Anthony Dobranski Online

Tag: inspiration

  • A Valentine to The Master and Margarita

    A Valentine to The Master and Margarita

    In this season of love, I’m posting Valentines to inspirations for my own novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the fourth – find the others here.

    My previous love notes were to works or creators that I followed for years. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita happened to come into my life at the right time — I found it on a bookstore table, and bought it on a whim.

    Though I use books to find styles and moods, I tend to avoid books with similar stories to ones I am currently writing, and deals with demons and thwarted love come awfully close. So I say whim, but I think inspiration. Without this great novel and its many lessons, The Demon in Business Class would be a different and worse book, if finished book at all.

    The Master and Margarita is a hallucinatory horror satire, a story about capricious, florid evil challenging methodical, dull evil. The Devil wants to host a great party in Soviet Moscow, but while he can bully past greedy functionaries — or behead them, or teleport them to Yalta — he needs a willing human hostess. The desperate Margarita searches for her writer lover, crushed by the official rejection of his beautiful novel about the last days of Jesus’s earthly life. A deal is struck, one that leads through horror toward unearthly peace.

    The Russian people now treasure the novel, both as a story and as one of the few surviving honest descriptions of life under Stalin. Despite demons, talking cats, magic flights over Moscow, and a grand ball by turns miraculous and ghastly, the novel also captures the injustice of ordinary life in that fear-soaked time.

    In many ways, my novel opposes Bulgakov’s. My demon is an evanescence, not the intelligence in charge. Margarita embraces the demonic to restore her lover; my characters escape the fantastic for each other. Bulgakov ends with hope and love. My characters — well, read for yourself.

    It’s instead that honesty and ordinariness that inspired me — really that solved my worst problem — and took The Demon in Business Class to greater breadth and depth.

    My earliest concepts of Demon focused on the love story, the characters’ unsuitability for it, and what they had to go through to keep it. To highlight the opposition, I imagined a world with modern technology but also overt and obvious magic. I knew the fantastic had to be there, but I couldn’t say why, and that ignorance was in my way. I wrote 400 pages of novel and felt painted into a corner.

    Bulgakov showed me my initial error. I had chosen to flavor my book in my time and with my brilliant experience, which showed me a world where fast transportation and instant communication had brought ancient cultures right up against each other, without time and understanding to moderate. I saw nations in flux, saw fusion and friction, all the while working alongside smart, ambitious people.

    Having been offered all that, I was making it an aside, in favor of my own engineered fantasies, for stakes that needed over-explaining in a bubble. Many books are their own place, with no referent to our world, but I was trying to make my own small place out of a big place.

    Fantasy need not be a rejection of the world as it is, because most fantasies, and horrors, form inside us, our own processing of our hopes and fears through the lens of our culture. I had a rich world to work with — the only real world, pace ecstatics and Philip K Dick. All I had to do was… be in it, in both its facts and its dreams.

    So I followed Bulgakov’s example. My narrator went to the background, my plot got trimmed. My characters grew sharper, less erudite, feeling not talking. The magic became secret, costly, and hard-won — and usually inconvenient. It made for a better novel, if a more exacting one to write.

    It also made for a novel that knew what it wanted to say, about where the world was going and how we might accept, reject, or stand back from it. Already the real few years since Demon‘s setting have shown it got things right.

    Despite demons, star-crossed lovers, hidden conspiracies, immortals, and a single night of miracles and horror, maybe The Demon in Business Class will also read, over time, like an honest description of this period in human life.

    I wonder if readers will feel as lucky not to live in my time as I do not to live in Margarita’s.

  • A Valentine to A Scanner Darkly

    A Valentine to A Scanner Darkly

    In this season of love, I’m posting Valentines to artistic inspirations for my own novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the third – find the others here.

    I spent my teenage years in search of Philip K. Dick. I hunted down every yellowing paperback of his I could find, in used bookstores across the United States and in other countries too. I bought and read Dick novels in the Latin Quarter, on the Spanish Steps, and in many low-end shopping malls. He was my lodestar for a decade, in the decade before his critical renaissance.

    What most fascinates me in Dick’s work isn’t exactly what drives most discussions of his work: the sense of unreality he is justly famous for exploring, his Gnostic sense that the world we see is a veil over a deeper truth, be it better or worse.

    I liked that, of course, because it was true. It was obvious. What I craved from him was not that knowledge, but what to do with it. I sought examples of humanity in the face of that. I wanted to explore the terror of cosmic befuddlement, to see how to survive it, and how sometimes one didn’t.

