Wayback Wednesday #5: 2004

This week’s Wayback Wednesday post takes us back to 2004 for the second part of last week’s blog on Broken. It’s a good thing I broke this into two parts because I knew it would be long. This story is still “my baby,” and I have a lot to say about it!

Broken is the story that made me the writer I am today. It’s the story that taught me the most about writing and helped me develop my style. You can actually see that development occur over the course of the story, which took me just over a year to write. But wow, what a year that was!

When I started writing Broken in January of 2003, I was seventeen years old (half the age I am now… ugh!) and halfway through my senior year of high school. I was taking AP English, for which I had to read and analyze classic texts like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and Death of a Salesman, so of course, I learned a lot about symbolism. I made my own clunky attempts at incorporating symbolism into Broken through various similes, metaphors, and dream sequences – I got really into dream interpretation that year, too. I also discovered the thesaurus on Microsoft Word, which broadened my vocabulary, but also occasionally led to some interesting and odd word choices. For example, I named the hotel that the Boys stay at while they’re working on their album The Clandestine after coming across the word “clandestine” as a synonym for secret. It sounded fancy and was intended to be symbolic of the fact that Nick was keeping his cancer a secret from the rest of the group at the time, but after becoming more familiar with the connotation of the word “clandestine,” I realized it also makes the hotel sound super sketchy and not at all the kind of place anyone would ever want to book a room, LOL. Live and learn!

Like most writers, I was and still am influenced by what I read, so as I branched out from Lurlene McDaniel and other YA authors and started reading more mature books, my writing became more descriptive. I have to commend myself on all the different, colorful ways I came up with to describe Nick vomiting; I probably set some kind of record for most puke scenes in a single BSB fanfic – sorry, Nick. I had gotten into Stephen King, which certainly made me wordier and more graphic than I had been before. I had also become a big Harry Potter fan; you can see J.K. Rowling’s influence on my writing at the beginning of Broken, where I was overusing parentheses to add bits of information, a technique I had never really used until I noticed it was something JKR did. In rereading Broken, one thing I notice now is how inconsistent the writing style is. Sometimes it’s very flowery and formal, and other times it turns very informal, almost as if Nick was telling the story, even though it’s written in third person point of view. I was definitely experimenting with different styles as I tried to develop my own.

I wrote as much as I could that summer after graduating high school, knowing I would be going off to college in the fall. With a full courseload and a roommate, I wasn’t sure how much time I would have to write fanfic, so I wanted to get as far as I could on Broken. As fate would have it, the last chapter I finished and posted before I left for college was 100, in which Nick is faced with the life-altering decision of whether or not to let them amputate his leg. My life was about to change, too, albeit in a much less dramatic way. Still, college was a big deal for me; I’ve always been an introvert and a homebody, so I worried about being away from home for the first time, not knowing anyone, and having to make new friends. But it worked out as well as it could have: my new roommate was not only nice and easy to get along with; she was also really busy and was gone a lot, which gave me plenty of time alone in our dorm room to write without her ever knowing what I was doing.

Don’t worry – I didn’t spend my whole freshman year of college holed up in my dorm room, researching amputation and writing fanfic. I did go to class and got out and socialized from time to time, too, and I made other friends besides my roommate. But in between all that, I definitely devoted some down time to doing non-academic research and writing. Fanfic has always been a hobby I’ve kept pretty private (you know, aside from posting it all online for random strangers to read LOL). No one in my offline life, apart from my family, knows about it. Though I am proud of my writing, I recognize that writing stories about tragedy befalling the Backstreet Boys is a pretty weird pastime that not everyone would understand. I was really paranoid that my roommate would figure out what I was doing, but I managed to keep it a secret from her and the rest of my friends by password-protecting my laptop, making hidden folders for my fanfics and bookmarks, and regularly deleting my internet history. On some subconscious level, maybe this is why so many of my stories feature characters who are keeping secrets. I mean, this isn’t the only story I’ve written where Nick hides his cancer from his family and friends for months, so that may be saying something about me.

