We write together, me and my man. The way we’ve worked so far, he writes the first draft, the bones of the novel, and I come back behind and fill in the flesh, bring it new life. It’s kinda the way Banky and Holden create comic books together in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. Holden does the initial drawings and Banky gives them color and life, ink as life blood. I could be ridiculed for being a “tracer,” but I don’t think of it that way.

In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Ruth Young is a ghost writer. This is a different concept of collaborative writing. Ruth takes another person’s stories and ideas and puts them in words, infusing them with a spirit, making them live. The name “ghost writer” would have you think she’s like a poltergeist moving furniture and type in the night, while her mother thinks it means she talks to the spirits, for such is her experience in life.

Again, we’re teetering between East and West, and throughout this novel, the western world Ruth lives in seems but a skeleton of a life comparing to the richness of the eastern world where her mother came from. In Ruth’s skeletal blindness she reduces her mother’s rich spiritual past to mere superstition and delusion. But all she has to do is blow on the bones, and they come to life around her.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Asia, magical realism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.