    This is why my inspiration and my love goes to A Scanner Darkly, the rawest, cruelest, bleakest, least heroic of all his novels — the only one that ever made me cry, and still does.

    Despite it being the only Dick novel faithfully made into a movie, it seems the least beloved. Science-fiction fans like his earlier work, where there are spaceships and androids, virtual realities and powerful psychopaths. Mystics like his later work, of religious ecstasy and passionate conviction. A Scanner Darkly is the grim, tedious nadir between them, with a main character who is neither The Matrix‘s Neo nor St. Paul: Bob Arctor, a deep-cover narcotics policeman between losers and literally faceless (thanks to special suits) desk-duty bosses, while his addiction to the drug he’s supposed to trace slowly destroys him.

    The Demon in Business Class shares much with A Scanner Darkly‘s story. There are answers to hidden questions, and characters discover they’ve been serving goals they would have refused, whatever their worth to the greater good. And of course there’s a demon, more literal but as effective as addiction at dragging them down while promising not to.

    Zarabeth and Gabriel are too adept at conventional reality to bottom out in the way Bob Arctor does. If Dick had written my novel, Bill Thorn would have been his Arctor, failing tragically to measure up to a goal he chose out of fear.

    Demon however is a love story, something Dick never wrote (save one for a shoe). Dick never allowed his characters a companion in their grief. Zarabeth and Gabriel have each other, and the willingness to recognize the value in their bond by letting it change them.

    The closest I could get to Dick’s despair was to give Zarabeth and Gabriel the understanding that their love meant giving up something their love could never fully replace. At least it’s a choice.

    Without spoilers, my lovers have challenges ahead. Maybe this was another nod to Dick’s reality — the thing, as the saying goes, that doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

    I said earlier that Zarabeth and Gabriel don’t bottom out the way Bob Arctor does. Maybe better to say, haven’t yet. There’s still time.

    *Maybe I should say, the least beloved of his major works. Dick wrote nearly fifty novels, but fewer than a dozen get Library of America editions. A Scanner Darkly is, I think, the least loved of those.

  • A Valentine to The Alexandria Quartet

    A Valentine to The Alexandria Quartet

    In this season of love, I’m posting Valentines to inspirations for my own novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the second – see them all here.

    It’s impossible to say only one literary work taught me how to create characters, how to make them as deep and maddening as real people, how set them against each other, how to set them in their time and place.

    If I could only pick one, it would be Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

    It’s not an easy work to explain in this short space: a magnificent, sprawling, story of destructive passions that hide, and enable, political intrigue. Told told over four gorgeously slumming novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea), it’s set in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1930s, at the onset of both World War II and Middle-Eastern revolution.

    It’s also not an easy work: elliptical, philosophical, experimental, inconclusive, and rooted in single viewpoints for such long stretches that it really takes until the third novel to see just how wrongly some characters in the first novel misunderstood their situations.

    In flipping through its pages, both in my hands* and in memory, I wonder anxiously (in Harold Bloom’s sense) at its many influences on my characters — of which I was mostly unconscious during my writing, thank goodness. Zarabeth is like Justine in her sensuous character, childhood trauma, and facility with deception, but Zarabeth is an overt trouble magnet, and would bristle at being so pampered and indirect — as, in the end, does Justine herself. Gabriel has both Darley’s callowness and Mountolive’s optimism to mislead him, but happily Gabriel is more violent and less deceptive than either. Walt is wealthy like Nessim, and like him, gets in Missy a wife who, also like Justine, sets his agenda and will never stick to his bed alone.

    If those were the similarities I didn’t intend for The Demon in Business Class, here’s three I did:

    It’s cosmopolitan. The Quartet only has only one setting, unlike Demon‘s dozen, but empires come to Alexandria, and have for two millennia. Few books give one such a sense of meeting our whole world and its history in one place, which is likely why I so responded to it while reading it during my own wanderings across the in-flight map.

    It’s personal. I led this homage by talking about characters, and the Quartet keeps the focus on them, even while so slowly revealing an actual plot that won’t leave anyone unscathed — but there’s no saving or destroying the world here. The story stays rooted in the characters’ lives.

    It’s about the end of youth. I almost wrote that it was about growing up, but growing up is something we do in our teens. 1st Corinthians famously notes the putting away of childish things, but when we first close the toychest, the adult world is new to us. The Alexandria Quartet is about when we start to see just how old and big the world really is, and how little of its time we’ll actually get to take part in.

