The Grand Writing Adventures of Victor Chang

PART I: The Dream

This one came to me in a dream.

I remember telling this to many people over drinks, at parties, and basically to anyone who’d listen. In this dream, I’m waiting at a surprise party for a friend to show up. I don’t know who we’re waiting for, but we all feel super hyped. Then, in walks this girl. It’s Lauren Spierer.

Yes, that Lauren Spierer. She’s the face of missing white girl syndrome for our generation. She went missing at the University of Indiana in 2011 and is still missing to this day. But I didn’t just dream about her out of the blue.

I knew Lauren since we were 7.

Okay, not exactly “knew” her. We were in the same first grade class, and we had a birthday exactly one day apart. I think I sat pretty close to her in our first grade class portrait. I’ve heard on good authority she was kind of bitchy. But she was always… fine? to me. We never really talked but we never really needed to. She was just another girl. We were in different social circles and when we went to college, I didn’t think much about her. But when she made national headlines in 2011, that changed.

Wini always says on our first date, I mentioned this to her and she always thought it was weird. But the thing is, something about this always stuck with me. I barely knew her, and yet she stuck in the back of my mind. I remember the overjoyed elation I felt in my dream when I saw her return home safely. Was it just hope for her to come home? Sure. But what else? I really didn’t know. And to be honest, this wasn’t really something to share with people. It just kind of was. And thus, it just sat there at the back of my mind.

So I decided to take this and write about it.

Part II: The Context

When I outlined Daughters of Sons, I was preoccupied with senior design and engineering and problem sets yet I still found time to outline and write this. I probably had the dream in mid 2013 and then outlined at the end of 2013. That summer, I interned at an energy auditing company but since I was staying with my parents, high school was still on my mind since I was hanging out with those friends again. I would commute to the city and return home every day.

Around this time, a lot of things were happening.

1. I sort of began to fall back in love with an old friend, who I had briefly dated in 2009. And by brief, I mean 3 months. When she went to college, we parted ways but remained kind of in touch. We reconnected briefly and dated for maybe a week in early 2014, knowing it wasn’t going to work out.

2. My parents were getting on my nerves. They are very much traditional Asian American immigrant parents, but judge me less on my academic prowess but more on my social life. I was itching to get out. I eventually moved to the Upper West Side in late 2014.

3. I began to see a therapist for my OCD. I won’t delve into details, but it wasn’t a good time for me in early 2014. The good news is that I still go to therapy to this day and you should see a therapist too!

4. I was really developing my taste in music that has stuck until today. I had seen “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and one song really stuck with me: “Tugboat” by Galaxie 500.

Part III: Plot Shenanigans

All that being said, for some reason, I landed on “Daughter of Sons”, a story about a boy who comes home after college, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, deals with annoying parents, has to interpret dreams of anxiety and, guilt, is haunted by a missing girl from years back, and sprinkled in random indie songs. Sound familiar?

I always imagined this story beginning with the Neutral Milk Hotel song “The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1”. It helped that the band, who I thought had disbanded forever, briefly came back to tour in mid 2014 and I saw them live in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I always imagined the “reveal” conjoined with “Tugboat” playing.

This story got complicated real fast. I remembered very little until I reread it recently. There’s so much plot here that I took notes as I reread. Here they are in no particular order.

