Elliott Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "bts"
That Pinche Papelado
Hey y'all - I'm super stoked because two great book sites that I myself read have posted reviews of NOTV. I speak of ReadDiverseBooks and also The Book Satchel. If you are not following these sites, you should. I actually read them before thinking of submitting NOTV their way, and was honored Naz and Resh said yes.
For me as an author, it's always fun to see how my writing has impacted readers and other people. The transition from a blogger to a freelance journalist was a gradual one - years and years of typing away to a few loyal readers. I remember writing a guest blog post at The Run of Play that got mentioned and linked in an article at The Guardian, and Brian and I were both over the moon (or at least me).
Then Steve Busfield of the Guardian, thanks to Graham Parker, got in touch with me over Twitter and asked me to write for The Guardian. And I did. And I'd also written a few stories for Richard Farley at Fox Soccer. And now I have hidden my gmail email because I kinda get enough work offers as it is.
For fiction writing, though, the transition was pretty abrupt. I broke my leg in preseason for a lower-tier soccer club in the US, and had three months to kill on a recliner. At first, I enjoyed birding, but in a very white trash sense of the word: my wife put up a birdfeeder I could see from a recliner in the living room, and I watched Cardinals and pigeons and the occasional falcon (during the drought they came to our bird bath to drink at times).
I read Proust, and loved it. I listened to Kanye West, finally, and enjoyed it. And, inspired, I wrote NOTV's first draft in a hectic 2.5 months.
I chose both literary fiction and an experimental structure because for me, writing fiction is more about creation - emphasis on creative - than penning something that may sell. Lots of debut authors will submit a manuscript, get some feedback from agents, nix any creative playfulness with narrators or tone shifts, and then resubmit. I stuck to my guns.
I know the shift produces an effect on readers - my editor Peter hated/counseled against the head-hopping in Part III - but it accomplished my artistic goals. Structure mirrors plot, and readers feel dizzy as if they themselves were tipsy at the party. In Part II, Manny reads his old diary and experiences a bit of growth. In Part IV, we get very deep inside his mind as this happens - and, sadly, we don't like everything there is to see.
Of course, as a debut novelist, NOTV has flaws. After the ten months of editing, I honestly can only read a few select paragraphs in Part IV that I still find engaging. Turning off that creative part of me - killing Manny and NOTV and the process - was hard and emotional. At any moment, I could find inspiration and gleefully type a note or tweak in iPhone's notes and make the book 0.01% better. But I had to stop. There's only so much time.
I do want to talk about Manny's immigration status and how it was handled in NOTV.
Basically, based on my own life experiences - close family and closer friends who are undocumented - I tried to create as authentic a depiction as possible for Manny in particular. Keep in mind I lived in the RGV for four years and helped organize and empower low income individuals, largely undocumented.
The truth of the matter is that, so far at least, the US is not a Gestapo state with checkpoints where a person like Manny necessarily has to be constantly looking over his shoulder. Manny can't fly (hence the drive back to Texas from Cali), but he largely avoids the police and uses bogus papers to work. This is kinda the bread and butter for many undoc people's existence.
Manny does have one encounter with a police officer, and he is terrified.
The other issue is amnesty. In NOTV, in the future, some amnesty law is passed in the US and Manny gets a legal status. For you and I - likely college graduates with a knowledge of how things work - amnesty feels really, really far away right now. Getting a law passed also takes lots of work both at the local, organizing level but also in DC.
Still, the perspective of NOTV is Manny's. There are people in South Dallas I know who speak about Reagan's amnesty as if the clouds opened up one day, a tablet fell to the Earth, and suddenly everybody needed to bum $500 to get an attorney. Not everybody who is undocumented is an activist - many go about their lives and try to keep a low profile. Manny, sadly, is one of those.
I did pen a sub-story arc where Manny and Hector stopped in Arizona, attended some Dreamer protests, and had some romantic encounters. However, the arc kinda fell flat and was just a thinly veiled excuse to take potshots at a certain Sheriff up there who I find repulsive. It got nixed early on. Instead, Hector has some fun in TJ.
I also wanted Manny to marry Albertine because of his neurotic, irrational, and self-destructive desire to "control", not because he wanted to get papers.
Still, I don't want to deny the singularity of either Naz or Resh's reading experience. In a sense, the law "just changing" in a few paragraphs feels unjust and almost flippant - but, for me, that's truth. That's exactly how it feels to many in the undocumented population. Tomorrow, the US Congress "could" (very theoretical) pass an amnesty bill - or a Judge could find in favor of Obama's DAPA executive order - and suddenly, to a person like Manny, it'd feel like the sky had opened.
In a material sense, laws are just blots of ink on paper. They are rewritten, torn up, and changed daily.
