In my last post I raised the question that had been put to me:
How does one go about writing a novel?
I gave a flippant answer.
This is how I actually got around to writing a novel.
First, some background,I'm 57 yers old and have spent over twenty five years travelling, mostly in Asia but also spreading my charms as an international funster on four other continents.
(c) Copyright David Zax, 2009.
About ten years ago I was taking time out in Hong Kong where I had at the time been resident for several months.
One night being a football fan I was sat in a sports bar in Kowloon.
They had a satellite dish and were showing an obscure cup game involving teams from the lower divisions from England in the middle of the night.
I was one of only seven or eight people there to watch the game
At the time I was a drunk and as was usually the case then, I had been drinking too much.
One joke that I used about my drinking at the time was this one:
I'd have been a millionaire if I'd taken all the bottles back.
Tragically this statement had some truth behind it, I've thankfully since given up this infantile hobby.
I was sat at a table with another Englishman who I'd met there on that night who was also on something of a bender.
Before the game began, at half time and after the final whistle, we got into some conversations firstly about football, then travel.
We swapped anecdotes.
This is a common practice when two drunken well travelled men away from home for an extended period meet in a bar.
My contribution to the conversation was a desperately sad story about a young man in India who had stolen some money from me while we travelled on the same bus.
Before the bus reached its destination I realised the theft and while I was trying to get my money back from him some of the other passengers were outraged by finding he had robbed a tourist.
They beat the lad up and held him until the bus pulled in at our destination, the southern Indian city of Madurai, where he was turned over to the police.
The story is a brutal one that ends with the most depraved beating and confinement one could ever make up, the problem here was, I was there and the events were real.
I was witness to the whole wretched unfolding chain of events and it literally made me sick to my stomach.
My story topped the one my drinking buddy had told me and when we split up I could see he was deeply affected by what I'd seen and had told him.
This was not a lighthearted vacation story.
About a month later I was invited to a wedding reception held in a hotel located in the Central district.
After the bride and groom had bounded out of the doors to begin married life I and several other males were sat around a table doing a stirling job getting rid of the last of the free booze.
I only knew one other guest there, we had both been invited to the reception at the same time.
As the alcohol took over, anecdotes were swapped. I had plenty of them and had told some of them several times, but on this occasion I stayed quiet.
The swapping of travel anecdotes is a popular shared activity between travellers who are drunk, but you have to be in the mood to join in.
The stories I told I never shared them outside a bar setting and I only swapped them with other travellers.
It was a shock then to hear one of the guests relating "his story." to the table. It was the one about the Indian boy who who was arrested on the bus and subsequently beaten to a pulp and then.... (you'll have to read the novel Extemadura to find out what happened)
It was the story that had happened to me years earlier.
Even stranger, the man telling the story was an Australian, he wasn't the man I'd told the story to in the sports bar.
In Hong Kong, I had only told that story one time.
I was absolutely stunned to hear this phony getting off telling my story as though it was his own.
Not wanting to cause a scene on what had been an enjoyable afternoon, I waited till I was ready to leave and confronted him off to one side away from the remaining drinkers, I asked him where he had heard the anecdote but he insisted the story was his own personal experience.
This story is one so perverted the punchline so hideous, its impossible that these events happened twice in the same city with the same people being involved with the same names in the same location.
So I left the hotel grumbling and muttering to myself and wended my way back to my rented rooms for a nap.
The thing stayed with me for days' but gradually my anger subsided.
The story is notable for its shocking brutality and at least two people I knew of were touting it around Hong Kong as their own story. This told me that it had some value and that these phonies thought it good enough for them to want to be associated with it, to claim it as their own.
God knows how many of my stories were going around the world possibly told by thousands of liars and phonies who are passing them off as their own experience and on to others who in turn hijacked the story and then pass it on to yet more phonies.
These people are everywhere, don't blink you'll miss one. Look! There's another one! and another!
I'd like to pick them off with a hammer.
My daughter is just old enough to play that game, you know, the one with the crocodile's noses popping up at random out of ten holes in a plastic mould and you have to hit them with a hammer to score.
Lying phonies are everywhere, you'll see hundreds of them today even if you don't go out. Just switch on the T.V.
