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I recently felt forced to defend Ticket to Ride and it came out sounding snobbish and arrogant. If anyone felt put off, you have my apology. Having a popular blog can lead to all sorts of weirdness, like thinking you’re more than just another guy with a laptop. It’s not the first time I’ve taken myself a little too seriously. Perhaps Michael Stipe from REM said it best in the song World Leader Pretend:
This is my world
And I am world leader pretend
This is my life
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It’s high time I razed the walls
That I’ve constructed
And then there’s this from the U2 song Stand Up Comedy:
Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas
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It seems the greatest controversy among the readers of Ticket to Ride is the believability of the first chapter. Without giving away what it is exactly, (I don’t want to spoil the book for those who have yet to read it), I will say there is an interesting dichotomy between the two camps. And I must preface the following statement with a caveat: I mean no offense.
In speaking to, and discussing this topic with, those on both sides, I’ve discovered that most readers with college degrees find it very believable, no questions asked. Those who don’t find it believable, in general, have not furthered their education.
In addition to the blessing of being able to sleep in on Father’s Day, bestowed upon me by my son and, aside from the fact that he’s the best kid in the world, I, yesterday, was also given one of the best gifts a writer can receive. A reader of mine came into my place of employ, and told me that, not only had she enjoyed Ticket to Ride, but had just finished reading it for the second time and was now going home to enter into it for a third.
It’s moments like these that writers live, and write, for. Thank you Rebecca, you made my day, and my week for that matter. I may now have to enter into the daunting task of finishing the sequel. If for no other reason, but that readers like Rebecca will eventually tire of the first. What a wonderful dilemma. This will go along way in dispelling that terrible writer’s disease called doubt. (Please see “When the Amazing Happens” for more about Rebecca).
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When writing a story the five most important questions to consider are Who, What, Where, When and Why. And while I feel quite comfortable that I covered these questions, it seems many are getting “hung up” on the When.
Yes, Ticket to Ride takes place in the 70s but that has really very little to do with the What and Why. I originally attempted to make this story “timeless,” meaning, I didn’t want to anchor it in a time period for fear of diminishing the overall impact of the story. It was only in about the middle of the process that I realized that perhaps only poetry can be offered up in this way. Without the When Ticket to Ride would have been quite vague and, for lack of a better word, foundation-less.
In Ticket to Ride there are countless themes and “lessons,” if you will, that are timeless and therefore meaningful to any generation. So as you’re reading please bear in mind that the simple elements of the story like people and names are interchangeable (President Carter, can be substituted with President Obama) but the overriding themes like longing for connection and understanding are timeless. In the 10,000 or so years of “civilization” men and woman have faced the same questions about life and living that we do today. We may have cell phones and televisions and DVD players but our souls and our very existence on this planet remain almost entirely unchanged with respect to our search for meaning.
About Livy: Turning Tin[sley] to Silver
A free copy of Ticket to Ride will be awarded to the first person to indentify the woman in the photo at left. She was the original inspiration for Livy.
My Perfect Woman: Livy Tinsley is actually an amalgamation of 4 or 5 women. The development of her character began with my using the name of a famous singer/songwriter (I’ll insert her name once the free copy of my book has been awarded) from the 70s for whom I had intense crush. The next woman whom I used as a model was a former English friend (for my purposes here I’ll call her Julia) of mine who was born and raised in East Finchley, London. I knew her for quite a while before I started work on Just Another Day. My infatuation with her first showed itself in a poem (“What Captain’s Verses,” {see below}) named for a collection of love poems by Pablo Neruda. The poem appears midway through Ticket to Ride just after Morgan finishes with his therapist. Soon after writing that poem I re-wrote the female lead in my novella Tradewinds with Julia in mind.
A few months later, after having decided to write a new novella based on Morgan Blake’s girlfriend and, after a fifteen minute meeting with “Julia”, I went home and wrote most of the first 4 chapters of JAD. I somehow finally connected with her in the way I believe I was meant to and the words just came pouring out. She had a playful spirit which made it easy to imagine her as a precocious child. Hence, the opening of the book begins on her 10th birthday. Apart from being physically beautiful, Julia was also a well-educated woman whom I suspect has a high IQ. She was a bit of a loner as well, and I, having been quite enamored of Paul McCartney’s song Another Day, imagined Julia to be my living example of the subject of that fantastic song.
Why “Morgan” and what am I trying to say through him?
My male lead, Morgan, was named for a young friend of a friend who died a drug-related death. Some of you in Southern California may have known him as Morgan Bonan. I wanted to honor his early passing by giving him new life in my book. His father, unlike mine, served in Vietnam, and served me in adding a bit more depth to the character of Morgan’s fictional father.