Lastly, I am an admitted fan of irony, and, yes, Manny getting papers in the US to then move to Mexico for a lucrative job opportunity was also an irresistible sub story arc. Think of it as a "Chinga tu patria", even though I love both the US and Mexico - despite their particular flaws- and see no conflict between them.
For me as an author, it's always fun to see how my writing has impacted readers and other people. The transition from a blogger to a freelance journalist was a gradual one - years and years of typing away to a few loyal readers. I remember writing a guest blog post at The Run of Play that got mentioned and linked in an article at The Guardian, and Brian and I were both over the moon (or at least me).
Then Steve Busfield of the Guardian, thanks to Graham Parker, got in touch with me over Twitter and asked me to write for The Guardian. And I did. And I'd also written a few stories for Richard Farley at Fox Soccer. And now I have hidden my gmail email because I kinda get enough work offers as it is.
For fiction writing, though, the transition was pretty abrupt. I broke my leg in preseason for a lower-tier soccer club in the US, and had three months to kill on a recliner. At first, I enjoyed birding, but in a very white trash sense of the word: my wife put up a birdfeeder I could see from a recliner in the living room, and I watched Cardinals and pigeons and the occasional falcon (during the drought they came to our bird bath to drink at times).
I read Proust, and loved it. I listened to Kanye West, finally, and enjoyed it. And, inspired, I wrote NOTV's first draft in a hectic 2.5 months.
I chose both literary fiction and an experimental structure because for me, writing fiction is more about creation - emphasis on creative - than penning something that may sell. Lots of debut authors will submit a manuscript, get some feedback from agents, nix any creative playfulness with narrators or tone shifts, and then resubmit. I stuck to my guns.
I know the shift produces an effect on readers - my editor Peter hated/counseled against the head-hopping in Part III - but it accomplished my artistic goals. Structure mirrors plot, and readers feel dizzy as if they themselves were tipsy at the party. In Part II, Manny reads his old diary and experiences a bit of growth. In Part IV, we get very deep inside his mind as this happens - and, sadly, we don't like everything there is to see.
Of course, as a debut novelist, NOTV has flaws. After the ten months of editing, I honestly can only read a few select paragraphs in Part IV that I still find engaging. Turning off that creative part of me - killing Manny and NOTV and the process - was hard and emotional. At any moment, I could find inspiration and gleefully type a note or tweak in iPhone's notes and make the book 0.01% better. But I had to stop. There's only so much time.
I do want to talk about Manny's immigration status and how it was handled in NOTV.
Basically, based on my own life experiences - close family and closer friends who are undocumented - I tried to create as authentic a depiction as possible for Manny in particular. Keep in mind I lived in the RGV for four years and helped organize and empower low income individuals, largely undocumented.
The truth of the matter is that, so far at least, the US is not a Gestapo state with checkpoints where a person like Manny necessarily has to be constantly looking over his shoulder. Manny can't fly (hence the drive back to Texas from Cali), but he largely avoids the police and uses bogus papers to work. This is kinda the bread and butter for many undoc people's existence.
Manny does have one encounter with a police officer, and he is terrified.
The other issue is amnesty. In NOTV, in the future, some amnesty law is passed in the US and Manny gets a legal status. For you and I - likely college graduates with a knowledge of how things work - amnesty feels really, really far away right now. Getting a law passed also takes lots of work both at the local, organizing level but also in DC.
Still, the perspective of NOTV is Manny's. There are people in South Dallas I know who speak about Reagan's amnesty as if the clouds opened up one day, a tablet fell to the Earth, and suddenly everybody needed to bum $500 to get an attorney. Not everybody who is undocumented is an activist - many go about their lives and try to keep a low profile. Manny, sadly, is one of those.
I did pen a sub-story arc where Manny and Hector stopped in Arizona, attended some Dreamer protests, and had some romantic encounters. However, the arc kinda fell flat and was just a thinly veiled excuse to take potshots at a certain Sheriff up there who I find repulsive. It got nixed early on. Instead, Hector has some fun in TJ.
I also wanted Manny to marry Albertine because of his neurotic, irrational, and self-destructive desire to "control", not because he wanted to get papers.
Still, I don't want to deny the singularity of either Naz or Resh's reading experience. In a sense, the law "just changing" in a few paragraphs feels unjust and almost flippant - but, for me, that's truth. That's exactly how it feels to many in the undocumented population. Tomorrow, the US Congress "could" (very theoretical) pass an amnesty bill - or a Judge could find in favor of Obama's DAPA executive order - and suddenly, to a person like Manny, it'd feel like the sky had opened.
In a material sense, laws are just blots of ink on paper. They are rewritten, torn up, and changed daily.
Lastly, I am an admitted fan of irony, and, yes, Manny getting papers in the US to then move to Mexico for a lucrative job opportunity was also an irresistible sub story arc. Think of it as a "Chinga tu patria", even though I love both the US and Mexico - despite their particular flaws- and see no conflict between them.
