::The Hotel Travel::

O b s e r v a t i o n s

I am not formally trained in writing, but have never felt that to be a disadvantage. I always felt I could write. Perhaps with a degree of arrogance, I thought I could write better than most.
More importantly, I felt I had something different to say.
My sneaking suspicion is creative writing cannot be taught. I think I would find it difficult to respect the process or the teacher.
The treadmill of daily journalism provided an apprenticeship of sorts. There are many fine journalists who are also fine writers but personally I generally found that the editors preferred a dumbed down writing trade. Journalism however was an estimable preparation for the essential mechanics of putting short, coherent descriptions together.
Reporting doesn't provide skills in forming plot or developing characters however.
These are skills I tried to teach myself through experimentation, observation and advice. It is a difficult task. Whether I have succeeded is up to the reader but for interest's sake, I have provided some of my working files including Issues and Rules, an iteration of my dynamic Roadmap and examples of various sketchpads.
This is not How to Become An Author in 10 Easy Steps . Rather it is a documentation of my muddled attempts to find character cohesion and narrative drive in what began as an unstructured first novel.
I suspect most authors write part-time. This is of course due to economic necessity. I have a wife and two young children and naturally they take precedence over anything else. It is my responsibility to provide for them. Any other attitude would be foolishness and worse.
As many established authors - both good and bad - rightly say discipline and routine are necessary attributes of the writing process. These habits are not a guarantees of success or quality but they do enable completion of work. This is no small thing.
Unfortunately I am not particularly disciplined. This is probably why The Hotel Travel took me more than 10 years to finish. But I did stick at it. I needed to write this book.
I am proud of the result.
By persisting with this objective, I gained two unforseen benefits. First, the writing was therapeutic and helped me with other challenges in my life. Second, I taught myself how to do it quicker next time. I am now half-way through my second book.
I tend to write late at night. Normally from 10 pm until two or three in the morning. I figure I'm a night person. Same as when I studied for my final exams. The problem now is that I have to wake up for a demanding day job.
Nevertheless there is something about writing when the house is quiet, my wife and kids are in bed, my music is blaring, there's a smoke in my Lombok dish and I type dementedly at this machine with gnarled fingers.
Characterisation is tough. Naturally you use observations of real people and disguise them by amalgating traits and idiosyncrasies of different individuals.
The flipside? It is an enjoyable part of the creative process to enhance or embellish characters in any way one finds fit. To do so, without losing the integrity of the character and the believability of their actions in difficult situations is probably the art of it all.
In the environments I describe, a lot of the guys swear a lot of the time. These include profanities that publishers are loathe to print. But this is the way it was. This is how people I describe spoke. To depict it any differently would be disingenuous.
At first I wanted to replicate dialogue sequences in this book with almost literal effect. I realised fairly quickly that approach would make the book virtually unreadable. The trick is to pare the conversations while retaining colour, idiom and truth - and acutally say something - and thus continue to engage the readers interest.
I edit continuously. My hard drive and CDs are littered with the ghosts of a dozen or more chapter iterations not to mention the sketches and roadmaps. I don't do this because I read it was the right thing to do although it would be nice to think so.
The truth is I can't help myself. The difficult part is to know when to stop and avoid falling into an abyss of self-correction. I'm still working on that last part.
If you ever contemplated the mountainous repetition of words and reading and editing at the onset of a writing project, no-one would ever write a book.
My mate, Stuart, reckons professional writers have an enormous advantage in that they normally employ their own professional editors who in effect become serial collaborators. He is dead right of course.
Stu is my reluctant editor but a pretty good one. He told me to never forget the importance of narrative and not to include any writing which doesn't advance the plotlines or develop the characters.
I wanted to do it differently. Have small departures and re-entries just like a real journey. In the end I realised Stu was right again however. Even these sorties and detours must progress the story in some way.
Still to kill off a scene or worse a chapter from the body of work is difficult if necessary. They are the children of our labour and we love them despite their handicaps.
Hopefully they are not dead, just in limbo, waiting for a future book.
Stu also advised to remember that the protagonist wasn't me. It actually became liberating when I ascribed actions, words and thoughts to Sean Dinan that I have never had the courage or madness to do, utter and think in my own life.
Titles are important. My first title was Lost in Asia: Love and Other Addictions . I also thought about calling it Taipei Hostel and Other Stories . The first seemed too unwieldly and the second too obscure. No-one knows where Taipei is until the Mainland threatens to invade.
I'm still not 100 % sure about the name, but The Hotel Travel has stuck and that says a lot about a person or a thing.
Numbers are important especially dates. I never thought so until I lived in the Republic of China. All the numbers in the book have meaning. If I wanted to finish a character off, I would associate a 4 with him.
If I wanted to finish him off badly it would be a Triple 4.
I love quotations. Which is why I put them at the start of each chapter. Also you can bounce your own ideas off what they say or describe.
I not a geek but I appreciate the benefits technology has brought. I have a ready editing machine, dictionary, research engine, fact finder and thesaurous at my fingertips.
It is self-evident that most published authors are semi-illiterate. That is because publishing houses generally print books by people who are already famous in another field (sportsmen, actors, politicians and the like), self-help books or pulp literature.
Writing is the least of it in their commercial view.
This situation doesn't particularly disturb me. The fact is the internet allows people like myself to distribute our creative product to a global audience at a reasonable cost. When you think about it, we are fortunate for the time we live in.
Besides I understand the logic of commercial drivers.
The Hotel Travel is set at a time when email and mobile phones were still relatively rare for the large majority people and certainly for the travellers I describe.
