I know many of you are overseas, but to my fellow North American fans, I hope you had/have good luck getting your tickets to the DNA tour! The Boys answered my teacher prayers and actually scheduled all the cities around me right in a row and during my summer vacation, so how could I resist? I’m going to see them three nights in a row in Indianapolis, Chicago, and St. Louis. Can’t wait! Friends in Europe and Asia, I hope they announce more dates for you next! To those in Mexico, South America, and Australia who have shows coming up soon, I’m so excited for you! Have fun!
In the meantime, it’s Wednesday, and this week, I’m going back to 2008 to reflect on one of my lesser read “recent” stories, Secrets of the Heart.
Title: Secrets of the Heart
Written: October 2008 – August 2012
Straightforward synopsis: After receiving a heart transplant, Brian is haunted by strange dreams. Eventually, he realizes what he’s experiencing are actually the memories of his donor. When his dreams lead him to believe his donor’s death was no accident, he tries to uncover the truth.
The story behind the story:
There are two kinds of story ideas. The best kind are the ones that just pop into your head like a light bulb in a flash of pure inspiration, already formed. The other kind are the ones you have to painstakingly manufacture, forcing pieces together until you have something you hope will work. Secrets of the Heart was the second kind.
I came up with the idea for it after watching the movie Awake (2007). For those who haven’t heard of it, Awake stars Hayden Christensen as a man who experiences anesthetic awareness while undergoing a heart transplant, meaning he’s conscious and able to feel everything, but completely paralyzed so he can’t move or communicate in any way. From the moment I first heard of this movie, I wanted to see it. I bought the DVD when it came out in 2008 without even bothering to rent it first – that’s how sure I was that I would love it. Turns out, despite having a terrific, horrifying premise, it’s actually a pretty terrible movie. But I loved the concept of a medical thriller, and I wanted to write one myself. I wasn’t going to just copy Awake, so I manufactured an idea of my own.
I actually remember sitting on my bed, thinking so hard it made my head hurt as I tried to come up with something that would combine a medical condition or procedure with a mystery or suspense storyline. I liked the idea of using a heart transplant, but doing something different than what Awake did. I’ve always been fascinated by organ donation. I had already written one heart transplant story, Heartache, but I knew I could write a much better one at this stage in my fanfic career. Making it into a thriller would give it an extra twist to make it much different from Heartache.
I think the idea I eventually landed on was inspired by watching trailers for the Jessica Alba movie The Eye, which had just come out in theaters. It’s about a girl who starts having visions after receiving a cornea transplant. I’ve never actually seen the movie; I tried to watch it on TV once while I was writing this story, but it was even more terrible than Awake, and I turned it off before I got too far into it.
In any case, I got the idea for a heart transplant recipient to have visions of how his donor had died and solve the mystery of his/her death or murder. This kind of premise has appeared in countless ghost stories, but I had never seen it done with organ donation. I even did some googling to see if there were any similar stories out there, and that’s how I came across the concept of cellular memory.
Cellular memory is the hypothesis that memories can be stored in cells outside the brain. It’s based on the phenomenon of transplant recipients taking on personality traits, tastes, and interests of their donors. For example, a man who had never had any artistic ability prior to his heart transplant discovered a newfound artistic talent afterwards. He later found out his donor was an artist. Likewise, a man who had always loved rock music found himself drawn to classical music after his heart transplant. As it turned out, his donor was a classical violinist. There are more instances described in a fascinating documentary I watched on YouTube called Mindshock: Transplanting Memories. Despite the anecdotal evidence, cellular memory is not scientifically proven and is considered pseudoscience, believed to be impossible by most of the medical community. But it’s sure an interesting concept, and I thought it could be a perfect way to explain my main character having memories of his donor.
I don’t think I ever considered using anyone but Brian for that main character. As soon as I decided on a heart transplant, I knew it was going to be Brian. (Sorry, Brian.) After five years of writing nothing but Nick, I was thrilled to have another Brian idea.
I decided pretty early on to make it an AU so I could have one of the other guys be the donor without the two of them knowing each other beforehand. I’ve always preferred canon fanfics in which the guys are the Backstreet Boys to AU in which they aren’t, but between writing Code Blue and 00Carter and also reading some great AUs, I had become more open to them. There’s a lot of freedom in AU, and it was refreshing to write the Boys as regular guys living average lives.
I went with AJ as the other main character because I’ve always loved the combination of Brian and AJ. I’m a Frick and Frack girl, first and foremost, but I also love me some A-Rok. Brian and AJ are an interesting pair to me because, on the outside, they seem like polar opposites, and yet, they’ve always complimented each other so well. Opposites attract, I guess! There’s an old video I love of the Boys getting their makeup done for the old man bit they filmed for the Black & Blue tour, and the way AJ and Brian play off each other is a perfect example of why I love the two of them together. Even though I knew they weren’t going to have much interaction in this story, I thought AJ would be the perfect foil to Brian. I was originally going to have AJ end up being Brian’s donor, but then realized I could give him more story time if I didn’t kill him and instead made him the loved one left behind by Brian’s donor.
