A friend on Facebook recently asked, “Can you share with us how you came to choose the storyline?”
This question would make most fiction writers smile because really, as a writer, a storyline chooses you. At least that has been my experience. Unexpected: Love started with one idea—the opening scene.
In late 2018, I started voraciously watching Korean dramas after a friend suggested that it would help with my Korean language learning. By March 2019, I had watched about a half dozen or so dramas, and one day this idea popped into my head. What would it be like to be a famous Korean man and feel that a woman, probably a fan, recognized you but didn’t seek to engage with you in any way? No autograph or photo request, just a simple nod and smile in greeting, then the woman turns her attention back to her own life. Would it be jarring? Welcomed? As the scene played out in my mind, I saw it happening in an airport in the US. This location would likely result in the Korean celebrity not being recognized by the majority of those in the airport, making this woman’s recognition further stand out.
When the idea first came to me, I felt the celebrity would be a Korean actor. I wrote out that scene and the idea seemed to stall. I just couldn’t figure out how the story would progress, so I sat the idea aside. My fiction writing has gone in cycles since I was 17—writing furiously when I was inspired, then nothing when I wasn’t, so this stall didn’t really surprise me. Then a few weeks later, I decided to change the male protagonist from an actor to a K-pop idol. Once the fictional music group InFINITY began to come to life, the ideas exploded and soon the full story of Jenna and Jae-seong played out in my mind.
This is how each of my stories has started—with one simple scene, just a nugget of an idea. My imagination is big so I just let the scenes play out and see where they take me. Once a very vivid dream (an actual dream that I had while sleeping) became a story, but that’s rare for me. Mostly they are thoughts that come to me as I contemplate the world. I’m a thinker.
Amy G. Park 