So that was it as far as I was concerned, there would be no more stories told as anecdotes by me to drunks in bars. They were my stories, it was my life and I decided then to record them in a diary, so I'd have them all to myself.
You want a good story? I suggest you get a life first.
From then on whenever I recalled an anecdote I wrote it down in a notebook, in the way that I would have related it if I had been in a bar.
Over the next two years I filled several notebooks.
I seldom read them back after I'd finished logging them.
I guess in the begining it was therapy for me to keep a record.
Whatever the reason I enjoyed putting them down and when I got to completing a hundred stories I figured it was enough and I left them in a box and forgot about them.
I could have gone on to save a thousand but these first hundred were the best.
I was based in Taipei in Taiwan when I eventually put them away.
It was a good city to me, well situated.
I was making a small profit from picking up anything that could turn a profit at the time, this involved travelling regularly to Hong Kong, Korea, The Philipines, Thailand, Penang, Macau, Vietnam, Cambodia, laos.
All of these places were two hours or less flying time from Taipei and it was an ideal base at the time to get to know South East Asia well.
The notebooks stayed in the boxes for another two years until I moved apartments. It was then while sorting through my accumulated odds and ends that I came across the hundred travel anecdotes.
I spent one evening in my new apartment starting with the first notebook and by early next morning I was finished reading them.
Having left the writing for so long, the stories appeared fresh to me. In retrospect I found them interesting and I began to think of how I could take them and work them into a novel.
And that in brief is the story of how I wrote a novel on the back of the inspiration of frauds and liars.
The reason that I had to spend years knocking it into shape was that I had to change the seperate stories into a single plot, I had to rewrite them all, then reconstruct them into a story that moved quickly, kept the readers attention throughout and felt authentic. I also had to introduce a lot of charachters and dialog.
In the begining it was a diary now it's a novel.
All of the stories from the notebooks apart from two, bare little resemblence to how they now appear in the novel.
The first of the two unchanged from the notebooks is the story of the Indian boy on the bus that inspired the book, its unchanged and the second story that remained intact is a look at how undying love can over the course of time turn into slovenly indifference. The story is based on my first serious relationship.
In the novel I changed it to the collapse of a ten year marriage between the central charachter who acts out my part and his first wife. based on my ex.
Both of these stories are seperate chapters.
I meet a lot of frauds, people who are away from home for extended periods and are able to reinvent themselves each time they move location which in some cases is often.
Take my own case as an example.
I'm from England but I always enjoyed leaving it, my first trip was to Morocco,Algeria and Tunisia in 1971 (four months) then a second to Morocco a year later.(six months)
Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan,Pakistan,India and Nepal in 1975 (eighteen months)then India Nepal and Thailand in 1980 (six months) Lebanon, Jordan, Israel in 1982 (one year)and that's when I became sick and tired of returning to a country I loathed and didn't need anymore.
Margaret Thatchers Britain.
By March 1985 I was equipped to leave and never go back, that's when my vacation began, it's still ongoing, I travel constantly and I enjoy it.
I left England half way through Thatchers stint at the helm of a sinking ship navigating rough unforgiving seas.
Unfortunately during this time I have repeatedly run accross liars.
They are everywhere and they are terrifyingly shallow.
Look! There's another one, get the hammer!
They are the types of people who can't forge an interesting life for themselves at home because thier friends and family can see what they do, so in this quick smash and grab instant world where attention spans last less than two minutes where everthing is fast tracked, they leave home in search of a story and after, let's say three months of failing to find an interesting story.
(you'll understand why I choose three months later)
They go about stealing stories of people who they have seen as living admirable lives, then, being away from home they cultivate the stories before going back reinvented to impress their freinds with their awful lies that because they happened thousands of miles away, are difficult to expose.
I see them all the time building stories, they don't care who knows. They have no shame, they need a story, any story to make themselves look better, and they need it fast.
You think I'm exaggerating. Here are two stories chosen from thousands of the shameful liars I've come across over the years. They are acute cases:
The first was a Canadian who I met in the summer of 1972 at the end of my second trip to Morocco.
He was the first really hard core liar I had come across, he was a shameful piece of work.
I was twenty at the time, he was about the same age, I can't remember his age or his name, I forgot both these facts minutes after I left him at Victoria Station in London. keep in mind, it is as I write, thirty eight years ago.
