For this week’s Wayback Wednesday post, we’re going back to 2003, the year I wrote a “fan favorite” and one of my personal favorites as well… Broken!
We’re now up to the era in which I started writing novels that took longer than a year to write, meaning I also wrote fewer stories per year, so this blog will actually be a two-parter. In Part 1, I’ll talk about the origins of Broken. Part 2 will be more about the impact of Broken.
I should also warn you that the reason I’ve been hiding the rest of these blogs under a “Continue reading” link is not just because they’re long, but because they do contain spoilers for the stories. Keep that in mind for the ones you haven’t read. If you plan on reading one in the future and don’t want anything spoiled, don’t click. On the other hand, if you’ve always scrolled past a particular story because you weren’t sure if it was something you’d want to read or not, you can click and read the “Straightforward synopsis.” I purposely write pretty vague synopses for my stories so as not to give too much away about the plot, but these versions are meant to get right to the point of what the story’s really about.
Case in point…
Title: Broken
Written: January 2003 – March 2004
Straightforward synopsis: Nick’s life is changed forever when he gets bone cancer, loses a leg, and falls in love with a fellow cancer patient.
The story behind the story:
I’ve always had a thing for cancer stories. I know I’ve mentioned Lurlene McDaniel in previous posts, and that’s because she was my favorite author from the time I read my first book by her at the tender age of ten until I discovered Harry Potter at age sixteen. Since then, J.K. Rowling has been my queen, but I will always love good ol’ Lurlene. Though she writes about more than cancer, three of my favorite books by her – Don’t Die, My Love, Six Months to Live, and The Legacy: Making Wishes Come True – all happen to be cancer stories.
I don’t remember reading or even coming across many cancer stories in the BSB fandom – certainly not any really good or memorable ones – until I discovered the Swollen Issues series by Jenna and Swenglish. “Rediscovered” is a better word because I had actually read at least part of the first Swollen Issues story, but stopped because I guess I got bored or something – Nick was only sick with the mumps, and that was not dramatic enough for me. But later I found out that (spoiler alert) Nick did not actually have mumps at all; he had cancer! I don’t remember if someone told me this and then I went back to read the rest, or if I discovered it on my own. It doesn’t matter. But somehow, as Swollen Issues II was still being written, I started reading it after finishing the first story, and I got HOOKED! Jenna had been one of my favorite fanfic authors for a few years already, and many of her stories were addicting, but Swollen Issues was something else. It wasn’t cheesy and chock full of misinformation like a lot of other fanfic medical dramas written by teenyboppers who have no idea what they’re talking about. (Guilty as charged.) Jenna was a nurse, so she did know her medical stuff, and as a result, her story was super detailed and seemed pretty realistic, for the most part. I loved it. Not only did I love the storyline, but I loved Nick’s character, too. He just couldn’t catch a break, poor guy, and I felt so bad for him. In real life, Nick used to be my least favorite Backstreet Boy, but he had started to grow on me, especially around the time Now or Never came out, which is when Swollen Issues II was being written. My newfound love for real life Nick, combined with my infatuation with Swollen Issues, inspired me to try my hand at writing a Nick cancer story of my own.
I didn’t set out to blatantly copy Swollen Issues; I just wanted to write something that would make readers feel the same way I felt when I was reading that story. I had already written a cancer story early in my fanfic career called Don’t Wanna Lose You Now, but I knew I needed to seriously step up my game if I was to accomplish this goal and write something even close to Swollen Issues calibre. It was a lot to live up to, but coming off Code Blue, I was feeling more confident in my medical research abilities, so I went for it.
In Swollen Issues, Nick had a type of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is also what I had given Brian in Don’t Wanna Lose You Now three years before, so I definitely wanted to go with a different type of cancer for my new story. I still remember sitting on my bed, making a list of different types of cancer and weighing the pros and cons from a storytelling prospective. I was looking for one that caused dramatic symptoms and offered compelling treatment options that I could use to torture Nick. (What a strange hobby I have.) As I added bone cancer to my list, I thought, “Ooh, he could lose a limb if he had bone cancer.” The idea of amputation both horrified and fascinated me, but once it entered my head, I couldn’t get rid of it, so… bone cancer it was!
I was concerned that readers would think I was copying Swollen Issues or write Broken off as just another cancer story, so I tried to disguise it as anything but that at first. Romance was really popular at that time, so I thought I’d lure readers in by making it look like it was going to be a romance while slowly revealing Nick’s symptoms and then spring the cancer diagnosis on them. This was a bad idea. The object of Nick’s affection at the beginning of the story was an unlikable stripper who ended up cheating on him with Justin Timberlake, which was silly and only ended up dragging things out way too long before the cancer diagnosis came into play. I think I actually got more readers once people realized what the story was really going to be about. Through word of mouth, more and more people like me, who may have initially scrolled past the story, thinking it was just another Nick romance, came back to it and gave it a try. Turns out I’m not the only one who loves a good Nick cancer story.
Broken does have a romantic subplot, which was also inspired by Swollen Issues in a roundabout way. In Swollen Issues II, there was a female character introduced partway through the story, a fellow cancer patient who Nick was friends with for awhile. As a reader, I immediately groaned when she came into the story because I assumed she was there to be a love interest for Nick, and I didn’t want to see it go in that direction – I was happy with the story the way it was, all drama and no romance. I’m not sure why I was so against the idea of romance, as almost all of the Lurlene McDaniel books I had loved through my adolescence contained it to some degree, but for some reason, I just really didn’t want to see that in Swollen Issues. The relationship between Nick and the girl never turned romantic in that story, though, and eventually she went away, or maybe she died – I actually don’t remember. Clearly, she didn’t become that important.
