Spotlight: Eric Stone - Journalist turned author

For the better part of 30 years Eric Stone has worked as a writer, photographer, editor, publisher and publishing consultant. As a writer he covered a wide range of topics, including business, economics, finance, politics, arts, culture, sports, travel and once even wrote an advice to the lovelorn column for a bi-lingual English and Chinese fashion magazine.

Eric, I’ve sometimes been surprised by what my characters do in my novels. How about you? Do your characters surprise you and if so, what would you say was one of your biggest surprises?

Good. Let’s get past that right off the bat, Ray Sharp didn’t give me any choice, I had to kill him in Shanghaied. He got himself into a position that, being the kind of guy he was, there was no way he was ever going to get out of it. That Ray, always full of surprises. He even managed to surprise me and I thought I was in control of him.

How hard was it to decide to kill him off?

It was one of the most exciting, and frightening, times I’ve ever had as a writer. On the one hand I was worried that I’d written myself into a corner. On the other, when I asked myself what I was going to do now, there was a whole fresh slate of possibilities. The way it turned out, I’m very proud of myself. I managed to kill the narrator, in first person, midway through the book and keep it going in a way that seems to have brought most readers along with it.

We all have fans who favor one character or another. Did you upset any readers who liked Ray Sharp and did they let you know about it?

Apparently I did anger a few loyal readers by killing off Ray. But from what they’ve told me about why they liked him–a flawed, regular sort of guy who got by on his smarts, loyalty and perseverance rather than any sort of superman–it wouldn’t have been true to his character to have him get out of that situation.

Sometimes characters who the readers believe have been killed off miraculously resurrect in another novel due to a quirk or misassumption. Do you foresee this happening to him?

Short of a well-financed clamor from publishers, there’s no way I’m going to have Ray come back from the dead. I do have a couple of ideas for prequels–stories that I’d like to tell that took place even before the events of Living Room. And I do have two books planned that will carry on the story–narrated by Wen Lei Yue–that got underway in Shanghaied.

Many writers, including myself, develop characters based on real people or a composite. How do you develop your characters?

I get a lot of questions about how real the people, places, things and events are in my books. For better or worse, for the most part it’s all pretty real, or when it’s not it’s at least realistic. Maybe my imagination isn’t all that good, but during the years I was a journalist I never made up anything and it isn’t much different now that I’m a novelist.

How would you classify your novel? Can you give readers some sense of what they can expect in the Ray Sharp books?

The four Ray Sharp novels fall into two categories.

The Living Room of the Dead and Flight of the Hornbill are based on true stories with real life beginnings, middles and ends. I only had to, thinly, disguise the characters, make up some new characters and toss in some imagined events to get the stories told. You can even google the true stories. Living Room is loosely based on the sad tale of Gary Alderdice. Hornbill is loosely based on the Bre-X gold scandal.

Grave Imports and Shanghaied are based on collections of facts that I constructed a story around to better present real situations, issues and characters. The impetus for Grave Imports was a series of articles I wrote in the mid-1990s about the trade in stolen Cambodian antiquities. Shanghaied was cobbled together from a disparate group of facts having to do with various sorts of crime – financial, people trafficking, drugs, etc. – in China and Hong Kong in 1997, the time of Hong Kong’s return to China.

So with Ray out of the picture, what’s next? More crime novels with a new protoganist?

Now I’m taking a break from crimewriting. I’m working on a trilogy of novellas that are coming of age stories that deal with issues of race, culture and sexuality. They’re set in Los Angeles during three different time periods: 1947, 1969 and around 2000. The 1947 story takes place over the course of one night in the bars and nightclubs that used to line Central Avenue, south of downtown. The 1969 story is set all along the Los Angeles River. And the 2000 story is set in the huge new Chinese community in the San Gabriel Valley.

That sounds like quite a switch. What inspired you?

The novellas are a lot of fun to write since I grew up in Los Angeles and moved back here about ten years ago. I’ve always loved exploring the city. If you know it well and can put up with all the driving, it is probably the most diverse city in the world.

Having lived in L.A. myself since I was 13, I agree completely. Anything else in the works besides the novellas?

I’ve also recently begun writing short stories, something I haven’t done since I was in college. Even though I have had hundreds, maybe thousands of newspaper and magazine articles published, five books published and even some poems when I was young, I only had my first short story published in the current issue of the online magazine Dark Valentine (http://www.darkvalentine.net). And I’ve got another story coming up next year in an anthology called Bangkok Noir. It’s tough though, on a per word basis, I find writing short stories more difficult than writing novels.

Thanks for those insights, Eric. Once again I agree with you about it being more difficult to write short stories. I have several short stories in anthologies, and I think it’s because you really have to write tight with so few words to work with.

For more information about Eric Stone. www.ericstone.com

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Morgan St. James is Writing Examiner for both the Los Angeles and Las Vegas editions. Her Spotlight feature--Tuesday for Las Vegas and Wednesday for Los Angeles--always features a local or visiting author, organization or event in the writing community. Writers Tricks of the Trade is a "how to" column, Thursday in Las Vegas and Friday in Los Angeles, offering tricks, techniques and tips about writing, whether the reader is a published writer or one of the yet-to-be-published. Los Angeles and Las Vegas columns usually feature different people or topics.

A complete listing of links to previous columns: Los Angeles, Las Vegas.

Morgan will be presenting "From Novice to Novelist...and the bumps along the way" at the October 23 meeting of the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society. Meetings are open to the public. Click for details.

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