My second trip to Morocco had come to an end after six months when my money ran out. I had enough to get to Alicante, on the way back and from there I had to hitch.
Hitch hiking in Spain and France at the time was a real headache, people had a habit of rolling down their car windows and shouting Beatnick! at you. Many threw remnants of snacks and half filled water bottles.
In Spain which was ruled by the fascist Franco at the time, all three government tv stations showed ads daily warning people not to pick up hitch hikers because they were likely to have their throats slashed and their car stolen.
It took me ten days to get to the port at Calais to try and get onto a ferry to Dover.
Having no money was a drawback but on that hot afternoon when I reached the ferry terminal I was relieved to have gotten there and too tired to bother or to care right then about the problem of paying my fare.
It was he who approached me first. I spotted him in his holiday clothes all fired up looking for someone to tell his story to. It was a familiar one at the time.
He had landed in London and had bought a Eurorail pass. He had bought the longest one issued at the time, a three month ticket that gave the holder unlimited rail travel on the western European network.
This generally involves getting a map and moving from city to city spending a day in a town and then later back to the train station to sleep through the night en route to another town.
The advantages of this of course is the area you can cover and how cheap this form of travel is and also there are tens of thousands of young people paticipating in this every summer. As a ticket holder you will have many chances to get laid and tanked up on cheap supermarket booze and dance in a conga line up and down the length of the train in the wee hours.
The dissadvantages are are many, here's one.
Every day you get fifteen hours to wander round a strange town where you don't understand what people are saying to you smelling bad while supporting a terrible hangover.
Before I could stop him the Canadian bore was half way through telling me every single stop he had made through Europe. His ticket was then valid for this his last day. The next day he was flying back to Canada.
He finished his account and was faced with my silence.
To attract my interest he asked me where I had been.
I only mentioned the word Morocco and he cut me off.
He was swinging his arms wildly and cursing the air around him.
Morocco! Goddam! You've been to Morocco!
He told me he was from a provincial town and of his freinds back home, he had been the first of them to take off alone on an international adventure, he told me without any shame of how he couldn't wait to get back to see how envious his freinds would be of him.
The mention of my trip to Morocco had him feeling some regret that he hadn't taken a more adventurous option. He was sure if he had, his friends back home would have been in complete awe of him.
He began pumping me with non stop questions about where I'd been, names of cities, what currency they used, how much does a hotel cost, everything.
Eventually the ferry was ready to leave and he figured I would be joining him on the trip across the channel.
When I told him I didn't have any money for the fare, he thought about it for a minute and made me an offer.
He would buy me a ticket on the boat and a train ticket to London.
This would mean we would spend a further five, maybe six hours together.
During this time I would sell him my trip and furnish him with my story and coach him so he could appear to his friends to have been on a more exciting adventure when he arrived back home.
At the time I was living in a squat the adress was 113 Gaisford Street Kentish Town N6.
So I agreed, in fact I jumped at the chance to help this lying phoney decieve his friends and himself.
Once on board, I unpacked my shoulder bag and rummaged through everything, there was six months of a trail i'd left there.
A much handled map, several brouchures from hotels I'd stayed at, some loose Moroccan change, stubs of bus tickets, bottles of shapoo and soap with Arabic labels loads of junk that I freely handed over to him.
He had a notebook out and I started describing everything from the ferry from Algeceiras to Tangiers, the hotel I stayed in, the exchange rate, how much a room had cost me ,what I ate, the bus to the high Atlas mountains, dope, freinds, names,girls who became lovers, I sold this creep my entire holiday and gave him the props that would help convince the people back home it was he who had made the trip.
Course, I told him he would have the problem of not having stamps in his passport, he asked me how he could get over this so I suggested he drop the passport into water on the day he got back to Canada, hand it in and apply for a replacement.
His grilling and taking notes from me lasted right up until we split up at Victoria Station.
The guy had supplied me with a constant flow of beer and food and had given me my tube fare to Kentish Town. So I guess it worked out well for me.
What a fucking phony, he wasn't at all remotely embarrassed about what he did. People like him are everywhere. Look! there's one now!
This following story took place some fifteen years after I had sold my vacation to the shameful Canadian.
