Author's Journey
Boredom is an odd starting point for inspiration. But to me it is the starting point for most of my stories. I lived a safe and unremarkable childhood, and because of this, boredom was an ever-present companion. I learned to fill the long hours with stories. When I wasn’t voraciously reading, I was playing imaginary games with my friends, my younger siblings, or even by myself. I’d sit in the swing in my backyard, spinning in circles, and pretend I was flying.
Company, likewise, starts with boredom. Curtis is a ghost who is trapped, alone, at an idyllic but isolated house in the woods. He meets Jenny, an imaginary friend, and the two spark a friendship. Neither Curtis nor Jenny can interact with the physical world. They can’t pick up a book or turn on a movie or talk to anyone besides each other. And this became a challenge for me as an author. How do you write a story in which the central characters can’t touch… anything? What could they possibly do that might sustain an audience’s interest?
To solve this problem, I drew on my childhood nostalgia. What did I do when I was bored? I came back to the realm of imagination. When I played pretend as a kid, I didn’t need fancy toys or elaborate playsets. Instead, I simply told myself that a rock could grant wishes, a pencil could defeat dragons, and a weed could bring a person back from death. There were no limits to imagination. And so, I decided, as long as Curtis and Jenny could imagine, they’d be okay.
Jenny, of course, is herself a product of the imagination. When I came up with the idea of Company, she was the first character who came to mind: an imaginary friend who had been discarded. As I developed her, I wondered at how it would feel to know that you were a created product meant to be useful in a specific way. In Jenny’s case, she was made to keep her “sister” Charlotte from being lonely and to help her through depression. As such, Jenny is supportive to a fault. She is willing to sacrifice her existence for Charlotte’s happiness--or so she thinks. But there is a part of Jenny that wants to live, that wants to be real.
Charlotte created Jenny, and that creation is evident in her appearance. Jenny has unnatural purple eyes, which Curtis compares to the color of grape Jell-o. The purple eyes are actually a trait common in certain characters found in fanfiction, which Charlotte has probably dabbled with. Jenny’s eyes mark her as both unique and artificial. Jenny wears a plaid dress, reminiscent of a farm girl, with her hair in pigtails. This shows Charlotte’s nostalgia and her yearning to return to a simpler, more innocent time. Jenny’s appearance is important, because it shows how Charlotte wants her to be--not necessarily, how Jenny is.
For Curtis, on the other hand, appearance was less important. When I looked into his character, the trait that stood out to me was that Curtis was a ghost who didn’t really believe in ghosts--at least not when he was alive. Curtis has a skeptical, scientific mind. He died when he was seventeen, a time when teenagers are still developing their belief systems, and though he doesn’t realize it, his mindset is still very black and white. As he and Jenny interact, they begin to grow and change.
Although my initial idea revolved around a discarded imaginary friend, Curtis became my main character when I realized that most of the plot revolved around him. There is a mystery involving Curtis’s death. This mystery came about due to one tiny little detail that caused me to ask a whole host of questions.
Initially, I wanted to write Company as a “gentle love story,” one that focused, out of necessity, on emotions and friendship, rather than physical forms of affection. Now one very obvious rule of romance is that you don’t want the main characters to be or appear to be related to each other. I wanted Curtis to have no blood ties whatsoever to Charlotte’s family. But Charlotte abandons Jenny at her childhood home, and Curtis has only been dead for ten years. This means that Curtis, a stranger, died on Charlotte’s property while she was living on it.
How did that happen? How did Curtis end up haunting the property? How did he get on the land to begin with? Who killed him? Was it foul play? Did Charlotte know he died? How did she not know that a boy was murdered at her home? I was genuinely curious, so I started to come up with answers, and as I unraveled the mystery, the novel grew.
Company, likewise, starts with boredom. Curtis is a ghost who is trapped, alone, at an idyllic but isolated house in the woods. He meets Jenny, an imaginary friend, and the two spark a friendship. Neither Curtis nor Jenny can interact with the physical world. They can’t pick up a book or turn on a movie or talk to anyone besides each other. And this became a challenge for me as an author. How do you write a story in which the central characters can’t touch… anything? What could they possibly do that might sustain an audience’s interest?
