Editor’s Note 6/22/2020: At the time of the original posting, Speculative Chic was unaware that author Paul Krueger had harassed various people in the publishing industry. We do not condone harassment, and we stand with those people who’ve been harmed as a result of his actions. Speaking up is one of the bravest things they can do, and we thank them for doing so.
One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a new column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.
This week, we bring you Paul Krueger, who — in case you haven’t heard — is our featured Book Club author for April. We’re discussing his latest, Steel Crow Saga, at the end of the month. We thought it would be fun to sit down with Paul and learn more about what inspired our book club pick, so join us to learn more!
Like No One Ever Was
Falling in love with anime was like falling in love with punk rock.
In both cases, it was a whirlwind romance. They blew into my life, kicking down the door with enough power to make the rest of the room go down with it. And in both cases, I was left standing in the wreckage, staring out at the endless possibilities that had always been beyond the walls I hadn’t even realized I’d built.
I started out subsisting entirely on American cartoons: cheaply animated morality plays that always ended with a lesson learned before the show slammed its fist down on the reset button. But when I caught my first episode of Dragon Ball Z, its serialized storytelling enthralled me. Things didn’t magically revert to factory settings at the end of every episode. The world of the show changed to reflect Goku’s decisions, which meant Goku’s choices mattered.
It was very elemental storytelling, and now I know that DBZ was far from the most sophisticated expression of those elements. But at the time, it was giving me things American cartoons hadn’t, things I didn’t even know I’d wanted from stories. And once I had them, all I wanted was more.
As the ’90s and ’00s wore on and more anime washed ashore in the west, I found other things about anime to fall in love with. Cowboy Bebop taught me the profound power of leaving things unsaid, and sometimes undone. Gundam Wing showed me scope, scale, spectacle…and why the small people caught in its midst were what made it all matter. And from Pokémon, I got maybe the greatest gift, one American boys’ cartoons could never give me: a male hero who ran towards his feelings, not away from them. Who could cry without the narrative framing his tears as weakness. Who could ask his friends for help when he was in trouble instead of trying to go it alone, and be lauded by the story for showing true strength.
And it went beyond good male role models. When I hit my teens, I suddenly started to appreciate that I wasn’t like all of my white friends. I was Asian-American, and I was now old enough to be curious about sorting out whatever that meant. Lacking Asian friends, anime became a way for me to explore that side of myself. I wasn’t Japanese, but I found familiarity in the rice these cartoon characters ate, or the way they’d take their shoes off when they entered a building. I saw far more of myself in them than I did in the square-jawed stoics the American toy industry had lab-engineered to appeal to me.
My enjoyment of anime was a lonely thing. My friends weren’t into it at all, and I took their jokes about it as encouragement to keep my interest to myself. So I’d stay in on Saturday nights to catch my weekly hits of Inuyasha and Yu Yu Hakusho and Fullmetal Alchemist. And with each new series I saw, I kept quietly revising my understanding of what made a story great.
Yet, I resisted bringing anime influences into my own writing for the longest time. I wanted to write fantasy, and serious fantasy was full of messianic archetypes and monolithic evils for them to single-handedly thwart. They were tropes that flew in the face of all those stories I loved. And besides, if my friends didn’t like anime or take it seriously, how could I expect my potential future readers to? But there’s a funny thing that happens when you try to write something you’re not into:
You get bored.
Much as we authors like to romanticize this thing we do, writing is a tedious, lonely, meticulous, thankless process that leads to vexation as often as it does victory. You need to be writing about something that matters to you, or you’ll never be able to survive the slog that is the hard days. Eventually, I had to admit that I was making it harder for myself for no good reason at all. And in my boredom, I found myself wandering back to that explosive feeling I’d gotten every afternoon when I settled in after school to watch Toonami.
So I went back to basics. I imagined a world like the Asia my family had come from, and a world war like the one my family had survived. I made that world into a place where men could cry, women could be fierce, people could love as they pleased, and the greatest power a person could wield was the bond they forged with someone else.
Other details emerged: magic systems and cultures that all ran on differing understandings of human connection. Monster friends who fought each other alongside their human partners. Big, earnest speeches in the middle of raging battles. People with outrageously spiky hair, impossible clothes, and glasses that would flash dramatically when the sunlight hit them just so. And word by word, trope by trope, esoteric anime reference by esoteric anime reference, a story took shape.
My teen experiences with anime were lonely, but my adult ones have been anything but. Steel Crow Saga, my love letter to every lesson anime ever taught me, has found its audience among all the people who used to be weebs like me. Some of my fans (a phrase I never thought I’d get to type) have told me how happy they were to have a fantasy novel that reflected the unusual path they’d taken into the world of speculative fiction. Others (I have others??) have told me that the book has emboldened them to tell their own anime-inspired stories, when before they might’ve fallen into the same traps that I had. I try not to get too high on this. It’s nothing world-changing. We’re all just people trying to have some fun and tell good stories.
Yu Yu Hakusho
But on the other hand, anime finally let me make the kinds of connections and friendships that all my heroes had used to save the day. And I was able to do it not by strategically hiding bits of myself, but by revealing to the whole world what made my heart race and my eyes water.
It was my truth, in the key of three searing power chords.
Paul Krueger is the author of Steel Crow Saga and Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge. A Chicagoan by birth, he currently resides with his cat in Los Angeles. You can follow him on Twitter at @NotLikeFreddy.
Photo by Jeff J. Daniels
Want to talk about what inspired you as a writer, and/or your current release? Check out our guidelines and fill out the form here.
No Comments