If you happen to have crossed paths with me in life before, you would find that the source material in this novel to be strangely familiar. You are not too far from the truth; a large part of the story draws parallels that have gone one in one aspect of my life. The chief difference of course is that the characters are all fictional, and so are the events that are presented. The locations and mannerisms of some of the cast are based on some of the places that I have been to and the people that I have interacted, with heavy fictionalisation of course. Actually, let's just introduce the full cast and talk more about them here. All these information comes from my idea file, which, as you might recall, is my master planning document.
- Heng Kar
- This guy is the protagonist's protagonist. I planned my story to have two inter-weaving story lines, one in first person perspective, the other in third person perspective. Heng Kar is the one that I chose to write in first person. His name is a play on the word ``hacker'', which is basically what he is: an aspiring programmer within the computer club of the school. I chose Heng Kar to be the first person perspective due to the ease in conveying his thoughts and ideas to the reader; it's hard to go wrong with talking about what a geek is thinking, particularly on rather objective things like computer programs, and even remarking on the behaviours of people around him/her. I gave him a few ``typical'' roles that he might play in school life, like being a subject representative for Mathematics, and liking soya bean milk. Initially, I had wanted Heng Kar to ``merge'' with Kah Hao later on as two conflicting parts of the same person, but decided somewhere during the middle of the writing to avoid doing so to avoid the cliché ``multiple personality syndrome'' trope that will most likely occur. Due to that rather last minute change, I made it such that Heng Kar used to be in Chinese Orchestra as a dizi (笛子) player, which made the eventual merging easier.
- Kah Hao
- This guy is the other protagonist, but due to his third person style of presentation, he seems a little more distant to the reader than Heng Kar. The choice of name was sort of random; only sort of because the initials of Kah Hao were deliberately chosen to be the reverse of Heng Kar, which plays upon my earlier concept of them being a part of the same person, a concept that I ditched midway due to the implausibility of the matter. Kah Hao's choice of musical instrument is the dizi (笛子), which is coincidentally the one that I play in real life. Actually, it's not coincidental; the details of his instrument bag are exactly like that of the one that I own, and Kah Hao is a strong reflection of the younger musician in me back in the day. I chose to keep him far away from school to show his penchant of sleeping on buses, which made his three-thousand-ish-word-long dream sequence more relevant when he slept on the bus on the way back from the rehearsal at the orchestra. Again, since I wanted him to ``merge'' with Heng Kar in the end, I didn't make him a part of the school orchestra till much later, which made it easier for them to meet and lead to the final conclusion that I wrote for the novel.
- Siew Wah
- Siew Wah is a joke, literally. His name sounds like 笑话 in Cantonese, which means literally ``a joke''. He's kinda the smart sidekick of Heng Kar, and I liked to use him as a general geekier-than-thou-art character, which is useful when I need to graft in the reasons as to why Heng Kar could transfer out of the robotics division into a hard core programming division. I also wanted a sounding board for Heng Kar, in the sense that I find it nice for Heng Kar to actually talk to someone as opposed to thinking deeply about things in his head without verbalising, which makes him sound neurotic more than anything else.
- Ms Tan
- She's a Scary Teacher, but one who is reasonable. She is based on an old teacher I once had, but I made Ms Tan a little milder than the one I had for class (sorry), otherwise Siew Wah would not get away with the things that he has done, and the story will probably be stuck where they are trying to get out of trouble from her.
- Tiffany
- She's a real mystery. I don't really know much about her, but she seems to have some kind of liking for Kah Hao, or at least, I tried to insinuate that she had some kind of liking of Kah Hao. It was hard to work in a romance angle, and I didn't really try to force the issue---two thirteen-year-olds dating while I'm trying to weave the two story lines of Heng Kar and Kah Hao together? No thanks... too much work. I just kept her as a good yangqin (扬琴) player who accompanies Kah Hao. Tiffany is an amalgamation of two girls that I know who also played the yangqin (扬琴), and I'm not telling if the crush that Kah Hao had on Tiffany is reflective of what I might have felt.
