Two weeks ago, I woke up around 6:00 on a Saturday, ran through an outline of notes I had made the previous week, and took a 7:30 train into the city. I can’t remember being a morning person. I was just as bad as the next kid getting up for school in those few years I went to school. But for a long time now I’ve been able to wake my body up without an alarm clock at whatever time I pick before I slip off into my often dreamless sleep world. (If I can’t remember dreaming then in my book it never happened…)
I was 20円 short on change to take the subway to Akasaka station so I grabbed the next bus instead. Within a designated area in the city, the busses cost only 100円 regardless of where you get on or off. I hopped off in the upscale shopping area of Tenjin and hoofed it the rest of the way to the Fukuoka Now offices. I had to interview a Frenchman today for the local magazine.
Early morning in the city is nice, but a little displacing. The empty streets I’m so used to see full of people and traffic are empty except for stray cats and shop keepers sweeping their door ways and watering their flowers. The only things open are cafes and convenience stores. The city is lit up by this strange reflected dawn sunlight and the January air is crisp and biting. The people are either waking up or heading to bed. There are business men in fresh suits walking at a fast clip to their offices and men and women staggering in some half-dead walk-of-shame back to their homes and waiting futons.
I haven’t written anything for print since high school. I’ve written a lot and sent a total of one essay and three poems off to my college’s literary magazine when I was a junior. None of them were accepted. The only feedback I got back on my essay was, “Thanks for submitting. Half of the people loved your essay and the other half hated it. So you must be doing something right, but we couldn’t come to an agreement about your piece so it will not be featured.” I sort of shrugged it off, it annoyed me, but I guess the greatest damage it did was that I never really tried submitting anything else after that. I guess my college just wasn’t ready to accept a piece titled “Drugs & Jesus,” maybe it would have landed better in a more godless state.
Fukuoka is a small city. For foreigners trying to find a job or connection here there is one website that pops up most frequently in their web searches. Fukuoka Now is an online and print magazine. They publish monthly and have been steadily growing over the past few years. I originally contacted them when they were looking for someone to write about the local baseball franchise, the Softbank Hawks, in a reoccurring column. I told them I was interested, but had basically no experience writing. I’m guessing I was one of maybe one or two that contacted them. I don’t know or care really, but they got back to me in January asking for me to interview and do a write up on a French expat who played baseball competitively in both Japan and France. I didn’t even know the French played baseball… I told them I’d give it a try.
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I went along for the photo shoot jawing with the Frenchman, Nico, about baseball and his new profession as a physical fitness trainer. He was a nice guy, big but friendly. He got real serious when he started talking about physical fitness. Baseball he spoke of like someone who has finished their playing days enjoys rehashing the good ol’days, but when we got into the technicalities of building a body his eyes lit up and his voice changed. Listening to him talk about that stuff, I finally figured out how Donald Miller must have felt when he listened to that saxophonist outside of the Bagdad Theater in Portland. People’s passion has a way of rubbing off and Nico’s didn’t just rub off here and there, it just sort of poured out of him like some burst pipe.
We had a good talk and I didn’t take many notes because I don’t write fast enough and I don’t really know how you’re supposed to take notes when you interview someone. (If I do more interviews I’m going to buy a voice recorder.) Nico’s professional knowledge on building athletes supported my own views on physical fitness, a real first for me, but this was also a first I’ve spoken with an ex-baseball player turned professional fitness trainer. I realized that the reason for that was that our goals were similar when it came to working out. Most people go to the gym so that they look presentable in a bikini or can impress people when they flex. I went to the gym because I wanted to make a strong body and test the limits of my muscular potential. It’s building a body to look at versus building a body to live well.
Afterwards I took the chicken scratch I had in my notebook and as much as I could recall from memory and penned two articles; one for the print version and the second for the online article. The print version was pure hell for me. I had about a 90 minute interview I needed to condense into 450 words. I started and stopped it twenty times. I wrote it out completely three times. I diced it apart like a frog in 10th grade biology, and then put it back together like Humpty Dumpty. It was a mess and terrible and I hated it and I hated writing it.
Three days later I had my finished product: 500 words without an ending. So I spent Wednesday tinkering around with it adding a final paragraph, shaving off an adjective here and there, and rewriting the intro once again. Feeling a little disgusted with it all I emailed the draft to the editor of the magazine, Nick, and my interviewee, Nico. They gave me a thumbs up on the whole thing which made me feel a little better, but it’s the sort of better you feel after you finish climbing Mt. Fuji and you still feel like crap wondering what the hell you did that for.
The online article went much smoother. I actually wrote half of it while working on the print version and it is essentially the interview bracketed by an intro and closing statement from yours truly. It took me a week to finish tweaking that and by the time I was done I didn’t really want to look at the whole mess again. Again I got positive feed back but this is an English article in a country where 98% of the population speaks Japanese.
My biggest problem was I had to cut so much from both versions. I couldn’t possibly cover everything, and that’s okay, but it bothered me. I started writing this so I could fill in those blanks just for myself, but I’ve changed my mind now because I’m at a different place than I originally planned on writing to…
I know I have a definitive style when it comes to writing and I have a very present voice and tone, but weather I’m a good writer or not isn’t something I can figure out without people reading what I write. Maybe that scares me. I made me a little happy that I could make people both love and hate the same thing, but I’d rather bring people together I guess. But in this world that’s just not something that really happens. So this is an article by me that sounds like me, but for a change not about me. So check it out next month at Fukuoka Now. It will be my first published article, something of a milestone. You can read it in English, Japanese, and I think Chinese and Korean, though I don’t know how many languages they will publish it in.
