Tag: dream life | A Banana Peeled

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Pie in the sky for the new year, part two

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

In yesterday’s post, I was talking mostly about writing. I have not done much of it since my medical crisis except for my daily posts. I did try–truly I did. But it just did not come together, no matter how I tackled it. I’m hoping that it’ll be different this time–or at least that I’ll have the wherewithal to soldier through. I’m not feeling great about it because I haven’t written for a while now. Ever since getting rid of the tree in my front yard severely fucked with my sleep schedule, I have had a hard time writing.

But, it’s me making excuses, really. Back before my medical crisis, I wrote 2,000 words every day without fail. Mostly. like 94% of the time. I really want to do the anthology of short stories and maybe try out The Moth (spoken word) based on them.

My medical crisis didn’t change my life much in the long run. I recovered from it remarkably well. In fact, I’m amazed by how little it affected me except in ways I could not really see right away. (Such as how bad my memory now is. It’s slowly getting better, but it’s still nowhere as good as it used to be.) I am very grateful for that, but one way in which it has affected me, I think, is my writing ability.

I used to have whole stories in my head, and they were constant. It was one at a time, but there was always something else in the back of my mind. Now, I have the basic outline of my novel in my head, but I’m having trouble filling out the details. Or to put it more bluntly, getting from Point A to Point B. I spent 20,000 words on one four-hour chunk or so of time. That’s not a brisk pace at all.

I really need to just get it done and then decide whether it’s worth editing or not. I get tripped up in trying to do something perfectly because then I never get it finished. I need to make it my mantra, “Just get it done”. I used to be able to spit out a fairly polished rough draft because I cannot help but edit as I go. So. I want to get the rough draft of my novel done by my birthday (which is in April). That’s more than enough time, but I’m giving myself a cushion. I’m talking at least 120,000, though it’ll probably be more than that.

Funnily enough, I just Googled what the average length of a novel is these days, and it’s 120,000 words on the dot. Ha!

One thing I do if I can’t seem to get a novel off the ground is to try writing the middle of the novel rather than the beginning. I’ve even written a rough ending before and one time, when I was writing a stageplay, I just ended it by burning down the church during a wedding. So it truly was, “They all died in the end.” It was a joke ending, but it was how I felt about the characters, too.

Pie in the sky for the new year

Posted on November 29, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

For the past few posts, I’ve been talking in measured tones about what I hope to do in the new year. Now, I would like to take one post to dream big and dream wildly. When I was a kid, I had the grandest dreams. I wanted to be an actor, but then I realized that fat Asian girls* weren’t allowed to be actors in America,** so that dream was a nonstarter.

I was relating the story of how I took a writing class when I was in my twenties from a local author I really admired. At the time, I was writing a murder mystery with an “I” protagonist, meaning the protag was in first person. That’s how I prefer to write, by the way. There were some scenes in which the protag was not present, so it was told in the third-person persppective. My teacher insisted that this was not possible.

That confused me because I had literally done it. How was it not possible? What she meant, of course was that it was not acceptable to write a book that way, which also made no sense to me. She was adamant that if the protag was in first person, then that protag had to be in every scene.

Cut to five or so years later, when it’s all the rage to have different perspectives in a book, including a book in which the main protag is in first person. I wanted to call her up and smugly point out that I had been ahead of my time.

I have a weird brain that doesn’t understand why I can’t do something that I can clearly do. I know that there are imaginary social constructs/norms that I cannot see, even in writing. I have spent all my life trying to figure out what I need to do to nominally pass in the greater society, and there are still things that surprise/shock me. It’s not pleasant, by the way.

When I was in grad school for writing, my advisor read a short(er) story I wrote about a serial killer who was an Asian American woman and extremely violent. He said I should make her white because people would focus on the race and not the actual story. While I knew what he was saying was right, I refused to change the race because I had no interest in only writing ‘good’ or ‘nice’ Asian people. That to me was another side of racism because it does not allow a minority person to be fully fleshed out.

It’s difficult to let people critique my writing because I have such a strong voice, and I have a clear view on what I want to do with a piece/story/novel. And, quite frankly, I don’t care if readers don’t get what I’m trying to go for. I’m sure most writers say that they have a clear vision, but the difference is that I know I’m out of the norm. I’m on the very fringe of society.

It’s difficult because I’m not obviously Fringe (with a capital F). I’m also straight-edged in that I don’t drink or do drugs, which puts me ouutside the artistic crowd. And I’m not crazily experimental in my style. I was talking to K about Mary Oliver. Ian had sent me a poem by her (Mary Oliver), and I sent him one back. I remembered that K had mentioned Mary Oliver being one of her favorite poets, so I asked her about it. She said she loved Mary Oliver, even if some people complained she was too didactic.