yellow brick road

Apart from the everyday world that I walk around in, there's another world I enter when I'm writing a new story. It's like a dream world because it has elements of my everyday world, but transformed somewhere in my mind into something strange and new. How strange varies from story to story.

In this dreamlike world, I quite willingly suspend my disbelief, and trust that most readers will be willing to do the same. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner guy, was the one who came up with "willing suspension of disbelief" as a necessity in the dream world of storytelling. In return for entertainment—a good story—the reader agrees to accept some fantastic elements in the story.

The storyteller must do the same, plunging headlong into the dream world, believing the story as it unfolds, taking a path less travelled and unpredictable, if only to see what's around the next bend in the road. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, for us the most important step is the first. All the adventures await her, and she must follow that famous path if she is find her way home. The writer, and reader, take that first step on the opening page of a story. Adventures await us, and we know that 15 or 20 pages later, or maybe 400 pages later, we will find our way home to the story's end. The end of the dream, the return to our waking world.

So let's think of that first page of the story as a first step on a journey. Everyone talks and writes about an opening page as a hook, and it is in a way, but that word has always had a sneaky, aggressive connotation for me. I imagine a writer in a long black cape skulking behind an innocent bookshop customer who has picked up a book and is seconds away from feeling a cold, heavy hook around her neck. Her only escape from the sinister hook is to buy the book and leave the store, thus freeing the writer to stalk his next victim.

How much better would it be to imagine the writer standing next to the reader, no weapon in hand, just browsing the shelves, then pointing down the yellow brick road of his story and inviting the reader to join him on the journey?

So here I am, having just finished dreaming, and writing, a short story about a young woman in Honolulu who is totally ruled by her emotions. I call it "The Manic Monday of Orchid Lefleur." This is a working title, but I doubt I will change it. Here's the opening page of that story (please don't call it the hook). This is my invitation to the reader to take that first step on the yellow brick road of this new story, to see what scarecrows and tin men and cowardly lions are waiting to befriend Orchid, what witches and flying monkeys are just around the next bend to threaten her, what poppy fields may delay her jouney home, and what great and powerful wizards live at the end of that road to give us all a happy ending. And so, gentle reader, I give you . . . Orchid Lefleur.

Orchid Lefleur—her real name—awoke on a warm Monday morning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On an island, that is. On Oahu, in fact, in the single bed with the amazing Technicolor dream quilt she had bought at the Aloha Stadium swap meet, the one that perfectly matched her colorful inner life, for Orchid was a young woman who was ruled, as they say, by her emotions.

And yet who could have foreseen that this particular Monday would bring all the rainbow colors to the surface, as if Roy G. Biv himself had climbed through the window into Orchid’s bedroom during the night and shone his red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet rainbow self on her like some blinding psychedelic spotlight? Who could have foreseen it?

Not Faith Lefleur, her mother, the sweet Japanese-American lady who had done such a splendid job of raising the older daughter but somehow failed miserably with Orchid.

Not Henri Lefleur, the blustery, hockey-mad French Canadian from Montreal who had met Faith at the University of Hawaii when they were undergraduates and were both immediately attracted because each was so exotic to the other.

Not Lilly Lefleur, the older sister, the refined daughter who had her emotions under tight control and was carving out quite a career for herself in finance, currently the teller with the most seniority at her American Savings Branch in Kaimuki. (Lilly—just a side note here—would have been named Guy Lefleur, after Henri’s favorite hockey star, had not her mother insisted on a more feminine name. Some might say that a young woman with the name Lilly Lefleur was destined to become a porn star, or at least dance around a pole on Keeaumoku Street, but they would be wrong.)

Not Brad Pitzer, Orchid’s lingering-but-not-for-long boyfriend, who knew all about her emotions, first hand. Some said that Brad did not resemble the better known Brad Pitt enough to be worth the emotional investment of a long-term relationship, an opinion Orchid was beginning to share.

Not Deena-Anne Tamashiro, Orchid’s best friend since high school who was interested in Brad and had agreed to take him off Orchid’s hands. Orchid had second thoughts, however, when she found Deena-Anne and Brad entangled on the sofa that Saturday night when she went over to see Deena-Anne and discuss when would be a good time to hand off Brad but it had already begun. The green monster took over Orchid’s head and she had stormed in and made a big scene and then stormed out, and wouldn’t pick up when Brad and Deena-Anne kept phoning her that night and all day Sunday.