I find myself constantly refreshing the Kickstarter page, waiting to hit my funding goal. It’s sad, really, but it’s a better way to manage my anxiety rather than overeating or heavy drinking. Honestly, if the campaign funded this week, I wouldn’t worry about the total so much.
When I created the character of Mei Yin, I wanted to have her personal flaw to be unworthiness. Why would she feel unworthy to continue the work of her order in the United States? What could she have done that would make her feel like she didn’t deserve to be here?
Then I had another problem. Mei Yin was adopted by Americans. If her adoptive parents were killed and she found her way to the White Crane Temple as a young girl, wouldn’t they have tried to get her back to the American Consulate? I realized she needed to have “gone native” for a few years.
Then, while rewatching John Wu’s Hard Boiled for the 100th time, I thought about having a Triad (Chinese mafia) involved in the story. Still not knowing where to put all the pieces, I wondered if Mei Yin could have been involved somehow in the Triad.
At first, I thought about her being a full Triad member, but wasn’t sure about it. Then I thought about her being abducted by the Triad with the intention of trafficking her until they found out she was a linguist.
The second idea sent me down a dark road, writing a horrible chain of events for her including a rape scene, and had her permanently marked as property of the Triad with a tattoo covering her back. A tattoo that would be a problem later in the story.
When I finished the pages, I felt terrible. Like I had permanently marred my character.
I told my friend, Charity (a fellow comic book fan), about it, she said, “…we are just really tired of seeing raped women overcoming as an origin. There is so much more about us that can make us strong. So much more feeds our fire, our rage, our sense of justice. Those are the kinds of stories we want to read.”
Who am I to deny that? I said that I had been toying with the idea of “a Triad turns saint character…”
She replied, “Like... that’s a story I want to read, already. What are her motivations? What made her want to turn? Is she having a crisis on conscience? Is this a Shaolin version of Better Call Saul where she is trying really hard to be good but the dark side just keeps creeping in? Does she struggle being good? Did she struggle being bad? Who is she really, when all bets are off? She’s already a much more interesting and complicated character. Like... I want to read this comic.”
My only response to that was “Can I name a character after you? I want to credit you with saving the book.”
So I did.
And I changed Mei Yin’s origin story to someone who chose to become a member of the Triad. It was crazy how much better I felt after the rewrite. Like I finally got the story right.
Notice that Charity’s arrival in the present comes just as she recalls making her choice and getting her tattoo? Art imitates life.
But what about her tattoo? Now, instead of the shame of being the property of the Triad, she now has the guilt of once belonging to the Triad, and having a dark side that could come out at any moment (issue #6), and the tattoo is a permanent reminder of that. But it also stands for her ability to make that choice. She chose to be a member and chose to leave. She chose to become a bhikshuni and a warrior. Her tattoo should symbolize hard choices. So I gave her a phoenix.
Want to show off your empowerment? You can get a special-edition, only available during this campaign, t-shirt featuring Mei Yin’s tattoo. Choose either the “Comic Book & a T-Shirt” reward tier, or any of the “Bundle” tiers, or select it as an add-on when you order a physical reward!
The lesson, in the end, is that asking for help and being willing to accept it can make a huge difference in your writing. I know it did in mine.