Ironically, when I was planning for Broken, I decided a romantic subplot involving a female fellow cancer patient would be fun to write, and so I came up with the character of Claire.
I have a little notebook I started keeping in the nightstand next to my bed at this time to jot ideas down in when they occurred to me, and the first page of this notebook has my initial thoughts about Claire:
Claire Ryan – light red hair, green or blue eyes
– outgoing
– optimist
– quirky sense of humor
– has breakdown – keeps up brave face for Nick
– NOT CHEESY OR INSPIRATIONAL!!!
With Claire, I wanted to avoid the cliches I’d read in Lurlene McDaniel books and other BSB fanfics: the cheesy, inspirational, Bible-quoting, strong-and-brave-til-the-bitter-end cancer patient and the perfect Mary Sue that all the Boys instantly fall in love with. I wanted Claire to be likable, but also believable, an Anti-Sue. She was the first original female character I ever wrote who was actually well-rounded without being based on someone I knew or an idealized version of myself. I gave her some attributes I admire in other women – an outgoing personality, a good sense of humor, and of course, red hair (I’ve always wished I was ginger!) – but besides our shared love of rock music, pizza, and ice cream, Claire really doesn’t have much in common with me.
It was important to me that Claire and Nick became close friends before they went any further than that. I didn’t want there to be any sexual tension or sparks early on, so I purposely made her somewhat unattractive in the beginning (partly because of the side effects of her cancer treatment), but tried to infuse her with personality so Nick could befriend her without any thoughts of romance. Her name, Claire, was meant to reflect her “Plain Jane” appearance – it was simple and classic, not a trendy name at the time, and not a name I had ever particularly cared for, though it grew on me over the course of writing this story. Of course, I also planned for Claire to have her “butterfly moment” later on in the story, in which Nick sees her months after she’s finished treatment, when her hair has grown back and her puffy face has thinned down, and finds her pretty for the first time. As much as I hate the idea of appearance being the basis for a budding romance, let’s be realistic here: physical attraction is important, and a guy who could have just about any woman he wants is probably not going to go for a girl he doesn’t find even remotely attractive. Case in point: the Backstreet Boys’ real wives may have lovely personalities, but none of them are ugly. So yes, Claire got physically cuter in the second half of the story so Nick could realize he had romantic feelings for her, too, because Nick was a twenty-three-year-old guy.
It was interesting trying to write a twenty-three-year-old guy dealing with cancer as an eighteen-year-old girl who didn’t have much real life experience with either cancer or boys to draw on. My portrayal of Nick in this story very much reflects the melodramatic teenage girl I was at the time; “Broken Nick” totally thinks and acts like a melodramatic teenage girl. He’s moody, angsty, and he cries a lot. Like a lot of girls that age, I was self-conscious and overly concerned with my appearance and what other people thought about me, and I put all of those insecurities into Nick. It was fun to take him as the hot, cocky celebrity who was “on top of the world” at the beginning of the story, knock him down to rock bottom with a cancer diagnosis, break him with the amputation of his leg, and then slowly build him back up again, albeit as a changed man. I loved writing his emotional struggles and insecurities because, even though I had never been through any of the things I put him through, I felt like I could relate to those parts of him in some way.
At the time I wrote Broken, I had killed Backstreet Boys before in stories, but I had never permanently maimed one. Chopping off Nick’s leg doesn’t seem like a big deal to me now, especially coming off the novel I just finished, but it was an extreme choice back then. In fact, when I first thought of the idea of amputation, it was definitely intriguing to me, but I didn’t know if I had the guts to go through with it. This was the first time I learned the lesson “If it scares you, you should write it,” which has served me well over the years.
One of the reasons amputation scared me so much was because not only did I not have any firsthand experience with it, but I also didn’t have any books or fanfics that had already done it to use as inspiration, meaning I knew I would have to do 100% of the research on my own. In the past, I had been able to rely on the medical knowledge I’d acquired mostly from watching ER and reading Lurlene McDaniel to at least get me started, and I would either look up or make up what I didn’t know. But now I was in uncharted waters – I had never read or watched anything that dealt with amputation on the level at which I wanted to write it. There were a couple of minor characters in Lurlene McDaniel books who had lost a leg to bone cancer, but both were introduced to the main character way after the fact; neither was dealing with the actual amputation and recovery process during the story like Nick was going to. My only source of inspiration was ER, which was in its ninth season the year I started Broken; Dr. Romano had lost his arm in a freak helicopter accident in the season premiere the previous fall, had it reattached, and eventually come to realize it needed to be removed because it was never going to recover. While this storyline may have subconsciously inspired the amputation portion of my idea for Broken and was certainly helpful with some of the emotional aspects of what Nick would be going through, it wasn’t the same and wasn’t enough to help me actually write it. I had to go outside my comfort zone, broaden my horizons, and do some really intensive internet research.
Remember, this was 2003. Google existed, but not as a verb, as in “I’m going to google that” – at least not in my vocabulary. Besides, I was more of an AltaVista girl back then anyway. I wouldn’t discover Wikipedia for a few years yet. There was no YouTube. We had finally upgraded from dial-up internet to high-speed internet at home, but I had still been using my Encarta ‘95 encyclopedia CD-Rom as a resource to look things up as recently as the beginning of this story. It was a much different time, and online research was not as easy then as it is now, at least not for me. I was still learning how to do it.
But learn, I did. Research, I did. Amputate Nick’s leg, I did! I remember being really worried that I would hit a wall shortly after the amputation and regret doing it, but I never did. In my mind, that aspect of the story is absolutely what makes Broken what it has become. Part 3 of the novel, the “post-choppage” portion, is by far my favorite part of the story, and it’s also the best-written part. But more on that next week.
I’ll be back next Wednesday with Part 2 of this blog, in which I will write more about the lessons learned and legacy of Broken.