The Matt Zander Journals is my first novel.
It all started several years ago, when I wrote a screenplay about a slacker dude who had a life-changing near-death experience. After I was done, I still had a tonne of ideas and storylines I wanted to explore and decided that I’d begin work on a kind of ‘novel adaptation’ of the script (I knew I had a lot more to say than just script direction and dialogue). So, with all these story ideas buzzing around in my head, I began writing but immediately found myself adding a more personal slant to the story—some of my own experiences, soapbox thoughts and observations. That’s when the original idea started morphing, and the story began to take on a life of its own—or rather, it began to take on a lot of my own life. As I travelled from Toronto, through The Colorado Rockies and Las Vegas, heading for L.A., I continued to write, letting a lot of my own experiences shape the story, as if I was playing the main character of the 'movie' in my head. When I finally stopped writing in L.A., I had a 400-something page novel that I wanted the world to know about.
Y’know how some writers say, “the book just wrote itself”? Well, that’s exactly what happened. What started out as an expanded idea from one of my own screenplays, turned into a novel that I honestly didn’t want to finish—mostly because I was treating it as my own journal for what was going on around me, as I tried to figure out what I should be doing with my life. I realised at the time, how journal writing can be a cheap form of therapy, and people-watching, a cheap form of entertainment. During my road trip, there were times I even thought of abandoning the whole idea of a novel. I realised I simply wanted to explore my feeling lost in the world, not knowing who I was or why I was here. I wanted to explore the way the world appeared to a guy like me and the 'disconnectedness' I felt towards modern society. I wanted to explore a place like Las Vegas as a representation of everything wrong with a celebrity-worshipping, money-hungry, pill-for-everything, dumbed-down, psychobabble society that never stopped to think what it was doing or where it was going. And, not least, I wanted to explore on paper why every time I ended up in Los Angeles, I had this unbelievable sense of déjà vu that surged right through me.
Looking back, you could say I wrote this novel as much for myself, as I did for people to read. I’d had a fascination with near-death experiences for some years (since writing the original screenplay) and read dozens of accounts of people who had clinically died only to come back from the dead with stories about tunnels, gateways and spiritual guides telling them they ‘still had something to do in their life’—people who had their entire perspective change since their near-death experience. That was the kinda theme that really appealed to me. The idea that we all have something to do in life, a lesson to learn, but yet we don’t get a guidebook at the outset. Cos that’s all we really want to know in life right? Who we are. What we are meant to be doing. What our journey is. To find our true self. Everything else should be a distant second.
As I set out on my journey and left Toronto to begin writing, I still remember the advice a friend gave me for the novel I was planning.
“Gary,” he said, “write what you know.”
So I did.
