An American in Asia: His Quest for Cosmic Truth (or at least a Decent Espresso)

 

Yeah, I write stuff.

A photo of me at a press conference that was published in the Laos English daily, The Vientiane Times.

For the past couple of years I have been the Bangkok correspondent for a travel industry magazine called, TTG Asia. Along with its sister publications, Business Travel News and TTGmice (which stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions), TTG is a basic resource for travel agents, hoteliers and tour operators concerned with Asia's tourism industry.

I was responsible for writing news and exploring the countries of Thailand, Cambodia and Laos to provide the industry with the latest information on the state of Southeast Asian tourism. It was the hardest job I've ever done. It was also a lark. As part of my job, I'd find myself riding elephants in a school for mahouts in the notorious Golden Triangle, or swooping over the jungle hills of Samui Island on a cable stretched through the treetops.

Back in Bangkok I'd don a suit and attend high society functions to track down one of the most elusive of beasts, a quote from a government minister that actually made sense. It was a kick-ass job, but there was one stipulation that drained some of the fun out of it: no adjectives. This was hard news, industry news at that, and over two years I wrote reams and reams of it, carefully avoiding any turn of phrase that might smack of creativity.

Fiction was how I entered the literary scene nearly two decades ago. I published my first story in PLAZM magazine. Their second issue, I think. A poem went into their third one. The story is a dense 3 pages that reads like free verse and the poem is just a dream that I wrote down on a scrap of paper by the bed. Even though the story is dense I still like it and when I get the time I'll copy it in here.

Years later I started publishing again. The lapse was due to the realization that I had no style of my own. I can mimic like nobody's business, but I shied from trusting my own original ideas. I'd pretty much be writing like whichever author who most recently impressed me.

Finally, a few years ago I went on a stint of reading escapist literature to relieve my Japanese studies. I plowed through all of Ian Fleming's James Bond books and was surprised to find that I was impressed by his style. After reading a lot of serious literature, I was refreshed to find the focus placed on the reader's entertainment, and less on the author expressing his version of ultimate truth.

After I finished all of those, I picked up Raymond Chandler and he really turned my crank. The guy wrote to entertain the masses to be sure, but he did something that 90% of the Atlantic Monthly literati never tried: he showed respect for the reader's intelligence. If you read his interviews and letters, you'll know that he actually regarded the general public as a bunch of rubes duped into swallowing anything spewed by a cathode ray tube. But the tone of his books was different. He wrote as if he assumed the reader was more intelligent than he. The result was that I had to check the dictionary a couple times and read more than a few pages over, but I came away from his novels feeling smart.

So many writers write down to their public. Perhaps unconsciously. Chandler wrote up though he was well above the curve and knew it. I'd never been tempted to even pick up a mystery, but I've read each of his three or five times, and I'll read them again.

Following this minor awakening to the obvious, I wrote a bunch of travel and culture pieces for English magazines in Japan. You might think that kind of writing is tripe next to fiction and poetry but the other thing that Chandler did for me was show that style can overcome any limitations of genre. He took the pulp out of pulp fiction. They started printing his books on nice paper because people read them more than once and they wanted them to last. If an editor told me to write 5,000 words about my left sock, I'd turn in a piece that would keep you on the toilet for an hour, and I'd have fun doing it.

It's something I picked up from playing with Swoon 23 too. I'd pour my soul into a flurry of notes only to be told that I'm too noisy and I had to tone it down. So two notes would be foisted on me and I'd glower and sulk. Then I'd stop caring. That got boring pretty fast and I'd start goofing around with all the subtle ways I could mess with those two notes without anyone noticing. Pretty soon it hit me that there really are an infinite number of things you can do with a note, and my artistic happiness was only limited by my imagination. I got so I could get a thrill out of playing anything.

So I have absolutely zero sympathy for writers who complain that they only get to write fluffy features and all the 'real writing' goes to the big-name writers. It's nothing more than a lame excuse for their own lack of imagination. They are letting their own boredom infect their writing, and then they have the gall to publish it and infect millions, perhaps hundreds of readers.

That said, writing for the travel industry is like having a wild orgy with the cheerleading squad and then trying to tell your mom how your date went. I'd come back from Cambodia's ancient temple of Angkor Wat, where I'd seen a traditional Apsara dance under the full moon, and I'd sit down and write up a story on tourism projections balanced against the rapid increase in high-end resorts in Siem Reap, with a side-bar on the new airport terminal. It was time to switch genres.

Now I'm living in a house on the island of Phuket and I spend my days holed up with the laptop, plunking away on a novel. Occasionally I take a break for a snorkel around nearby coral reefs or head into the local tourist trap for a beer and a game of pool. It's pretty close to paradise for me right now, but ask me again when I start shopping the book around to publishers.

Here are a few of the stories I wrote in Japan. Click the link button at left for links to some of my TTG Asia stuff that might be worth a read.

The Guaranteed Endless Love Valentines Date

Merry Oshogatsu

Tokyo Apartment Hunt