By the time I finished Broken in March of 2004, I had almost a whole year of college under my belt, and I had learned and grown so much, both as a person and a writer. College helped with my personal growth by giving me more knowledge and life experience, but Broken fostered my growth as a writer. Before Broken, I had never planned and outlined a whole story from beginning to end; I used to write with a tentative plan in my head, but I mostly flew by the seat of my pants and rarely put ideas down on paper prior to writing them. I was the kid in school who wrote the essay first, then went back and wrote an outline to go with it to turn in to my teacher when one was required. I started an outline  at the beginning of Broken as a way of keeping track of medical information, treatment plans, dates, etc., and now I can’t imagine writing a novel without one.

I also became better at character development. Broken is the first story where I wrote a variety of multi-dimensional, memorable characters instead of mostly flat, one-dimensional cliches. I talked about Claire in my last post, and I love her as a character, but “Broken Nick” is probably my favorite version of Nick that I’ve written. He is flawed and, at times, idiotic and infuriating in this story, but for the most part, I find him endearing. Despite putting him through so many things I had never been through personally, it was fairly easy for me to get inside his head because I infused him with so much of my own feelings. There’s a sentence from Chapter 96 that says, “His temperament had suddenly turned to that of a hormonal teenage girl, filled with mood swings,” and wow, does that describe Broken Nick to a T – because I was the moody, hormonal teenage girl writing him, LOL.

The other Backstreet Boys still fit into specific roles – Brian as the best friend, Kevin as the father figure, Howie as the peacekeeper, and AJ as the comic relief – but in rereading this story, I like how I portrayed their relationships with each other and with Nick. The scenes with the Boys together are some of my favorites.

Then there are all the other supporting characters. The villainous ones, like Jane Carter and Nick’s gold-digger girlfriend Leah, tend to be pretty over the top and cliched, but I really like some of the others, such as Dr. Kingsbury. I’ve written a lot of doctors and nurses over the years, and usually, unless they’re a main character, they are just names who pop up and say words without showing much personality. But Dr. Kingsbury, though a minor character, became such an important support person for Nick in this story, almost like a mother figure after he cut ties with his actual mom. I really like the relationship I developed between those two. Then there are characters that make me laugh, like Claire’s boyfriend Tim, who was a late addition inspired by a guy I met at college. Claire’s ex Jamie was another character based on a real person I knew in college, but more on him in my next blog.

This is also the story where I started naming the many medical staff members after readers and friends of mine, something I still do in my medical dramas to this day. Some of these little cameos became actual characters who appeared in more than one scene throughout the story, and a few of them even made it into the sequel. I started doing this for a couple of reasons: first, I hate naming characters because I tend to overthink it, so it’s easier to just have a list of names I can pull from, and second, I wanted a creative way to show appreciation for the amazing people who were reading my story and giving me feedback.

Broken was the first “popular” story I ever wrote. Prior to Broken, I had a handful of readers who would regularly give feedback, and I’d get the occasional random email from someone else who had stumbled onto one of my stories, but I’d feel lucky to hear from even one person after posting a chapter. Then, slowly but surely, over the course of this story, I started getting more and more emails per update. When I say “more and more,” I’m not talking hundreds or even dozens – maybe five to ten for a typical chapter, give or take. It was still way more than I had ever gotten or get now, and it was so exciting!

I have always made it a point to reply to every piece of feedback I get, so I’ve built many friendships that began with emailing or commenting back and forth about fanfic. Out of all the stories I’ve written, this is the one that sparked the most online friendships for me, some of which are still going strong today. Broken is the story that brought a lot of people to Dreamer’s Sanctuary and introduced them to my writing. Some of you are maybe here today reading this because of Broken. It’s the story that put me on the map, so to say, and made Dreamer’s Sanctuary one of the more well-known BSB fanfic sites, even at a time when there were still a lot of other BSB fanfic sites out there. That’s one of the reasons why Broken was and will always be so special to me.