It is a totally different world now but email will never replace getting a lettter at the Poste Restante at the GPO in Bangkok after riding a riverboat along the River Chao Pra.
There is no solution to anyone's life despite our attempts otherwise. My philosophy is that it is the futile attempt to find understanding in our lives that has a certain dignity.
This includes the rejection of meaning.
I am not a religious person but I have always been attracted to others who are. Generally these are people who manage a pragmatic adaptation of their religion.
Tony Akbar strictly speaking is not a nom de plume. It is actually my second name.
As I say in my spiel, The Hotel Travel is a real establishment located in Chinatown . It is the Chinatown located in Kota , Jakarta . The venue is basically a bar and a brothel. I went there with a few friends for a send-off for and on the way there, a mate said the name in a funny kind of way. He elongated the vowels. The Hoe-Tell Trav-Vell . It sounded good and the play on words suited the substance of my unfinished manuscript. I kinda like it now.
There aren't a real lot of Asian male characters. There is Shadow and Grayson who are almost opposite ends of the spectrum. I hope they seem real. They are based on characteristics of real people I knew. The signal point however is that I describe what I saw through my own prism of a foreigner who largely associated with Western men and Taiwanese women which in itself is an interesting counterpoint.
There aren't a lot of women characters who aren't objects of desire in some way. The reason is pretty much the same as above I guess. It may not be politically correct but I wrote about what I knew and what interested me.
I did try hard to fully flesh out these women and thereby contrast their objectification with how they actually felt.
Most women who read my stories like them.
This surprises me.
I made a conscious effort to make my characters nobodies - albeit dysfunctional, peculiar nobodies.
My current book is on dysfunctional, peculiar celebrities!
Dysfunctionality is a more informative characterisation as it sharpens the description of the fears we all share and allows perhaps greater hope if one person succeeds in some small way.
More to the point, it is more interesting to write and read about than functionality.
I enjoy writing sex scenes. If anyone said they reminded him or her of Penthouse Forum I would be quite complimented.
I used to think that most things in life are about sex or sexual tension. I still think this is the case more than most people care to admit.
When writing about drug usage, I would sometimes play around with the writing style to try and formulate it in a manner reminiscent of the drug being consumed by the character. This is hard to do without stuffing it up.
I always wanted to write a torture scene and I am pretty happy with the one in Olympic Village. A friend told me it made him squirm.
There is a lot of sanctimonious crap about the integrity of art. The truth is I wrote to be read and I want to be read. It seems silly to approach it any differently.
Nevertheless I also wanted to write something original in an unusual way. This was counterintuitive to my first objective.
Reading should be fun. I find most books I read are turgid tracts of shit. Perhaps that's too harsh and probably puts me in a bad light but that's what I think.
The Hotel Travel started out as a collection of short stories. Then my agent, Fran, suggested it would be better as a novel -in terms of commercial appeal and creative endeavour. For both reasons, I made the transformation.
I don't consider this as a sell-out. The book is a much better read for it and it was a mighty effort to achieve.
Also each chapter still remains a story unto itself. So I figure I got the best out of both worlds.
Some of this writing is very old in the sense that I borrowed some phrases and descriptions from my adolescent attempts at poetry. Most of it was crap but there were a few lines I still liked so I used them in THT.
The early chapters including the opening chapter were done soon after I returned from my sojourn in Taiwan . I was broke and doing a crap job and living at my grandmothers home after she was transferred to a geriatric home with a bad hip.
All in all, it was a pretty good set-up. I had a Japanese girlfriend who took care of me and I would come home on the evening train and take off my cheap suit and sit at the dining table and plough away at my cheap Twinhead laptop like a madman. There was no plan or structure. I just wrote because I had to.
Later I gave the stories and then the novel structure. It's better to develop it from the start however.
After I got married, I began to write more consistently. I really think it was a function that I stopped going to bars regularly during the week.
I liked going to bars. Like most men I suppose I enjoyed talking shit and trying to get laid.
Writing should be provocative and evocative.
If you like the book that's good, if you find it disturbing, that's good too. If you don't care then I have failed.
Art should be minimalistic. This probably sounds pretentious. I tried to instil this approach in my writing. Short words, short sentences, brief descriptions, that type of thing. You can edit a chapter 10 times but you'll find a hundred ways to reduce it the next time.
On occasion, elaborations are necessary too.
I always feel stupid equating what I am trying to do to art. Who decides these fucking things anyway. There's no committee is there. Just the great unwashed public and the critics I guess. Personally I think the Da Vinci Code and any John Grisham novel sucks but I guess a few hundred million people disagree. That's ok. I still know I'm right.
There must be a lot of people who bought Phil Collins albums who wish they hadn't. What is more difficult to credit are those who don't regret the purchase!
In this context, I remember a mate at a football party pulling out a Kenny G album, taking it from the cover and frisbee-ing it into the swimming pool. That was a good critical statement.
I love sport and sporting analogies. There is an honesty and simplicity in sport that few other human endeavours achieve.
Persistence is everything. During my drafts, my hard-drive failed twice. I lost a lot of work the first time and some the second time. It hurt but you must try and learn and then get on with it.
In the end, the final editor needs to be you , the writer, so you need to become good at editing. Being good means being fairly ruthless.
Sometimes I daydream, someone will care enough about my work to ask me why I write. I will ponder the question and then say: "Because writing is about our fears and our efforts to understand those fears . " A normal shit quote.
But the real reason why people write is probably a multi-variate equation which is not so easily explained. The variables in the equation would include innate drivers of ego, creative urge, fear of mortality and others I don't even know.
Nobody has asked me yet so I asked myself.

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