It was the second time I had sold an entire part of my life to help a liar misslead his family and friends back home to feel good about himself. I coached him for days so he would succeed with the deception.
He was only about eighteen at the time, I was thirty five and about two years into my permanent vacation, I stayed in India that time for four years so I guess it must have been 1987.
At that time I was exploiting a loophole in the tax law and making a profit importing wedding sari's from Sri Lanka into India.
After the loophole was closed I moved on to Thailand.
When I wasn't flying back and forward from Trivandrum to Colombo I travelled extensively throughout India.
I had been in Delhi a dozen times. I didn't care for the city I had used it so often due to its location as a central transport hub as a transit stop. Usually I stayed overnight and was gone the next day.
I'm not sure now but I was probably going to a northern hill station to escape the weather. Once again, this was 22 years ago.
My plans were thrown off when I arrived in the capital in agony shitting blood and mucus.
A trip to a clinic told me what I already knew, I had Amoebic dysentery. I was lucky to be in the city when it struck because without the correct medication stuck in an isolated backwater I would have been, it's fair to say, in deep shit.
The tablets prescribed cleaned it up but I was weak and ended up staying for ten days at a hotel on the Pahar Gange, a long straight narrow road that runs up from the main entrance of the railway station, it's crammed with hotels, mainly cheap ones.
I'd stayed there before. I had an unremarkable room located on the third floor of a twelve story building.
After a few days of not eating and feeling weak I was going batty with boredom. I had some dope that was strong and evil smelling so when I felt up to it I climbed the stairs to scope out the roof and spark up.
There was no elevator and I was exhausted when I eventually dragged myself up there.
I was surprised. There were four rooms and a view.
The roof had been swept and felt like a peaceful refuge there was a table and several comfortable chairs. I sat in one and had a smoke.
That's when I met him, he was a skinny kid in a pair of shorts hanging out his washing.
On his way back he spotted me and came across.
He was English and he hailed from a small village located on the outer reaches of the suburbs of Nottingham.
He joined me, on that day I stayed up there for several hours hanging out with him. over the next couple of days, I spent all my time escaping my drab room up on the roof and I found out his story.
He had spent his life in the village where he lived with his parents.
The Thatcher years were a truly miserable time for many in England. Unemployment in some areas was out of control and apathy for many kids who had left school and had never had a job was rampant, there was very little hope particularly to anybody who was working class and lived north of Watford Gap. That's why I was so determined to get out myself and to stay out. And this was a story I shared with my new young friend, and the reason he too had arrived in India so we both had that in common.
We were both bitter about our recent past and we had a laugh complaining with spite about what was wrong with our country.
He couldn't find a job since he had left school and he spent most of his time in his bedroom and hanging around his local bar that was full of his friends he had left school with who were also on the dole.
There were drugs, depressants, and I knew the despondancy he'd felt.
I've never found that hopeless resigned all pervading air of defeat among young people in any other country outside Britain, it was mind numbingly depressing back then, a true living hell.
Recent events I've read in the Guardian Online have not encouraged me that this situation has improved.
He got sick of his pointless life and with so much time on his hands he began to dream of getting out, he spent time reading about India, nobody he knew had ever tried something so ambitious, so when he began telling his mates down the pub of his plans to travel they ridiculed him, telling him nobody ever escaped and the present life they were living, the one where they were frozen in aspic,that was a permanent condition and he should get used to it.
The thing about unemployment then was there were certain factory jobs that you could find if you desperately needed money, places like dye works and asbestos processing plants and generally they offered lots of hours, double shifts, sixteen hour days seven days a week grubbing around up to your neck imerssed in toxic filth.
The reason they had such a high turnover of staff, was that working there was in the long term, an impossible way of life, nobody wanted to work there.
The only benefit was that if you needed money you could put it away easily because your whole life was work, every day, when you weren't working you were sleeping. He was living at home so he had no bills, everything he earned would be used to escape and leave the horrible drabness behind.
He figured out how much money he would need and reckoned if he worked round the clock for four months he could do it.
I did this myself twice for travel money at a rubber factory located on a barren moor miles from where I lived, miles from where anybody lived such was the stinking poison filth the place spewed out twenty four hours a day, every day of the year.
