When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. I finished my first “book” when I was twelve and it was probably the greatest book ever written. I wrote in longhand and it might have been a dozen pages or so. Sadly for the world, I lost it and the zillions of dollars of potential royalties with it.
Well, fast forward a few years. I loved music – was a professional jazz pianist and keyboard player in a rhythm and blues band. After a few years of playing bars and strip clubs, I decided to go back to university. I eventually completed a Master’s degree in Music and hung out my shingle as a composer for film and tv. Four seasons on Sesame St., commercials, film and tv scores – it was great.
But somewhere along the line, I felt I wanted to tell stories again, particularly about my world which was not entirely white. I have an Asian heritage and the Vancouver and Seattle and Los Angeles that I knew had us as part of everyday life. This very real world had few stories told and even fewer films shown. To this end, I started making films, documentary and fiction that included Asians, particularly Chinese, as part of the North American fabric.
Now to make films means you’ve got to write proposals and stories in order to get funding. This was hard – I hadn’t communicated seriously with words only for maybe fifteen years. My Master’s thesis was a piece of music, as was all the major stuff I had been doing. Rhythm section, symphonic track – hell yeah, but a five hundred word proposal? It was pain, pain, pain but like the Energizer bunny, I kept going, going, going.
Hundreds of thousands words later, maybe even a million, I’m still going. Wrote film proposals, screenplays, magazine articles, fiction, non-fiction. Somewhere along the line, I got a Diploma in Creative Writing too.
But there’s something that’s kind of soul destroying about working in media. You can get paid to write a screenplay even low-budget films are a heck of a lot of money so most scripts never hit the big screen or small.
But that doesn’t stop the stories from being valid. Heck, I did a dozen drafts or more on some on them so I know the stories work. So a couple of years ago, I decided to take a couple of screenplays I’d written and turn them into novels. And so began my travels as a writer of prose. I still make films but these days, it is really gratifying to completely control the worlds I create with words.
So now that I’m getting old, I get to do what I wanted to when I was a kid.
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