- Mr Ang
- I had some fun writing Mr Ang, the retired professional musician who is trying to keep the orchestra together while maintaining an element of fun while he looks like a scary being. The observations that he made of the music that they played are based on the words that I have heard a few of my music directors said before, and I liberally used what they said while tailoring them to the pieces that were played. Oh, the music are real, so are the titles and the nuances that I highlighted through the commentary---it is as real as it gets.
- Zhang Jie
- I basically needed a reason for Kah Hao to be running up the stairs and colliding with Heng Kar for that initial meeting and the first step for the merge of the two storylines. It would sound a bit weird if the main conductor (Mr Tew) were doing the conducting and then they all disappeared half-way---the timing also meant that it was probably more believable if a student conductor were present, which was based on what I had observed from some of the school-based orchestras that I have seen.
- Tian Kun
- I needed a character to have more prowess in dizi playing than Kah Hao, both to show that Kah Hao had external training, and to provide a natural means of ``unearthing'' Heng Kar's hidden talent at dizi playing. Remember that at the time of the novel, Kah Hao had to rehearse with Tiffany for a concert, so having him ``vet'' Heng Kar was unrealistic. Besides, I needed an oxymoron character (muscular guy playing dizi? hahahaha) who has more purchasing power than the thirteen-year-olds to supply the dizi for Heng Kar to play.
- Mr Cheong
- He was an excuse for me to write that whole excursion to Sum Lum Mall. It's my play on the shopping habits of the über-geeks.
- Hilltop High School
- Ah hahahahaha! This one is quite fun; it's a play on my old secondary school (can you guess how?). In fact, the old campus of my old secondary school features prominently in the story, particularly that spiral staircase where I spent many hundreds of words describing as people walked up and down, ran up and down and crashing into each other. That old campus is probably gone by now, since the said school has since moved away to a bigger campus to accommodate the increasing number of students from a slew of new programmes that they have come up with over the years.
- Chinese Orchestra of the Community Club
- This one keeps remaining unnamed in the story, but the location and the orchestra itself is loosely based on the Chinese Orchestra that I play with at Teck Ghee Community Club. That said, the people involved are not wholly based on the people who are in the orchestra; specifically Mr Ang is really a figment of my imagination. Honest! The description of the room is vaguely similar to the actual layout in the actual room where the inspiration was drawn from.
- Computer Laboratory at Hilltop High School
- Like all the sub-locations in the Hilltop High campus, this one is based on a real computer laboratory that I spent many afternoons in. Most of the descriptions are about the computer lab circa 2000, when they revamped the old layout of computers into the new one. But I was bummed enough to not write a definite year in the story, who knows when it occurred?
- Sum Lum Mall
- Hahahahaha... my personal favourite. This is really a weakly disguised version of ``Sim Lim Square'', the biggest computer parts selling complex in Singapore. I just tried to mangle one aspect of the name, which gave me that weird sounding one of ``Sum Lum Mall''.
Initially, I started off with the idea of writing two seemingly divergent story lines, with one told from a first person perspective, and the other with the third person perspective, and to unify them towards the end. It was originally meant to be an ``inner struggle'' story, with two competing ideologies within the head of the protagonist manifesting themselves as two completely different people, but as noted earlier, I found that a bit risky and not worth the careful segregation that was needed to make the story believable. So I modified it such that two real people were involved, and then the rest of the story concept was still the same.
Was I satisfied with the work? Well, sort of, since there are so many sub-plots that I didn't have the chance to flesh out, from Kah Hao's relationship with his parents, Kah Hao's seeming crush on Tiffany, Heng Kar's rise towards programming eliteness, Kah Hao and Heng Kar's frienship with each other, Ms Tan's views on the ``meteoric'' rise of Heng Kar, more computer algorithms lessons from Mr Kang, geeky jokes---well you get the idea. So much to write, so little to write them; I had to make sure I actually ended the story by November in order to ``count'' for NaNoWriMo.
So there you have it. The ``spoilers'' and inspirations on how I got to writing ``A Slice of Life with a Twist of Lemon''. What are you waiting for? Download the original draft of the novel here and start reading! (=
