell from your hesitation and your smile.
Me: Yes. There’s another reason he was sent away from the school. He was given very explicit instructions by the previous headmaster. But I’m not going to tell you anything about them. Read the book.
Host: Do any of those explicit instructions have to do with a damsel distressed by a dragon?
Me: Well, I will answer that. No. The fact that these stories intersect is important, but not in the way that you think.
Host: I assume this girl and this man meet?
Me: Yes. He lives in a town at the edge of the desert, and she rides through it on her quest. He’s seen many other people go into the desert on the same quest, and recognizes her for what she is. He talks to her about her quest, and when she tells him that she will never abandon it, he promises to tell her everything he knows about the desert and how to survive it. A lot of what he tells her takes the form of stories about several other interesting characters who live or have lived in the town, and their stories. She finds these stories somewhat amusing, but does not believe them to be true. She later realizes that they are very useful.
Host: That’s it?
Me: Not by a long shot. These two people, who might seem like the central characters, are just pawns in a larger game. There are people who desperately want the princess to succeed in her quest, and others who desperately want her to fail. There are people who are seeking the master for various reasons. There’s no shortage of things going on.
Host: It sounds like it. Now, before we go on, I hear there was some controversy about the names of the characters.
Me: It’s not really controversy, although we can make it sound controversial if you like. When I first drafted out some of the parts of the book on my blog, I needed names for the characters. I made some up that I thought were decent working names, and used them. Eventually the names become “real” names and the other characters started using nicknames or puns based on these names.
Host: But then something happened to make you think that these names were not OK?
Me: It started when I got some email from a woman who lives in China and who has the same name as my princess. It turns out that she is a very pleasant young lady, and we’ve exchanged many emails. I felt funny having a character sharing the name of a person I actually know. I didn’t want to get the two of them confused in my mind. For example, I originally imagined the princess to have an athletic, muscular build–the sort of young woman who could wield a two-handed sword convincingly–but my real-world friend is somewhat more willowy. When I found myself imagining the real-world person doing the things the fictional character was doing in the book, then I knew something had to change.
Host: But you said “names”?
Me: Yes, the name of the other main character was bad for a silly reason. It was just a nonsense name that I’d originally stitched together when I was looking for a screen name on a social web site. My name was already taken, and everything I could think of that made sense was already taken, so I just strung together a random-sounding Chinese name and tried it–and it worked! In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised, since, as far as I could tell, there were no more than about three people with even remotely Asian names on the entire site.
Host: Obviously not orkut or hi5!
Me: Nope.
Host: Well, it looks like we’re running out of time. After the break, we’ll have Keith Richards, to explain how he’s still cheating death.
(Camera pulls back and cuts to commercial.)