He knuckled down to the four months only taking one Saturday off a month
Of course he went to his local pub where his cynical; defeated mates laughed and mocked him, taunting him that he would never stick it out.
He'd never leave.
This made him more determined and was a great help to him to stick with the plan.
By the time he had been working for three months, his monthly night out had his friends openly hostile toward him due to the fact that it looked as though he was going to get away and leave them behind without hope.
He would leave them to reflect on the fact that it was possible to leave but unlike him, they didn't have the drive to get out themselves, and they never would.
Eventually the day came when he quit his job.
He had the money in the bank, had gotten his passport and was off to London to get a visa and his shots, then buy travellers checks and his return ticket.
He had three days back home to wait for his flight.
He spent the night before leaving down the pub and this time it was he who was mocking and taunting his friends and that night they had nothing to say to him in response. He was escaping and they weren't.
He left with some begrudging good luck wishes and made his way home but he felt alone and afraid.
He was actually going. In thirty six hours, he would be in a bed in India.
He was feeling vulnerable, and for a young man who had never taken a chance it was a big step.
Still the next morning he took a deep breath and set off to catch the London train.
He arrived off the flight in Delhi in June, the hottest month of the year just prior to the annual monsoon when the mercury registers regularly in the upper forties celsius.
The blast of heat as he left the plane slapped him hard in the face and before he reached the terminal building his clothes were soaked in sweat.
His first moments in India were awful, something far outside his previous experiences of eighteen years in and around Nottingham.
At the baggage carousel he waited for his bags and watched his fellow travellers, mostly returning Indians create all manner of havoc while waiting to pick up their bags.
Through immigration and customs he opened a door and was rushed by hundreds of screaming chancers who were camped there looking for a mug.
Taxi drivers, hotel hustlers, pimps and oddballs, all screaming at the top of their lungs directly into his face.
By the time he got into the back of the taxi he knew he was in India and he was terrified.
As the taxi negotiated traffic into the city and near naked children were hammering on the windows screaming at him at every stop, there were dozens of them at every junction.
There was man with leprosy banging the stumps of his hands and pushing his face, the one with no nose up against the glass.
Cows with shit smeared arses crapping in the road and an all pervading stink of piss convinced him he had made a terrible mistake and right then, all he wanted to do was to turn the taxi round and take the next flight home.
His panic increased as the taxi took an hour to reach the hotel, with the adress he had passed to the driver.
He paid the cab off with money he didn't know the value of and bounded up the stairs to reception and a man who smelled bad and had a deeply stained betel nut mouth.
He was given a bland room similar to the one i was staying in on the day he had arrived some weeks later and the traumatised lad locked the door and lay petrified beneath a slowly spinning fly specked three blade fan that hung from the ceiling and melted into the mattress.
That's where he had stayed for a week.
On the ground floor was a restraunt and he ordered food to be sent up to his room three times a day.
He told me he was too afraid to step out into the street and was feeling thouroughly miserable sat in the bottom of the deep hole he had dug for himself.
He desperately wanted to go back home but his life would have been made intolerable by the ridicule of his mates if he showed up there after being away for only a week, he would have never lived down the humiliation.
At the end of the first week he had been reduced to the edge of a nervous breakdown. He had to get out of the room and he wasn't going out of the front exit so he went up to the roof as I had done where he found the rooms.
He spoke to people who lived up there and one guy told him he would be returning to Europe the next day, so the kid went down to reception and reserved the room.
Next day he took his bag and he moved up there.
His life improved, people rarely stayed there longer than a week and the other three rooms were always full so he met a lot of new people, there were plenty of books travellers had left behind and every night after midnight he was usually sat with company around the table drinking beer and sharing dope and their stories.
Because of the constant changing of nieghbours, he didn't have to explain his odd situation of never leaving the roof.
As he settled in he began to see a way out of his jam. Everybody got very sick at least once in India, the stomach parasites are of such ferocity, they could give a T-Rex a bowel dissorder, many of the people leaving were returning early because of some medical malaise, so he had his solution.
He figured to seem credible when he returned to Nottingham he would have had to have stayed in India for three months, he checked a calender and had pencilled in a departure date three months from the day he'd entered his Indian nightmare.