    In Mountolive, the Quartet‘s third novel, the novelist Pursewarden bitterly calls Jesus an ironist for blessing the meek, given what the rest of us do to their inheritance. In that at least, Demon‘s characters differ in their imitation of Christ, learning by example not statements. As Walt says to Gabriel, “You’re what, thirty? Jesus died at thirty-three. Get cracking.”

    *I have the 1961 Dutton paperback edition, pictured, though not the box. It’s a lovely set I sought across many used bookstores, and the last literary novel I read in mass-market format.

  • A Valentine to Farscape

    A Valentine to Farscape

    In this season of love, every day this week I’m posting Valentines for the artistic inspirations for my novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the first – see them all here.

    In my profile on the Science Fiction Writers of America discussion boards, I declare that, between Star Wars and Star Trek, I choose Farscape.

    This ridiculous, lurid, gorgeous, impossible show captivated me from my first stumbling on it near the end of Season 2 — and why not? Unapologetic and inspired melodrama, fantastic set designs, astonishing alien makeup, and a cheeky reworking of every other sci-fi show’s story clichés through absurdity and into flight, all delivered with hyperkinetic brio in Australian accents.

    My inspiration, however, was the central romance between John, an Earth astronaut “shot through a wormhole” across the galaxy, and Aeryn, a fighter pilot exiled from a military dictatorship for her failure to capture John.

    Messy and explosive by itself, the romance worked like that in a Greek myth, to give the show its skeleton — or maybe its gravity, as John and Aeryn’s unstably circling each other became a binary that drew the other story elements in. It showed me that my own early idea of an earthy romance between opposites in a fantastic setting really could work — especially if it first made life harder for both of them, not easier.

    Farscape‘s fingerprints are all over my novel. Like John and Aeryn, Zarabeth and Gabriel had to be uprooted from what they know, and forced to think on their feet with only themselves to rely on. Zarabeth has John’s part: dogged, confident and somehow making it work despite hard knocks, slashing Occam’s Razor all the while. Gabriel has Aeryn’s part: occasionally able to rely on his experience, but mostly learning a new way to be — trusting. Both find each other in part because they’re the only ones like each other, a match that is correct but also feels desperate, which leads to doubt.

    I also have to admit that Zarabeth’s demon isn’t too far off the translator microbes colonizing John’s brainstem.*

    Twenty years since its airing, I see I’m not the only one to find my way by Farscape‘s light. The casinos, trading posts, and treacherous landscapes of the last season of Star Trek: Discovery looked very much like Farscape’s “uncharted territories.” The Mandalorian took criminal jobs to make ends meet, all the while guarding a power as great as John’s “wormhole knowledge,” and as sought after by another empire.

    Maybe I’m not the only one choosing Farscape.

    * Of course it’s all babelfishes, but we try.

  • How writers read (sometimes)

    How writers read (sometimes)

    After a month focused on marketing and promotion, I am back to writing my maddening current novel, a science fiction set in a future war-ravaged Budapest.

    It’s maddening because I set myself goals that are hard to square. For one, or one pair in opposition, I want to give the book a pre-modern European patina, but I also want to keep it short and pointed — the formal elegance without the pastiche.

    I clearly needed a little inspiration. I’m intuitive when it comes to getting what I need. Like Philip K Dick’s Golden Man, I have no forethought; only an inadvertent method-acting, the way that some travelers unthinkingly restyle their hair to local norms. I really don’t know myself, at all. Existential panic notwithstanding, it’s a huge timesaver.

    Anyway. Without wanting to or planning to, I’ve lately been drawn to books and audiobooks that feel pre-modern.

    I started with Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, a heady book with lovely imagery, but I didn’t go far in it. I love VanderMeer’s work but I wasn’t reading to read. My artistic needs were guiding me, and Ambergris‘s thickly-layered lavishness was going to bust open my style if I lingered too long.

    A conversation led me to the audiobook of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, a novel told from the diaries of two feuding late 19th-Century British magicians.* This might seem the perfect inspiration — my book is also a diary, and its writer discovers a secret — but honestly it wasn’t planned. Despite the interesting excerpt in the bookstore, I actually bought the audiobook wondering why the hell I was doing it; I had work to do and other books in my pile. Eventually I understood.

