As another part of preparing for the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show, I dug up the first novel I wrote. It was a project for a novel writing class at Cal State Northridge taught by Dr. Jewell Parker Rhodes. Not only is she a New York Times bestselling author and winner of a number of prestigious awards, including the Coretta Scott King Honor Award, she is an informative and supportive teacher. As I wrote in the cover letter for my final project, “Of all the writing classes I’ve taken at CSUN, I have learned the most from this one. It has made me realize how far I have come and how far I still have to go.”
Of all the things I learned in her class, there are two things that I want to point out here, one technical and one thematic.
The technical was learning to chunk my story into scenes. This was necessary when writing with a Commodore 64. This computer had 64 kilobytes of RAM. The program and manuscript had to fit in that tiny space as well as the 170 KB on a floppy disk. PaperClip had the ability to create global documents where you can link files and print and search them together. As I wrote, it made more sense to put each scene in its own file.
When you look at a story scene by scene, not only do you need to look at how they fit together, you must make each one a self-contained unit. Scenes need their own arc and character movement. They need to give a reader a sense that something is happening. And they should end in a way that makes the reader want to go on to the next scene.
Even though the MacBook Pro I have today has 18 gigabytes of RAM and 1 terabyte of storage, I’m still breaking novels into scenes. This is why I like writing with Scrivener. It supports that style of writing.
The most important thing I gained was something I didn’t realize until years later. My novels all have a consistent theme. They all have to do with broken men.
The novel I wrote for this class, White Lies, was about a real estate agent named Bill who had fallen onto hard times. His friend offers him a solution, dealing cocaine (as one does in the 1980s). Of course, things don’t turn out well. This parallels what happened to my dad. He was also in real estate. When times were hard for him, he got involved with a business partner who got him into legal trouble. The stress caused his diabetes to spiral out of control, and he died from a heart attack.
Broken men like my dad show up in all of my novels, even the ones with female protagonists. They don’t start out as bad people, but their flaws cause them to do bad things. They abandon their families (as in Christina’s Portrait), get into self-destructive behaviors (as in The Remainders), or have a need for control that leads to tragedy (as in Offline). Some men learn (as in Doria) while others get into even worse behavior like preying on girls (as in Amiga) and violence (as in Christina’s Portrait).
What breaks these men? Unrealistic expectations. The need to be in control, invulnerable, and unemotional. Never asking for help, because it’s considered a weakness. Refusal to explore their own sexuality. Believing their sole value is producing income for the family.
Broken men brought us to the situation we’re in today. Led by the most broken man of all, these men (and the women who think they’d benefit by supporting them) regulate women’s bodies because they can’t control them, persecute LGBTQ+ people because their existence dares them to explore parts of themselves they’re ashamed of, and plunge all of us into tyranny and poverty because they couldn’t bear having a woman (and a woman of color at that) as president.
That’s why broken men are the center of my work in progress, Trevor and the Eight of Swords. It takes my deepest dive into broken men to see what makes them broken and how they can overcome it. Part of it involves a man exploring aspects of himself considered feminine, including submissiveness, vulnerability, and emotion. In discovering his feminine side, he becomes a more complete man—but he must deal with family and social pressures that would derail his growth.
As authors, we seek a place to write from and find our audience. It can be a genre or style, but it’s better when it’s a theme and worldview. Being a child of a broken man who has struggled with the broken parts of myself, this is the perspective I write from. Considering what broken men are doing to the world right now, stories like mine are important.
