How K-Dramas Transformed My Life

a "Behind the Curtain" article

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I just got back from a week long bus tour of South Korea, visiting a bunch of KDrama filming sites and let me tell you it was so magical I was messaging Meg Oolders in the middle of the night to tell someone—anyone who cared—that we were staying in the hotel used as the North Korean hotel in “Crash Landing on You”, for the North Korean hotel. You know, the one with listening devices.

The tour¹ is led by Jeanie Chang, a licensed family and marriage therapist, who discovered that setting KDramas as homework for her clients fostered connection and healing. She’s written a book “How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life: Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health”. She asked each of us to answer that question in the first days of the tour.

But first, here’s that stunning interior with me voice over raving about the trip highlights, which I realise will make no sense to you if you haven’t yet got on the KDrama Wagon Train.

How Has K-Drama Transformed My Life?

KDramas (particularly the romantic ones) are like a comfy cozy blanket to soothe myself with. I started watching them before the pandemic, but now, aside from the occasional Western drama and C-Drama, they are all I watch.

Then I realised—wait a minute, the reason why I am writing again is because of KDramas!

If you’ve been here since the beginning, you might remember this post:

I Gave Up My Writing Career: What Am I Doing Here??

But if not, here’s what happened: after having been published with a NY publisher, I burned out. As I wasn’t a best-selling author, I had to remake myself to find that next contract.

I couldn’t have named this at the time, and in fact would have argued strenuously with you about it, should you have dared to suggest it, but the whole publication process didn’t align with my values, my reason for writing, so I quit.

I write to get the stories out, to let my imagination run where it wants to, not to be fitted into some sort of subgenre box within a box.

In K-Dramas, the heroine often has to choose between two men (does this sound familiar?). The second male lead is often just as interesting a character as the male lead and, imho, often more likable. Even the bad boys.

This Second Male Lead Syndrome (where we want her to choose the other guy—yes, this is a thing) led me to making up stories where the second male lead finds true love.

Examples would be Kim Woo-bin’s high school bully in “The Heirs” (or “The Inheritors”), Lee Hyun as the princely cousin in “The King’s Affection”, and Yoo Yeon-seok as Dong-mae, the bad boy Korean butcher-boy turned Japanese samurai. (Can you tell I got invested?)

Kim Woo-bin, Lee Hyun, Yoo Yeon-seok

Don’t they deserve happy endings too?

Fast forward over 15 years of not writing fiction to 2023. I needed to justify a stationery supply purchase and the first idea was to write a fictional journal (that part at least stuck). The story idea was basically a time travel KDrama, a thoroughly-honoured trope in both romance novels and Korean drama.

The story evolved from a Joseon-era time travel to what The Môrdreigiau Chronicles are today: a Regency miss needing to save the world from ecological collapse via finding Arthurian treasures, set mostly in West Wales, with sea dragons. (And Second Male Lead Syndrome #sorrynotsorry)

Thus, thanks to KDramas and the invitation to consider writing as play, I became a writer again, putting out chapters once a week with multiple serials in the works!

This has changed my life from being a person who spends time in the studio painting to one who struggles to find the time to paint.

Both painting and writing are good for my mental health. They both fully engage my brain and give me joy in various ways. While it’s more obvious to me how the painting process helps me work through obstacles or baggage, I’m sure the writing is also cathartic in some way that I just can’t see.

Or maybe it doesn’t have to serve an additional purpose: it can just be to play.

*gasp*

KDramas transformed my life because it gave me back my writing and allowed me to play without toeing some production deadline or outline.

Did this recent trip inspire me? Uhh, yes it did. At the time of scheduling this, I haven’t written any fiction for over two weeks.

The ancient Silla capital of Gyeongu inspired a new story although it is very nebulous despite the handful of supplies I purchased from a calligraphy shop in Seoul. (Because of course we’re talking fictional journals again.)

It was odd: Gyeongu felt weirdly familiar and yet disjointed, like the city had disappeared and yet was hiding in plain sight.

Burial mounds at Gyeongu

There are hills near the burial mounds that my guide said were natural hills and I’m like no way, those are earthen walls for the palace. Maybe it was the lost archaeologist in me, but maybe I just knew … because I later read that they are the city walls, man-made, not natural!

hills taken from a moving bus (those are the weird lights)

But the story will require a ton of research because I know next to nothing about the ancient kingdom of Silla, and this story, if I am to do it justice, needs to be well-researched because as someone who writes historicals, you’ve got to know your time period.

While I steered clear of appropriating a culture that’s not mine when I first returned from writing, this era seems so ancient (like it’s a thousand-year time period that ended in 935 BCE), that maybe it would be okay if a non-Korean wrote this story. Or maybe it won’t come to anything, like the story set in Glastonbury and Wells that has a single glimpsed scene in a deja vu moment and I haven’t been able to hang a whole story from it yet.

In the meantime, partly because I love K-Dramas so much and partly because they are such fun story-telling tropes, I obviously can’t help but bring in some elements that would be familiar to KDrama watchers and not jarring to those who don’t. I get a kick out of including them.

Because without K-Dramas, who knows? Maybe this Substack would never exist.

PS. I am thinking of doing a Substack Live answering a whole host of questions (that I already have) as part of pivoting to a more author-y channel over at YouTube. I’ll be talking about writing and probably K-Dramas, so if you have any questions, please get them to me (reply to this email or DM me in Substack or the Chat) before Friday Australia time, as I’ll either be going live or recording on Saturday, depending.

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1. Check out her tours and get on the waiting list here: https://noonasnoonchitours.com