Why I wrote The Tales of the Swordsman
Sword of Sorrow has been out for about a week and I'm still super stoked about it. I thought I'd share a bit about why I wrote this novel. When I was a kid I watched The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Saber (My Jin Yong/Louis Cha fans, where you at?), and I was absolutely captivated by the story. Martial arts! Super cool looking swords! I was in love.
One problem though: language barrier.
I had to rely on my Mom to translate and tell me what was going on. My Chinese just wasn't good enough. Soon after I set off to the library hoping for an English copy of the story to read.
No luck.
In fact, it was really hard to find any kind of wuxia story to read. I was crushed and had to settle for a samurai story (which is a fantastic consolation prize, but not what I was hoping for. I think I read The Village of the Vampire Cat. Super fun book.)
Years later I came across this Toni Morrison quote:
"If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it."
There are a lot of quotes about writing, but this one really hit home. There aren't a lot of wuxia stories out there—and not much that you can really say is mainstream in English. I needed to write my own wuxia story. A year later, my first novel is out and I'm just getting started...
A DEEPER DIVE
I'm a big fan of crossovers and blending of genres, or taking certain genre tropes and applying it to different settings. I'm always fascinated by seeing how artists can take different storytelling conventions and reinterpret it into something new. One of my all-time favorite movies is Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet--seeing Shakespeare in a modern 'Latin' setting blew my mind at the time. I like Tarantino's Kill Bill series for how it paid homage to classic martial arts movies, but I didn't like all the gore.
I've always loved the spaghetti western--the lone gunman with a checkered past, gunfights, duels, the bounty hunters, etc--and I'm a really big fan of the Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. It was a recent viewing of that that inspired me to take those tropes and apply it into a wuxia-type setting. Hence my story: a lone swordsman hired by a runaway. A friend of mine read my first chapter and said it reminded her of True Grit, and that was such a lightbulb moment for me, that I decided to lean into it. I thought I could write a wuxia story that was a bit more grounded than classic Jin Yong. I love Condor Hero, but he has some pretty convenient storytelling that I don't think you can really get away with as an author today.
We've seen this sort of crossover and back and forth before--Kurosawa's Yojimbo inspiring A Fistful of Dollars--and I wanted to tell more stories like it. The crossover westerns and eastern elements is already there. My goal as a fiction writer is to bring the wuxia genre to life with some of these tropes that they are familiar with and start introducing the more traditional wuxia elements (the martial arts, the qing gong flying through the trees) as we go along. My logic is that if someone likes samurai stories, they might like wuxia--something tangentially related.
The short of it? I just want to make wuxia more accessible for the mainstream in the way samurai are mainstream.