1. My not so subconscious desire to always please my parents is pathetically on display. My striving to please my Dad is palpable and just sad. It’s actually very cringe worthy. Gosh, where was my mind at in 2013 and 2014? Whenever that part of the story comes up, I just gloss over it. Ugh.
2. Mattie is my ex girlfriend (see Part II, Bullet Point #1). She embodies many of her qualities. Her twin is basically how I saw Lauren. It’s a mixing of worlds.
3. The shoehorned music auditions and musical subplot was basically my music auditioning phase of my life. It’s a dumb side plot and I honestly didn’t know why I included it because it had been years since I even auditioned for a band. If I ever remake this into something else, I’d cut this entire plot.
4. Evanna was 22 year old Victor’s manic pixie dream girl. Evanna was named after Evanna Lynch, the actress who played Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter movies whom I had a huge crush on. And I still do.
5. John is an amalgamation of many people but basically a friend who became a radicalized conservative Hungarian motivational speaker. It’s a long story. He was good friends with us but always had it in with the cool kids too.
6. All the architecture and layout of Riverdale was Edgemont, my high sbchool, to me. For example, the layout of the band room, the hallways, the track, etc.
7. The house parties and underground were all figments of my imagination of what Edgemont was like. I was very creative with the subconscious bartender.
8. This definitely leaned more to a “story” and was not as dialogue heavy as my later writing. There’s lots of internal monologues, albeit very on the nose. My writing style was very formal, and I found that very amusing.
9. Reading this again after how-ever-many years is cool because I’m discovering the story as the reader would be because I forgot all the plot developments. The intrigue and lying and mystery is pretty good. It’s neat to peel back layers on the characters and their backstories. If I do say so myself, I am impressed with how many characters and backstories everyone got. It’s kind of addicting to read!
10. Obviously, The Virgin Suicides was on my mind regarding Mattie and Lindsay.

I am obviously very biased, but I had a blast reading this. It kind of sat in my mind and it obviously sat in my mind when I was brainstorming this. I remember laying out all relationships and plot developments but seeing it organically develop to me as it would to a reader was very interesting.

(spoiler alert!)

I am kind of shocked how… let’s say, controversial…. I got with some of these subjects of rape, sexual abuse, violence, etc. For “The Last Five Days”, there was lots of violence and death, too. For “The Roommate”, there was suicide. For “Minot, ND”, there was all of the above. However, for my latest, “From Earth to Earth”, there is nothing. Maybe I’ve softened.

I remember marinating on the ending for a long time. I always knew that the ending was kind of twisted, and my 22 year old self seemed to think this was very edgy. Reading it back again, honestly…. it kind of still is. This story reminds me of “13 Reasons Why” and “Riverdale” before it even existed.

Regarding Mattie, the idea that you think your ex-boyfriend raped you at the night of a party when it was some rogue underground guy that was just messing with your twin sister and then your twin sister disappears the next day, causing media frenzy, and then you leave for 2 years… boy, that is a lot to deal with. No idea how I came up with that. Seeing your ex-boyfriend must bring up some emotions. And then growing up with religious zealot abusive parents. I must have been dealing some shit … in my mind.

I think I wanted the reader to pity John. He was a victim of being a people-pleaser, not knowing when to say no to Mark, and not knowing when to say no to his best friend. It was a relief when he finally turned himself in. But to me, what he did was still unforgivable.

Let’s just not talk about Mr. Brown. I cringe when I read that storyline.

I think Peter is a fine protagonist. I tried to make him active and always wanting to seek out answers. I think using his dreams and then later revealing that Mattie had dreams too was an easy way out of explaining certain plot developments and him realizing things. If I were to adapt this, I would definitely incorporate this a little more organically. For now, it seems almost supernatural, which is fine, I guess. But Peter stayed motivated and angry, so he’s an active protagonist at least.

Evanna was definitely my vision of a spunky girlfriend I loved. She definitely pulled a bit from an old childhood crush I had growing up. Having her dad be a crazy conspiracy theorist was not inspired by anything. It was just interesting seeing that perspective. I remember thinking that when he hit Peter, we didn’t know whom he was and that was a cool development.

Mark Findelay (Findelay was from Katie Findelay, an actress who played the missing girl Rosie Larsen in “The Killing”‘) and Zoe were also pulled from the thought of feeling bad for bad guys. He just went a little off the rails when the “feds” (lol) tortured him for information. Him being the catalyst made sense. He was a party thrower and he basically started it all. Maybe he should have treated John a little better. It’s sad how he turned out.

(end spoiler)

I am honestly shocked how well this turned out. I was so full of ideas. I had to tune it down for “The Last Five Days”, even though that took me twice as long to write. But this was one was tightly constructed and I’m giving myself a pat on the back.