Enter Jori.
AJ’s girlfriend Jori is based on my sister. Her look, with the long, dyed red hair, blue eyes, and tattoos: my sister. Her love of the Beatles and weird food combinations: my sister. Her mental health issues: my sister. If my sister ever read this story, she would probably be upset with her portrayal, but I only slightly exaggerated some aspects of her personality. She struggled with mental illness throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. We used to lovingly call her “Pebble” when she was taking Zoloft for depression, after the little bouncing Zoloft mascot. Sometimes she was a happy pebble, and sometimes she was a sad pebble – you never knew which one you’d get, and it could turn on a dime. She was incredibly moody and hard to live with; my parents and I had to walk on eggshells around her because we never knew what would set her off. Eventually she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which explained the difficulty she had regulating her emotions.
Thankfully, my sister is in her thirties now and doing much better than she was as a teenager. She is happily married with two children, and she is actually a good mother. When I started Secrets of the Heart, a couple years before she had her first child, I wasn’t sure she would be. Her only experience taking care of a small, living creature was when she had a hamster for a short time as a teen. The hamster, Eleanor Rigby, made too much noise at night and kept her awake, so she moved its cage to the basement, where it eventually escaped and was never seen again. Sadly, it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine her fictional counterpart Jori smothering her infant daughter to get her to stop crying.
Once I decided to have AJ’s girlfriend be Brian’s donor, I had to come up with a story for how she died and why Brian would be having dreams about her death. I wanted it to initially look like a hit and run accident, but eventually be revealed as a homicide. I watch a lot of Dateline, and when woman die under mysterious circumstances on Dateline, it’s almost always the husband who did it. I loved the idea of AJ as Jori’s killer, but I didn’t want to make him a cold-blooded murderer. He needed a motive, a good reason to have gone into a blind rage and struck her with his truck. That’s when I thought of the storyline with their baby, which was the missing piece I needed to put the whole story idea together.
I spent a lot of time elaborately outlining this story, chapter by chapter. Instead of telling the story chronologically, I decided to alternate between Brian’s storyline and AJ and Jori’s storyline so it would seem like they were taking place simultaneously, when, really, the timelines were eight months apart. This helped me build a sense of mystery. How would Brian and Becci’s lives intertwine with AJ and Jori’s? Which one of them was Brian’s donor? I plotted the story in a way that I could reveal each twist to the readers in a specific order. First, they would find out Jori was Brian’s donor and that she had died in a car accident. Then they would discover that her death didn’t appear to be an accident after all. Next they would find out AJ was the one who hit Jori with her truck. Finally, they would learn the reason AJ ran her down was because he had just found out Jori killed their daughter.
This led to the climax of the story, where Brian has one last nightmare in which he sees himself, as Jori, smother the baby with a stuffed animal and wakes to find himself standing next to his son’s crib, holding a teddy bear. He freaks out at the realization that, had he not awoken, he might have killed his own child while sleepwalking. Deciding his transplanted heart is to blame and desperate to be rid of it, he stabs himself in the chest with a kitchen knife. This is one of the most disturbing ideas I’ve ever come up with, and despite it being a bit farfetched, I love the drama of it. At a time when most of my novels had happy or at least bittersweet endings, I was excited to write one that was dark and depressing because I thought it would be unexpected. And yet, it made sense – this story is not just a supernatural drama, but a tragedy about the destruction of two families. It was never meant to end happily ever after.
I was in kind of a dark place myself when I started Secrets of the Heart. It was the fall of my second year of teaching, and after a horrible week at work, I went into the three-day Columbus Day weekend feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. Teaching is not the kind of job where you can “leave work at work” – even when you walk out without your planbook or papers to grade, work has a way of following you home. You constantly worry about your students and their behavior issues and learning difficulties and troubled home lives, that parent who sent you an angry email, that lesson your principal observed that didn’t go as smoothly as you wanted it to, and so on. This was especially true when I was a newer teacher. On that particular Friday evening, I found myself unable to turn off my brain, yet I knew there was nothing I could do during the long weekend to fix any of the problems I was stewing over. I desperately needed an escape… so I turned to writing.
Well, at least, I wanted to write, to lose myself in a story and take my mind off the stuff that was stressing me out. But I didn’t have anything to write. Since finishing By My Side at the beginning of that year, I had been focusing mostly on collaborations. 00Carter was in full swing, and Song for the Undead had just gotten underway (more on that one next week), but it wasn’t my turn to write on either story. There was nothing else I had started that I felt like working on, so on a whim, I decided to start a new story. I had been sitting on the idea for Secrets of the Heart for a few months, and it felt like the perfect story to fit my mood, so I did some outlining, wrote the first chapter… and then the second. I wrote all weekend, and it totally worked! I was able to distract myself, and I knocked out two chapters that I was really happy with in record time.