The original name for Morgan in Tradewinds was “Jonny,” named after an old friend of mine, Jonny Smith, an awkward sort, who I used as a model for the early drafts. Jonny Smith’s real father died at an early age of lung cancer and left Jonny, in my eyes, as a sad, rootless kid.
Tradewinds was named for the prevailing winds that blow daily in Hawaii and Just Another Day was named for a Paul McCartney song (Perhaps you can go to Youtube and listen to it) of the same name that served as the basis for the story of my female protagonist, Livy Tinsley . But, like I said earlier, we’ll get to Livy a little later on. First let me finish with the title. The title of the Tradewinds section has now been changed in the current form of the book to “Got to Get You Into My Life” (Are you confused yet?) The reason being that a significant part of Morgan’s journey has to do with finding an ideal partner.
Morgan’s last name comes from one of my favorite English poets, William Blake. The fact that Morgan’s father’s name is William is meant to cause the reader to bring some of that transcendental poet’s wisdom to the table. There is also a bit of irony here which I’m sure many of you will see. Morgan’s father is, at times, much like the real William Blake, but at other times, much like Adolf Hitler. It’s the military side of him that drives him to be dictatorial. And it’s this side that causes trouble between himself and his son.
I’ll get into Livy’s character next week.
Have a good weekend.
Morgan Blake and Livy Tinsley (more about Livy later), are subjected to the world around them. They make choices, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. But instead of accepting the deficiencies in the world around them, they strive to better themselves. When one of my characters does something wrong, they pay for their actions. For Morgan Blake, there is a very clear price to pay and he pays for the sins he has committed and for those visited upon him by his father. Though he makes some poor choices, he ultimately must, and chooses to, pay the proverbial piper. He must because he knows right from wrong and his soul will not allow him to rest until he faces himself and his demons.
Without proper parenting and a profound lack of traditional “rites of passage,” our youth, sadly and oftentimes, turns to the media for an identity. My characters are faced with these things but choose not to become victims of pop culture, or slaves to it. Morgan struggles to gain a sense of a moral compass that helps him find a way through. He’s not perfect. He makes mistakes. But he learns to strive to be better than his circumstances.
It should be noted that the following is a work in progress and is subject to change. As I acquaint you, and reacquaint myself, with my motives and hopes for this, my little book about life and living, I will, invariably, experience a hiccup or two, perhaps lose my way, and then, hopefully, find the path again. It won’t always be a straightforward and clear-cut ride. And it will actually be a bit messy at times. But isn’t life that way?
Let me start with the title. The Tradewinds (the original name of my story about Morgan Blake), when combined with Just Another Day, (my story of Livy Tinsley), became Ticket to Ride. Apart from it being sort of “catchy,” given that it’s also the title of a Beatle’s song, the title has direct meaning because the two protagonists meet on a train. Being that popular music has been an important part of popular culture for decades it was important for me to flavor the book with sprinklings of it throughout. Musical references also help to contextualize situations and occurrences throughout the book and lend a soundtrack that I feel is as important to this type of book as it is for a film that has young characters inhabiting a particular period in time. We all have, or have had, songs that point to particular periods in our lives. These songs provoke certain emotions, good or bad, and help to articulate our experiences. For many, shared music is the common ground through which we can express how we feel with others and it also helps to add resonance and depth to otherwise mundane experiences.
The Tradewinds began as a short story. It was meant to be just a brief conversation between two young men and their youthful observations of life. From there it grew as I would, over the course of several years, go back to the original manuscript and add small flourishes and sometimes whole chapters. I fancied myself a painter returning time and again to a canvas that represented his life’s work. At some point I decided to put Morgan through a sort of hell that I hoped he would get through and become a man. As he asks his friend Miko in the third chapter, “When do you know you’re a man?” When indeed does any young man know when he has passed into manhood? It’s not easily defined nowadays so I guess, in a way, I wanted to create for the male reader a sense of the modern rites of passage. I must say that Morgan’s experiences are not required for manhood. But given the time period and the prevalence of drugs and promiscuous sex in the 70s, they seem likely. And while I know these things are not confined to the 70s experience, that decade was the first in which these things became most prevalent. Right or wrong, I wanted to put Morgan through the rounds and have him come out the other side a better man for having realized he’d made some poor decisions and embracing what he found to be good about himself. I’d like for male and female readers alike to learn from the Morgan’s mistakes, though I know many of us have to make them for ourselves.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
(an Introduction to Ticket to Ride)
The Broad Strokes
by philip scott wikel
Growing up in the 70s, and having semi-hippies for parents, I heard a lot of talk about positive change. There was something in the air back then, what with the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement, Women’s Liberation, Vietnam War protests, the Back to Nature Movement, the “success” of Woodstock, the environmental movement, America’s Bicentennial, and the American Indian Movement; it seemed that everything was changing for the better. And while I realize many got lost in the “Me-decade” aspect of the 70s and the pseudo-sexual revolution, in the final analysis, and from a kid’s point-of-view, it felt as if the world was beginning anew and that the average American was embracing, and looking forward to, greater freedom and a world redefined. I was so naive, in the best possible sense of being so, that I believed the whole world was joining together to ensure that the future would be full of all that our nation’s forefathers had set out to create; a land of free-thinking, loving, and idealistic people. I believed in all of this, even in spite of Watergate, the Gas Crisis, the Kent State Massacre, the instability of the Middle East and the terrorism at the 1972 Olympics.