That’s not to say I think it’s perfect (or that anything I write will ever be perfect). In fact, for many years, I’ve been afraid to go back and read Broken because I was worried I would be disappointed by this beloved story of mine, which I was absolutely obsessed with while I was writing it and have always thought of as “my baby.” After working on last week’s blog about it, I got curious and finally did start reading it from the beginning, and for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. But there are certainly some problematic parts that make me cringe or laugh for the wrong reasons. Although I appreciate that I tried to build up to the cancer reveal slowly and show how “perfect” Nick’s life was beforehand, it takes too long in the beginning to get to the point of the story, and the Justin Timberlake stuff, while kind of funny, is unbelievably stupid. I just have to remind myself that I wrote that stuff in early 2003, at the height of the Nick/Justin rivalry after the release of their first solo albums, and Broken is very much a product of its time.

Another thing that bothered me a bit, reading it in 2020, is how many sexist, misogynistic lines there are in it. There are so many times throughout the story where either Nick thinks or one of the other Boys says something insulting about him acting like a girl, acting like he’s on his period, etc. I’m not sure how much of this was me thinking this was just how twenty-something-year-old guys talked at the time and how much was me acknowledging the fact that I was channeling my own teenage girl thoughts and emotions through Nick, maybe a little too much. Either way, that was one of my takeaways from reading this story for the first time in over ten years and something I had never noticed about it before. The same can be said for the use of words like “gay” and “retarded” as insults. I don’t use those words that way anymore, but I did then, as did many other people I knew and observed. It feels true to how guys talked to each other back in the day, but it’s certainly cringe-worthy to come across those words used in that context now.

And then there are all the mistakes and inaccuracies that came from the simple fact that I was only seventeen/eighteen when I wrote this story, still learning how to research in some cases and without enough life experience to know better in others. Reading this as a layperson without any formal medical training, I feel like the medical info is mostly believable, although there are certainly some mistakes – I’m sure those of you who do work in medical settings or have experience with cancer could find all kinds of things to correct me on. But there are so many other things I laugh at now and think, “That’s so not how that works.” Like characters repeatedly saying they’re going to “call the airport” to book a flight. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think people ever called the actual airport to buy plane tickets before it became commonplace to buy them online; they would call the airline, go through a travel agent, or maybe buy tickets at the ticket counter at the airport. But, coming from a family that couldn’t afford to take many big vacations, I had only flown twice in my life by 2003 and had never bought a plane ticket myself, so I was pretty clueless about that.

Along those lines, it’s amazing to look back and see how much technology has changed in the past seventeen years. One thing that struck me is how reliant the characters in this story were on landline phones still. Cell phones are mentioned and occasionally used, but it seems like the characters always tried to call each other’s home phone before trying their cell. I didn’t get my first cell phone until 2004, so landlines were still very much a part of my life then. Of course, there is no mention of texting, taking pictures, or looking things up on phones because smartphones didn’t exist yet! Claire still buys a physical copy of Nick’s Now or Never album on CD and listens to it on a portable CD player, not an iPod. Music videos debut on TRL, not YouTube, and the characters watch movies on basic cable TV, not Netflix. Sometimes I question whether or not I should set my stories in a specific time period and include pop culture references like songs, TV shows, and movies because it does date the stories, but it also creates such a “slice of life” feel to them. Reading Broken this past week took me right back to 2003/2004, and I thoroughly enjoyed the nostalgic ride, reminiscing about that time in my life and the Backstreet Boys’ careers.

I probably won’t get around to reading every story I write about for these posts, but I’m going to try to read the sequel, By My Side, which I’ll be blogging about next week. I have never gone back and read By My Side from beginning to end since I finished writing it, so that should be interesting. Stay tuned!