I had just started reading ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King for the second time when I started Secrets, and even though my story has nothing to do with vampires, its style was definitely influenced by King’s. The way each chapter is titled and numbered with which of the core four characters it focuses on was borrowed from that book, which does the same thing. I see King’s influence most in the beginning of Chapter 2 [AJ (I)], where I took my time establishing the setting of AJ’s record store in Lockland, Ohio. One thing Stephen King is great at is creating settings, and ‘Salem’s Lot is a great example of that. The cities I used in this story are real, but I made an effort to research them and write them realistically.
Things were going so well with the new story, I impulsively posted those first two chapters I had finished on Columbus Day. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. I wrote and posted the third chapter a week later, then took ten months to update it again. Secrets took a back seat to the two collaborations and remained a side project that was rarely updated until the summer of 2012, when I finally forced myself to upgrade it to “main story” status and finish the damn thing.
To be honest, Secrets of the Heart is not a story I have a lot of good memories of writing. I’m not really sure why, but I’ve always suspected it goes back to what I said in the beginning about it being a manufactured idea. I had to force every bit of this story out of my brain; it didn’t flow naturally the way other stories have, the way truly inspired ideas tend to do, so it was hard to write.
That said, I’m glad I persevered and forced myself to finish it because I really do love the end result. I love the complex characters I created. I love the way the I was able to weave the two storylines together exactly how I wanted to, revealing each twist at just the right time. I love the fact that the story is descriptive, yet concise. Coming it at only twenty-five chapters, it seems so short compared to the long novels I wrote before and after it, but that’s at least partly because it was so carefully planned. Every chapter moved the story forward, so there was no need for pointless fluff or filler.
That’s not to say I didn’t put some stuff in there for fun. Even though it was a Brian/AJ AU, I wanted to give the other guys cameos, so I found a way to incorporate all three of them – Howie as AJ’s best friend and employee, Kevin as Brian’s cousin (okay, so that part wasn’t AU), and Nick as the substitute music teacher who fills in for Brian during his medical leave.
I also had fun with the Beatles references. Truth be told, I’m not a big Beatles fan at all, but my sister is, and since Jori was, too, I started naming minor characters after Beatles songs. Of course, AJ and Jori’s baby was named Lucy Sky Diamond after “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” (I used to joke with my sister that she should name her daughter that. Thankfully, she didn’t.) Lucy’s pediatrician was Nancy Magill from “Rocky Racoon.” (“Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.”) Brian’s cardiologist was “Doctor Robert” for the Beatles song of the same name. He had a nurse named Rita after “Lovely Rita.” There was also a Dr. Rigby, as in “Eleanor Rigby.” The officers who arrested AJ were named Campbell and Shears for the rumored surnames of the Paul McCartney lookalike who allegedly replaced Paul in the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory. There was an Officer Pepper for “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” as well. I also used a bunch of names mentioned in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”: Joan was the social worker, Rose and Valerie were nurses, Dr. Maxwell was a trauma surgeon, and Dr. Edison was an ER doctor (“Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine…”).
It wouldn’t be a Julie story without at least one reference to Titanic, too, and this one starts and ends with a Titanic reference. The first paragraph is, “Brian Littrell had heard it said that a person’s heart is an ocean full of secrets. In fact, he had heard it said at least a hundred times, because he was pretty sure that line came from Titanic, and Titanic was his wife Becci’s favorite movie.” Titanic fan and teacher, Becci is basically me. After I decided to base AJ’s girlfriend on my sister, it seemed only fair to base Brian’s wife on myself. Also, it seemed easy. Of the core four, Becci is the least important character. She exists to notice the changes in Brian after his transplant and to finish telling the story after he stabs himself, and that’s about it. She doesn’t really move the story forward on her own; she mostly just reacts to what happens around her. She’s an innocent bystander and the story’s biggest victim, the only one who suffers without bringing any of it on herself, ending up brokenhearted and widowed because of the actions of the other protagonists. And perhaps the saddest part is that she never fully understands why Brian took his own life and left her and their son alone. The last line says, “Becci Littrell would spend the rest of her life waiting… waiting for an explanation that would never come.” That is also a reference to what old Rose says toward the end of Titanic: “Afterwards, the seven hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait – wait to die, wait to live, wait for an absolution which would never come.” It’s a bit cheesy, but it bookends the story well.
So that’s Secrets of the Heart. I’ll be back next week with a blog about my best collaboration… Song for the Undead!