I’m not that smart. My wife, my daughter and my dog all remind me of that every day of my life. However, there is one thing that I am the world’s leading expert on – that’s me.
Unfortunately I haven’t had that interesting a life either. But that’s okay because a lot of the stuff I’m interested in writing has a theme of what I call “the hero of the common man.” And one thing about us common men is that if you live for awhile, every now and them, some things happen to you that are kind of interesting. And if they’re not, well you can always lie – I mean we are writing fiction, aren’t we?
So what do I write about?
Well, I start with who I am. An Asian in a Western culture. What’s interesting about that? Well I eat salad with chopsticks. I can order a meal in Chinese yet speak English well enough to do commercial voiceovers. There are Asian people all over the place in my books that are part of North American culture.
I play the piano and I love it. And I compose music that zillions of people have heard. I’ve also been told how untalented I was after spending weeks on perfecting a thirty second jingle. So there are lots of musicians, many of them neurotic in the stuff I write. Of course, the handsome sexy ones are me. I wish.
I was brought up being regaled with stories of Chinese gods, demons and magicians. I would go to the altar and cemeteries and bow in reverence to departed ancestors. I’m also an evangelical Christian who is Chaplain for Chinese Canadian WWII veterans. These are men who have faced death in the eye and lived to tell about it. So there are lots of people with spiritual conflicts in my stories.
I proposed to my wife after our third date and we were married within six months of us meeting. It’s taken us decades for us to get to know each other so you better believe that there’s conflict between mates in there. At the same time, I still feel she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met and love her more now that when we met. Yes, I’m a romantic and that works its way into the stories as well.
What to write about? Write about stuff you know. Write about yourself. You’re not as dull as you think.
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