“You
betrayed me on that snowy mountainside! Your reasoning was that my blind belief
in destiny was evil! I see your point now, actually! But you know what,
Irithdelle ElFalan? By betraying me and letting yourself slay innocent humans
of the north, by seizing the HawkEye with force and using it for your personal
enjoyment, you turned evil yourself! Evil! Evil!”
I
cough as he finally lets me go—my main character, Jeicale Riverstone. My
already husky voice is now croaky from shouting too much. Jeicale is furious at
Irithdelle. So am I. I lie back on my chair, rub my bloodshot eyes, push my
laptop away, and gratefully play Maksim Mrvica’s “Exodus,” a piece I often
listen to after writing tense scenes. It feels even more special this time
because this scene is the climax of my first full-length, 600-page English
novel, The Lost Heroine.
Seven
years ago, as a complete sponge inspired by excellently-read English audio books,
I began to write without planning a childishly-structured story titled The Magical Mansion, in which a
desperate young kid unsatisfied with reality breaks away into a magical mansion
awash with fantastic adventure. Though full of embarrassingly cliché characters
and shameless homage to Harry Potter
spells, The Magical Mansion still has
meaning, which can be found in the clumsy opening sentences of the story: “I
will write a story about a magical mansion from now on. You have to listen
carefully. The main character is me.”
On
and on I wrote short stories in English, persistently, totaling sixteen in the
end. Yet none but the first has the actual me as its protagonist. Being my
first story, written by an English novice who could barely write, The Magical Mansion has multiple errors
and drawbacks and is easily the plainest of all. Yet in reading over the story and
seeing that the protagonist found comfort in a fantasy world and not in reality,
I saw that the story was actually about my desire to escape from the villains
of reality.
Back then I used to have a black and white view of
the world, one in which there were either heroes or there were villains. My alcoholic
father, the man who used to tie me to a swing to prevent me from looking into
ant holes, was the major villain. My mother, the woman who always rescued me
from my father and cuddled me in her arms, was the ultimate hero.
Naturally,
my earliest stories are strictly designed so that the bad guys get thoroughly
beaten up by the good guys. Omnipotent, I achieved in my stories what was
impossible in the real world. Creating my own worlds was one way for me to cope
with reality, by being in a place where my father the bad, bad villain could not
interfere. Both worlds, the one inside and the one outside, were black and
white.
Slowly,
though, they grayed. My later short stories and novels no longer have flat, “hero-or-villain”
characters. Irithdelle, for one, is neither a hero nor a villain. Or, she could
still be both. In the book she betrays Jeicale and his gang Lunarelle because she
thinks his blind adherence to destiny is wrong and evil. However, she lets herself
become evil as well, abusing her magical powers to make humans obey and fall to
her cause. Not unlike her, many of my relatively recent characters are
flexible, versatile, and multifaceted.
This change—no,
metamorphosis—took place because the originally dichotomous worldview I had
been sticking onto made sense no more. I had begun to see the gray in people as
well. Yes; the graying sensation was not limited to my imaginary world. The
real world was a feast of colors. My once black father, too, turned gray and
then blossomed into a parade of rich, vibrant colors. Actually, it had been the
black shades on my eyes, not an inherent blackness of my father, that had
forced me to see him in black. And when I took off the shades, our relationship
spurted from adversity to a more normalized father-son status. Then it bettered,
with smiles, jokes, and, above all, mutual understanding. The place I had dubbed
hell was all of a sudden home again.
I entered
high school filled with these new spirits, and found myself capable of conversing
with a wider group of people in a school brimming with students with
unparalleled individuality. The Lost
Heroine began there. Naturally, the plot was richer, longer, and smarter,
for I put together the tale by drawing elements out of real life—people,
happenings, contexts. The world was a bigger and more colorful place for me
now. It wasn’t only my characters that had turned gray.
I put
my laptop on my lap again and erase the last three sentences I just wrote.
Jeicale doesn’t have to tell the readers Irithdelle is evil; her being
multifaceted has already been established. I will convey something else through
him. I start yelling again, and so does Jeicale: “Friendship, Irithdelle, is more valuable than anything else in this
world, and you defied it!” No. It is too plain. I erase. It goes on.