To solve this problem, I drew on my childhood nostalgia. What did I do when I was bored? I came back to the realm of imagination. When I played pretend as a kid, I didn’t need fancy toys or elaborate playsets. Instead, I simply told myself that a rock could grant wishes, a pencil could defeat dragons, and a weed could bring a person back from death. There were no limits to imagination. And so, I decided, as long as Curtis and Jenny could imagine, they’d be okay.
Jenny, of course, is herself a product of the imagination. When I came up with the idea of Company, she was the first character who came to mind: an imaginary friend who had been discarded. As I developed her, I wondered at how it would feel to know that you were a created product meant to be useful in a specific way. In Jenny’s case, she was made to keep her “sister” Charlotte from being lonely and to help her through depression. As such, Jenny is supportive to a fault. She is willing to sacrifice her existence for Charlotte’s happiness--or so she thinks. But there is a part of Jenny that wants to live, that wants to be real.
Charlotte created Jenny, and that creation is evident in her appearance. Jenny has unnatural purple eyes, which Curtis compares to the color of grape Jell-o. The purple eyes are actually a trait common in certain characters found in fanfiction, which Charlotte has probably dabbled with. Jenny’s eyes mark her as both unique and artificial. Jenny wears a plaid dress, reminiscent of a farm girl, with her hair in pigtails. This shows Charlotte’s nostalgia and her yearning to return to a simpler, more innocent time. Jenny’s appearance is important, because it shows how Charlotte wants her to be--not necessarily, how Jenny is.
For Curtis, on the other hand, appearance was less important. When I looked into his character, the trait that stood out to me was that Curtis was a ghost who didn’t really believe in ghosts--at least not when he was alive. Curtis has a skeptical, scientific mind. He died when he was seventeen, a time when teenagers are still developing their belief systems, and though he doesn’t realize it, his mindset is still very black and white. As he and Jenny interact, they begin to grow and change.
Although my initial idea revolved around a discarded imaginary friend, Curtis became my main character when I realized that most of the plot revolved around him. There is a mystery involving Curtis’s death. This mystery came about due to one tiny little detail that caused me to ask a whole host of questions.
Initially, I wanted to write Company as a “gentle love story,” one that focused, out of necessity, on emotions and friendship, rather than physical forms of affection. Now one very obvious rule of romance is that you don’t want the main characters to be or appear to be related to each other. I wanted Curtis to have no blood ties whatsoever to Charlotte’s family. But Charlotte abandons Jenny at her childhood home, and Curtis has only been dead for ten years. This means that Curtis, a stranger, died on Charlotte’s property while she was living on it.
How did that happen? How did Curtis end up haunting the property? How did he get on the land to begin with? Who killed him? Was it foul play? Did Charlotte know he died? How did she not know that a boy was murdered at her home? I was genuinely curious, so I started to come up with answers, and as I unraveled the mystery, the novel grew.
Company is a book that was written in quick bursts of inspiration, followed by long periods of waiting. I had the initial idea in 2012. In 2013, I completed the entire manuscript in one month, as part of National Novel Writing Month. And then the manuscript sat in my drafts folder for five years, as I went back and forth, trying to figure out how to revise it.
One thing I did during that five-year interlude was develop the setting. When I first came up with the idea of Company, I pictured a house on a farm. But I quickly decided if Curtis was going to be stuck in one place. I was going to make it somewhere beautiful, somewhere interesting, and somewhere familiar. Most of my novels take place in different worlds; this was my chance to represent my native state of California. So I stuck the house in the San Bernardino Mountains, an hour or so from my hometown.
As a kid, my parents would take me and my siblings to hike in the San Bernardino Mountains; afterwards, my mom would insist that we drive around and look at all the pretty rich person’s homes. In particular, I remember going up to Big Bear Lake. After hiking, we’d window shop in the cute, touristy section of the town. I decided to make Big Bear my model for Silver Fox Lake, the town near Charlotte’s old house. I persuaded my dad to make trips to Big Bear with me. We hiked the Woodland Loop, drove around the lake, and walked along the stores and restaurants. I took pictures and hoarded brochures and scribbled down impressions.