He could stay up on the roof and be solely in the company of foriegners.
The ones who were leaving behind all the stuff he would need to fabricate a journey he himself had never begun.
Everybody loses weight quickly during the first three months in India and he had lost a lot. This would back up his story of returning a month early because of his illness.
The people back home would be mighty impressed with his rough haggard look
By the time I had arrived he had quite a collection of maps, train tickets, hotel flyers brochures from tourist spots all over the country and he had the anecdotes he'd heard from different people who were only too glad to tell him where they had been and fill him in on a variety of towns cities and tourist spots.
When I'd met him he had a week left before his flight home was due.
Having been up there for three months he felt comfortable and me being on the roof most of the time he'd unloaded his story on me.
He asked me to help put his "trip" together with him, as I was doomed to spend the next week recovering on the roof and I was happy to help him.
The kid was pretty good company but i thought he could have made an effort.
What he hadn't understood about India was that arriving at the airport and his experience there was the worst thing he would have had to encounter.
If he had taken a train to a quiet beach town, he would have had a wonderful time with friendly people, there were so many to choose from and then there was all of that amazing food and life he had missed, he'd put in all the hard work and lost his nerve at the last minute and had hidden himself away.
He had picked up some super strong dope from Manali about three ounces of it.
He'd bought it from a guy who was going back to Europe and was swallowing it wrapped in condoms,
He had tried to get a kilo down but couldn't get make it, he reached his limit and any more was spewed up.
Rather than risk hiding the surplus somewhere else at the airport he'd sold the unswallowed dope to the lad at the knockdown ridiculously cheap price he'd picked it up in the scenic northern valley.
The kid sure didn't want to take it back, he had had enough of India after spending his first hour in the country.
He offered the dope to me as payment and we spent the week crafting my travels with some of the props his neighbours had left behind.
As the day of his departure came he was terrified of going through his awful experience again and talked me into riding shotgun with him in the taxi to the airport.
I said goodbye to him when he walked through immigration. He looked like a kid walking into his first day of school.
We live in a slick tacky impatient world where everybody is famous just because they say they are. It's a place where the easy way out is the first and only option.
Don't have any talent?
No problem, lie.
I like music, remember what that is? When people would spend years mastering an instrument and writing songs.
You don't need to bother with that anymore.
Go out and buy a drum machine for a couple of hundred dollars, find a rythym and then shout over it into a microphone about how great you are, shout about the sex you had last night and how you slapped your bitch after it was over, shout about how everybody is afraid of you, shout about what everybody else shouts about, you don't have to come up with anything original, rip off somebody else.
Learning an instrument up in your bedroom for years? That's for suckers.
You want to be famous now.
You don't need talent, If you can't sing you can pay some fat ugly singer who can't get on stage because of their appearance and then you can lip synch to their voice.
Everybody watching you knows its not you singing but it doesn't matter anymore because your on a stage and you say your famous, so you must be famous.
That's what Madonna did and continued doing. I have never seen a Madonna concert but i'm certain those who have are the most shallow vapid liars on the planet.
Meet an interesting person who has travelled around the world, do you want to be him.
No problem, tell everybody you've been all over the world.
They won't believe you but they wont critise you because they themselves are famous writers or film stars or skydivers or olympic athletes or premiership footballers.
Get tired of one, you can choose a different fame next week, its as easy as changing clothes.
People are now famous because they say they're famous.
You want to be clever?
Crawl through the internet and find something you think is clever.
Copy it, take off the writer name, put your's in its place.
Now your clever and you only wrote two words, your name.
You don't have to feel ashamed that your a liar, Everybody's a liar.
Let me tell you something about myself.
I've got a gas powered television.
Keith Richard stole Satisfaction from me, I wrote that.
I invented the safety pin.
My mother is Sophia Loren.
I got a first in theology at Oxford.
I drive an Aston Martin.......
My dick is four miles long.
I am the CEO of IBM.
I know i'm wasting my time, and i know this problem will get worse with each generation but here's the point of me writing this:
If you're a liar, can you stop lying to yourself and try to create something that is yours?
You wouldn't believe how rewarding it is.
The irony here is, if you are a liar you won't have the attention span needed to get through; and read all the piece, and then find the question.