Chris Page: Writing Weed the novel

This is weird. The tv seems to be getting closer. It is creeping across the room during lapses in Warren’s concentration like an ingratiating dog or a stealthy predator. It also seems to be sprouting leaves.

The tv, blaring primary tones, is showing men stuffing wriggling, living sardines into their swimming trunks and chasing wailing bunny girl sirens around the studio while the audience howls, delighting in its own lobotomization.

Outside the flat, in the sodium-stained night, the city pulses about as low as it ever gets: the police sirens are distant moor wraiths, and the screeches and growls of the elevated railway might be the distracted ruminations of Hell’s teeth. And the tv just shuffled a bit closer.

So begins Weed, the first fully featured novel from long-term Kansai resident Chris Page. What follows is a tale that somehow manages to combine the frustrations of modern urban Mclife and blancmange abuse in the same story… a tale that is likely to feel sheepishly familiar yet feverishly alien… depending on your views about the uses of sticky puddings. But who better to explain it all than the man responsible:

Kyoto AD: Before reading, I assumed Weed would be the next great ex-pat novel. But the exact location is a little hazy – there are aspects of Japan but other elements seem to be borrowed from a very different reality. Likewise, the main character, Bob Weed, is reminiscent of various people, but he has… quirks most wouldn’t necessarily admit to. Just where and who is Bob Weed, and does life get better for him?

Chris Page: Robert D Weed is a young chap living in a generically huge city who is trying to fit in and do the right thing. He is a trainee salesman working for a mega corporation called Daikon AirCon. He is just trying to get by, to fit in, to do the right thing, but by the standards of Daikon AirCon and the world in general, he is useless.

As he traipses around the big city doing his sales thing, he is mugged, shot at, bullied, teased, traduced, falsely accused, persecuted, nearly drowned in a vat of blancmange, accidentally shipped to a war zone, etc., etc. The blurb on the cover asks whether it is Weed that is useless or the world that is barking mad, and since Weed himself is building a spaceship engine, a tachyon drive that travels backward in time, in his bathroom, I suspect he is pretty smart.

As to that hazy location, I have lived in London, New York and Osaka, and I have sort of blended them for my own mad story-telling reasons. It doesn’t really matter to the story which city Weed is living in, you can be drowned in blancmange anywhere. Does life get better for him? Does life get better for any of us, he asked sagely. Better read the story and find out.

Style-wise, Weed somehow reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X – if it had been written by the love child of Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs… under the influence of a strong dose of Terry Gilliam. Are there any authors, or other creative forces, you feel have particularly informed, inspired or otherwise influenced your writing?

You hit some key words there – I’m chuffed. I didn’t read any Coupland until I had finished Weed and I particularly like JPod and Microserfs. Coupland’s characters embrace the world of plastic and inauthenticity. Bob Weed just seems to be bullied by it.

Other than that: Gilliam – Brazil is perhaps my favourite film in the history of the universe. I think some of the thoughts and feelings it expresses have accidentally ended up in Weed. Sam Lowry and Bob Weed are definitely two people who have the mind and the imagination as a refuge in an inane world. Or perhaps the life of the imagination is more real than our life as salary-slaves and consumers. Discuss.

When I was living in London, I doted on Hunter Thompson to the point of carrying a bottle of vodka around with me to chug on the Tube or the bus. That gets some looks at 9:00 in the morning. And I definitely was under the impression that I was channeling Burroughs when I started the story. I went through umpteen-dozen rewrites of the opening pages to make them sound less slavish to the man, so I’m not so sure I’m pleased you spotted the influence. The sardines in the first scene were originally centipedes. I’m glad I changed that.

Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 were unconscious but huge influences. I don’t think those associations need any explanation. I always liked Kurt Vonnegut for believing in humanity’s humanity despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Douglas Adams for his humour and (often cruel) whimsy. Italo Calvino – though I’m damned if I’m going to attempt to explain his relevance here without a lot more drink inside me.

Aside from literary references, writing the story was motivated by a desire to wave two fingers in the air and declare ‘Bah!’ at all the silliness humans generate for themselves.

Weed is now available in paperback as well e-book format and is being carried by Amazon and other key distributors. Getting a book in print and having it listed by major outlets would have been beyond the abilities of most independent authors until quite recently. How have you managed this feat and what has been your approach to marketing Weed?