In Ticket to Ride I have attempted to sort through the good and the bad of the 70s and to create characters who embody both sides of that time; not unlike a Bicentennial coin with Independence Hall on one side and a forward looking George Washington, or a thoughtful JFK, on the other. While I realize this might be a grandiose claim, I see my two protagonists as representative of America. Livy Tinsley, for me, embodies the positive side; free-thinking, confident, passionate and driven. Morgan Blake and his father William on the other hand, represent mostly what I see as needing to be changed. While Morgan does share some of Livy’s characteristics, his dysfunctional upbringing leads him to a number of pitfalls. And it is only through his exorcism in psychotherapy that he is ready to break the negative cycle of his past, grab the proverbial mantle and forge ahead to a better version of himself. It is within this transformation that Morgan must decide what to keep that is good in himself and what must be left behind. The child in me smiles when I think of what he, and we, may still become.
I must say I make no claim at being a cultural anthropologist, or an iconoclast, for that matter. I’m just a guy who believes there is still in all of us a wish for greater goodness and a greater good for our fellow man or woman. Many still believe, as the Beatles once sung, “All We Need Is Love” to make a difference in America and in the world. While I believe love figures in on a grand scale, I also feel it’s going to take an awfully lot of internal reflection and soul-searching to bring us to a true understanding of today’s global community. It may only be through quiet introspection, and self reflection that we can all find in ourselves the best “us” possible. Again I must say, in Ticket to Ride I make no claim to have made a comprehensive study of the 70s and America but I would like to think that my characters represent, mostly figuratively, and have grasped literally, some of the broader aspects of the time.
The Nuts and Bolts
This part is a tough one because my manager in New York suggested I open the book with a chapter about Livy Tinsley, the female protagonist in Ticket to Ride. That’s all well and good, ladies first and all, but it seems to put off my potential male readers. The book opens with a heavy sense that this is a romance novel though the book itself is not specifically a romance.
All I can say to that is, hang in there guys, as Morgan Blake’s first chapter follows this prologue and in it we can get on with some serious “guy stuff.”
A comment that has been repeated a few times about the Prologue is that Livy is depicted as being too intelligent for a 10-year-old. To that I say, nonsense, the character was modeled after a real, nine-year-old girl from England, my ex-girlfriend’s little sister. While I believe her to be an exceptional person, and therefore a wonderful example of what a child can be, it may very well be that she is, sadly, not the norm for a girl her age.
Another comment has been made that my opening sentence is too long. For that, I offer no apology, but that I love the English language and enjoy using it to its fullest. Is this a brag? I say no. I believe we should all strive to use our language the best way we can. With the advent of email and social networks, English is suffering under the influence of abbreviations that cause English users to abbreviate themselves to the point of non-existence. “Use your words” say the preschool and kindergarten teachers and I agree. Express yourself to the fullest. Make your thoughts known. Use big sentences to do so and don’t worry that people are in too big a hurry to listen. You’ll find your audience eventually.
Ticket to Ride is, at times, a very self-consciously literary novel. For better or for worse and, as such, it is sometimes much more writerly than it is readerly. For some this will be a welcome challenge. For others, it may be a distraction. And still for others (probably most) it won’t matter.
The first 2 chapters of Ticket to Ride are consciously written in an “antiquated” style for three reasons. The first is to attempt to show a depth of the English language of the past, the second, to attempt to raise the commonplace to a loftier height, and thirdly, to attempt to point out the movement away from ornamental language and into the more utilitarian writing that is now demanded of writers by their readers.
So without further ado (mostly about nothing), here is my coming-of-age novel. You will ride along with Livy and Morgan as they wend their way through life and, though the period in which they live is the 70s, I believe their struggles are as timeless as the story of Odysseus.
Click here for: Ticket to Ride on Amazon
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