Pop Goes The World Joann Ware
I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can rem ember. I began writing short stories when I was in third grade and then progressed to penning novels when I was in middle school.
In eighth grade I began working on a novel that was inspired by a song that was popular at the time. The song was “One Night in Bangkok,” which was a track from the concept album “Chess” with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by ABBA alumni Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. “One Night In Bangkok” tells the tale from the point of view of a world-weary chess player of a high-stakes chess tournament in the city of Bangkok, Thailand. I was captivated by the word play of the song and its lush orchestrations. It is delivered in a rap by English actor Murray Head.
The song does not paint a very flattering picture of the city with its “muddy old river” and massage parlors and for a while it was banned from the radio in Thailand.
By the spring of 1985, I had fleshed out a story about 19-year-old Sarah Jacobson who travels by a clipper ship to Bangkok, Siam, in 1888 to tutor the young daughter of a widowed noblewoman named Lady Tusaing. At her side is her fiancé, John Remington, who will earn his keep as a fisherman while Sarah teaches. They are joined later by John’s sister, Susan, whom Sarah despises because of her loose morals. Sarah intends to remain true to her fiancé, but when she has a chance meeting with reclusive retired chess champion Anthony Townshend, her loyalty to John is tested.
I worked on the novel off and on for several years, finally finishing it when I was in college. I remembered not being very happy with it and embarking pretty quickly on starting a second draft. I started the second draft my senior year in college and finished it soon after I graduated.
Recently I went searching for both drafts and found them in a plastic bin in the basement with some other manuscripts and notebooks. I didn’t even bother to thumb through the pages of the first draft since I had once considered it to be so bad it would probably stink up the room if I even dared open it. I decided to take a look at the second draft, which is 545 double-spaced type-written, Liquid Paper-spackled pages bound together by a light blue report cover I purchased at Kmart for 93 cents.
The night before this past Palm Sunday, I began reading the second draft manuscript in the loft room of our home. Since being hired as a copy editor at The News-Gazette nearly 20 years ago, it’s very hard to turn off my editing brain when I’m reading. I found myself grimacing at the multiple typographical errors and repetitive passages. I put a lot of emphasis on Sarah’s youth. Even the woman who hired her to tutor her daughter cannot believe that Sarah is so young. Did she not think to ask in advance, “Oh, by the way. how old are you?” Back then I was also quite fond of the simile “silent as a goldfish.” I suppose I was right. Goldfish are not known for their noisiness.
The heroine, Sarah, comes off as being very naive and even child-like at the beginning. She is a fan of the romantic poets and spends a great deal of time teaching her pupil, Su Lyn, about them.
When she learns about reclusive chess champion Anthony Townshend, she is convinced that he has gone mad and probably has horrible hygiene. But when she meets him she is relieved to see that he is of sound mind and actually smells pretty amazing. Sarah doesn’t play chess, but she is willing to learn. She might as well learn from someone who is a master of the game. After weeks of tutorials, Sarah becomes fairly proficient at the game, but bored by it as well. She’d rather venture out in Anthony’s black rockaway carriage and go sightseeing. For some dumb reason when their relationship advances to the kissing stage, Anthony and Sarah often stroll down to the docks where their affectionate gestures are on full view by the dock workers, including Sarah’s fiancé. Does she want John to see them when she knows that John has anger issues? After all, he did once yell at her at a church picnic for showing too much leg.
When I first started reading the draft, I developed an unfavorable opinion of Sarah Jacobson and I wondered why I had written her as such a dull character who, aside from her youth and beauty, doesn’t seem to have much going for her. What I found was in the second half of the novel, Sarah becomes the sort of woman she never thought she’d turn out to be. Anthony is gone from her life for quite some time, and when he returns, he finds that the young girl he left behind is someone who has faced hardships and has become stronger for them.
By the time I finished reading the draft, I found myself cheering for Sarah. Though she never becomes a champion chess player, she does learn something about strategizing her own life beyond the confines of her puritanical upbringing and anticipating the moves of anyone who dares to oppose her.
I am thinking about writing a third draft. We’ll see what the summer brings.