But even though I was developing the setting, the story was stalled, stuck, until 2018, when my life swiftly fell apart. My attempt to get a teaching credential came to an abrupt end, my critique group viciously fell apart, and I had to quickly relocate back to my parent’s home. My stability, my plans for the future, and my way of looking at life were shaken. This led me to re-examine Company. What I had been struggling with for the past five years was meaning. Why did it matter if I wrote this book? Who cared? Company is a story about two characters who have lost their connection to the material world and must find some other meaningful existence. As my own connections to the material world fell into disarray, I had to figure this out for myself.
The revision process was still challenging. I revised on and off in 2019. In the summer of 2020, I finished the manuscript in a quick, one-month burst, reminiscent of how it began. (If you want to know how the last few months went, I talk about it in my writing blogs—the links are below.) Ironically, the story that started with boredom, ended with boredom, as the entire world went into quarantine during that time and many people experienced what Curtis and Jenny probably felt: a disconnect with the material world, isolation, and the struggle to come up with things to do.
As I send my story out into the world, I hope, as I always hope, that it will be entertaining and thought-provoking. I hope that anyone who feels as Curtis and Jenny do may take comfort in their story. Boredom is not the worst thing; it is often the starting point for creativity. I hope that Company sparks your imagination and helps you see how much you can do no matter what circumstances you find yourself in.
One thing I did during that five-year interlude was develop the setting. When I first came up with the idea of Company, I pictured a house on a farm. But I quickly decided if Curtis was going to be stuck in one place. I was going to make it somewhere beautiful, somewhere interesting, and somewhere familiar. Most of my novels take place in different worlds; this was my chance to represent my native state of California. So I stuck the house in the San Bernardino Mountains, an hour or so from my hometown.
As a kid, my parents would take me and my siblings to hike in the San Bernardino Mountains; afterwards, my mom would insist that we drive around and look at all the pretty rich person’s homes. In particular, I remember going up to Big Bear Lake. After hiking, we’d window shop in the cute, touristy section of the town. I decided to make Big Bear my model for Silver Fox Lake, the town near Charlotte’s old house. I persuaded my dad to make trips to Big Bear with me. We hiked the Woodland Loop, drove around the lake, and walked along the stores and restaurants. I took pictures and hoarded brochures and scribbled down impressions.
But even though I was developing the setting, the story was stalled, stuck, until 2018, when my life swiftly fell apart. My attempt to get a teaching credential came to an abrupt end, my critique group viciously fell apart, and I had to quickly relocate back to my parent’s home. My stability, my plans for the future, and my way of looking at life were shaken. This led me to re-examine Company. What I had been struggling with for the past five years was meaning. Why did it matter if I wrote this book? Who cared? Company is a story about two characters who have lost their connection to the material world and must find some other meaningful existence. As my own connections to the material world fell into disarray, I had to figure this out for myself.
The revision process was still challenging. I revised on and off in 2019. In the summer of 2020, I finished the manuscript in a quick, one-month burst, reminiscent of how it began. (If you want to know how the last few months went, I talk about it in my writing blogs—the links are below.) Ironically, the story that started with boredom, ended with boredom, as the entire world went into quarantine during that time and many people experienced what Curtis and Jenny probably felt: a disconnect with the material world, isolation, and the struggle to come up with things to do.
As I send my story out into the world, I hope, as I always hope, that it will be entertaining and thought-provoking. I hope that anyone who feels as Curtis and Jenny do may take comfort in their story. Boredom is not the worst thing; it is often the starting point for creativity. I hope that Company sparks your imagination and helps you see how much you can do no matter what circumstances you find yourself in.
Writing Blogs (Finishing Company)
Writing Stories: March-May 2020
Writing Stories: June 2020
Writing Stories: July 2020
Writing Stories: August 2020