It has taken me more time and effort to publish this story and my collection of short stories than I am prepared to admit, but I could have achieved as much by sitting in the toilet with my finger up my nose for the same amount of time. I found that putting the stories out myself was very time consuming. It could have been a full time job. And the process was incredibly obtuse and infuriating. And I wasted a lot of time getting nowhere. Then suddenly Amazon made it a lot easier and here I am. I could have just waited.

Current technology ought to mean that this is an exciting and empowering time for independent publishing. However, it isn’t. Certain corporates, seeing traditional publishing models challenged, have moved to own the new independent sector. We’ve had several years of the big players – Amazon, Sony, Barnes and Noble, Apple – maneuvering against each other and trying out different models. The corporates seem to have won the day over the independents and among them Amazon has finished first.

The result is that publishing through Kindle or Amazon’s CreateSpace for POD is fairly straightforward. Many independents will celebrate this. It depends on whether you are comfortable with the means of production and distribution remaining in corporate hands just when you thought you were free of traditional publishing. I’m not, but there you go. I could write books on this – and then sell them through Amazon/Kindle.

So, I spent ages and ages trying to get the stuff out there while the men in suits were running around with the goal posts. Marketing is a pig and a half. No disrespect to pigs, who are more intelligent, likeable and useful than most established agents and publishers. Both publishing and marketing for yourself takes a lot of time – time that you could be using to write more stories.

If you write genre fiction and you have a clear sense of who your readers are, you can get your message across with Twitter – if you know how to use it. If you write non-genre or oddball stuff, you have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who might like to hear about it and how to reach them. Marketing is an ongoing task, but the key words are ‘blog’, ‘Twitter’, and ‘Ritalin’.

You are currently working on Un-Tall Tales, a new paperback collection of short stories. Even for experienced authors, writing stuff can be difficult, from coming up with an original idea all the way through to signing off on a story and moving onto the next one. Apart from “don’t do it,” do you have any sage advice for aspiring authors, based on your own experience?

The first thing to note about Un-Tall Tales is that it contains the same stories as the e-book Shorts, with just two stories added. I’ve been faffing about with the cover for a while and the damn thing still hasn’t got off my HD. Meanwhile: sage advice. Yeah, don’t do it, I want to say. The market is super-saturated already. Go and play pachinko or watch trains.

Signing off on stories, there’s no good news. I think because reading a well-told tale is such a pleasurable, absorbing experience, we are tempted to think that writing must be quite similar, but with the words going out rather than coming in. Unfortunately, no. It’s a palaver, and you need to spend an awful lot of time on it and give up a lot of things such as relationships with other human beings.

Aspiring fiction writers should make sure they have low maintenance companions such as those dangling skeleton things from anatomy school. You also have to be pigheaded or compulsive. The very productive writers – Asimov and David Mitchell come to mind – say they are addicted to the process. The rest of us have to fight our impulses to do something more sensible and realistic with our time.

Weed started off in a rush, then diminished to a dribble for several years and then suddenly came rushing again, and I was writing evenings and weekends, in lunch breaks, stealing time at work, writing on the train most mornings – on crowded trains where I had to stand, I would just about rest my notebook on the back of the salaryman in front of me or crouch in a corner among the feet. A bit silly really, but it got done.

And be under no illusions: the market, for that’s what it is, cares nothing for literary quality. It’s all about an angle. If you have any joy of the well-written story, you will be writing as you read, as a hobby. I could go on for days and years on this topic, but I think everyone has a different way of getting through the task and I think you just have to engage, just get on with it; put in the time and find what works for you. That’s the limit of my sagacity.

Prepping for work...

Profile: Chris Page  (chris-page.com, Facebook, Twitter)
Chris is a freelance writer living in Japan since 1989. He shares a semi-rural house in Nara with his loving family and long-suffering cat. From 2003 to 2009, Chris was chief editor of Kansai Scene and in April 2010 again returned as editor. In October 2011, he became the sole owner of this lustrous magazine.

His work has appeared on CBC TV News (Canada), in The Japan Times, Time Out Kyoto City Guide, The London News Review, Kansai Scene, Tokyo Scene, The Gloucester Citizen, Kansai Time Out and various non-commercial Web sites and publications.

In addition to Weed, Chris is the author of a collection of short stories titled, imaginatively, Shorts and is currently working on an expanded version called Un-Tall Tales. He is also an occasional artist, illustrator and cartoonist but these activities are very much sidetracked by his writing. Other interests include drinking.

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