    The end of my intuitive tour was a very fine audiobook of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I haven’t read since adolescence, but know well in memory. By now you’ve probably caught my drift — a diary of a trip to a remote castle in Hungary! the discovery of a dark secret! the need to find hidden resolve! Just the hairstyle I needed! I won’t finish it, now that the sailing ship Demeter* has brought its vampire passenger to England. I have work to do, and honestly, Lucy Westenra is annoying.

    It’s terrible to use books this way. If VanderMeer or Priest ever read this, they’ll likely feel like Salieri meeting Mozart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus — bitter and angry at some punk saying “a funny little tune, but it yielded some good things.”

    Alas, I’m just a writer. And, you know, it is what it is. It has always been.

    Long ago in Tokyo, a colleague and friend once told me about a novel she enjoyed,*** about the friendship between a shogun and an aesthete. The scene she retold sticks with me, and I think of it often:

    The shogun gets word that the aesthete has grown a magnificent garden of gorgeous chrysanthemums. The shogun sends word that he wants to see it. When he arrives, he finds all of the flowers have been hacked down. Furious, he marches into the house — and there finds one chrysanthemum, the best chrysanthemum of the whole garden, in a vase.

    Life is cruel but it’s got nothing on art. Cruelest of all, is need.

    *Priest wrote a short book slagging Harlan Ellison for sitting on The Last Dangerous Visions for what was then twenty years (and now will be forty-five when J. Michael Straczynski finally issues it this year). Then, Priest wrote a book about a destructive feud. I wonder if he picked a fight for his own inspiration…

    **My book’s protagonist is named Dömötör, the Hungarian version of the name. This happens to me all the time. Any writer who is not a mystic makes a fetish of empiricism.

    ***Alas the novel had not been translated, I don’t know Japanese, and I have forgotten the title and author. Also forgotten, where I put my own diary of my trips to Japan.

  • The first idea

    The idea for The Demon in Business Class came at a weird time. I had a good job, opening overseas offices for the internet company AOL. I had just finished a six-month stint in Tokyo, a life-changing and confidence-building experience. I was waiting to start my upcoming assignment in Sydney — waiting far longer than expected. After the energy and focus of startup life overseas, I suddenly had very little to do at what had become an enormous company. I felt like a snowboard in summer.

    I was still processing a bad relationship from the year before — or, really, back to processing it, cleaning out the emotional junk I had ignored while working in Japan. Many friends had settled down while I was away, so social life was hard to find. I ate a lot of dinners, at home and in restaurants, alone with a book.

    My dear friend Erik Bennett was working as an actor in Los Angeles. He and I had created a short-lived arts magazine some years before, and he was my only connection to my early creative dreams. At one point Erik had said, lightheartedly but with a sense of real possibility, that I should ditch my job and come make movies with him. As the boredom of waiting had grown, it was on my mind.

    One evening I wrote him a letter — on AOL Japan stationery, with a fountain pen given to me by a London colleague.

    Indie movies sounded fun, I wrote, but I was in a navel-gazing place. I could write about corporate life, but while I enjoyed it from the inside, it wasn’t exciting from the outside. I’d probably need some big plot, maybe something archetypal and fantastic. Like, if Good and Evil were rival companies, and two people who were on either side of that somehow fell in love.

    The great juggler Michael Moschen once talked about how he might pick up an object, like a bent piece of rebar, and feel a sickening in his stomach. He knew from that single heft he could do something with it, and that it would take him a year of hard work.

    I understood that feeling, then.

    It took me more than a decade. I did go to Sydney, and after that to Hong Kong. When I stopped living in hotels, life was waiting for me: my mother’s illness and death, meeting my wife, starting a family. I wrote some screenplay scenes, but I liked fiction better — even though I had to relearn how to write it, and learn more. I wrote 400 pages, tossed them out, and started over.

    What surprises me still is how I didn’t let go of this basic idea, or it of me. Now I have new books in me, but this is the book that made me a writer.

    Welcome aboard. Fasten your seat belt. Bon Voyage!

  • Quarantine Inspiration on The Inner Loop Radio!

    The Inner Loop is a Washington DC live-reading group that hosts fiction, non-fiction and poetry writers at monthly events. I’ve been pleased and proud to read work there twice.

    They also run a terrific podcast on all aspects of writing. This week I’m part of their Qurantine Inspiration Series, with my own 12-minute creative stimulus – motivation, tips, a writing prompt, and a super-short story with my new take on a legendary being.

    For more inspiration, subscribe to their podcast at: https://www.theinnerlooplit.org/radio