The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: Influence

  • Writers are Clay, Life is the Mold

    I believe that every experience a writer has shapes his or her writing. Everything we do informs and influences who we are, and therefore what we write. Some of the things are minor. If I read a really good book, maybe my writing sounds like that style for awhile. If I find something incredibly unjust, I get up on my soapbox and include that theme in a story. Writers are like sponges, soaking up what is all around them, and then wringing it out onto a page. We mimic real life so that it feels real when it’s being read, and the best way to do that is take what happens in our lives and re-purpose it for our writing (although this isn’t always a conscious process).

    Then there are profound life events that can forever change the way we think and feel, which can drastically alter our writing. Marriage. Children. Divorce. Death. These experiences dig deep trenches within us which fill with pools of emotion. From these pools we have an even greater depth to pull from when we write.

    When my Mom died after struggling with breast cancer on and off for almost a decade, I was profoundly changed as a person. My mom was the most important person in my life. There really are no words to describe what it was like to watch her die for years, and then lose her before I was even 30 years old. I wrote an entire novel for National Novel Writing Month in November trying to find the words, and they still seem inadequate.

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  • Truth Hurts, but It’s Worth It

    Stories like this are tricky. Ultimately, they’re subjective. All I can do is lay out the events as I see them, and you have to understand that I’m giving you a single point of view. This is my own admittedly biased experience, and others in this tale could take exception to my interpretation. Be that as it may, this is the event that I feel has done the most to shape me into the writer I am today.

    Growing up, my brothers and I hit the daily double of childhood. We were both rural and poor, and from an early age we were taught to distrust authority. Most of our conversations with non-related adults consisted of the following phrases: “I don’t know,” and “they’re not here right now.” The tenants of our family were simple and observed like dogma: support it, defend it, and keep everything in house.

    If you weren’t blood, our affairs were none of your damned business, and marrying in didn’t necessarily afford you with a right to know.

    As a child, this sort of fierce loyalty appealed to me, and I saw something noble and good in its application. My brothers and I belonged to something greater than ourselves, and we thought it was something worth defending. I no longer feel that way.

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  • Rise Above the Tears

    Grandpa Joe

    Sometimes, tears can be our greatest inspiration. They force us to react, and rise above ourselves.

    Almost a year ago, I really kicked up my writing output. I wrote a lot. I read a lot. I started to find myself as an artist. Then, in December, my Grandpa Joe lay in hospice, dying of cancer.

    This affected me in many ways. Perhaps the most direct is the blog I wrote while struggling with my feelings about his impending death: A Train Ride to an Unknown Stop

    I wrote it in the middle of the night, right after finding out. I bought a domain name so that my blog would be easier to find, and then I posted it. My post had nearly six hundred views in December.

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  • The Exotic Mundane

    “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” – George Santayana

    The writer’s mind is like a sponge, absorbing all moisture from around it, only to spill everything when squeezed. Your life is going to creep in to your writing, even if you don’t subscribe to the “write what you know” belief. Instinct drives the expression of the human mind through art. Writers are artists.

    What’s more, you shouldn’t fight it. Artists are illusionists of reality. We take the real and twist it, deforming fact into fiction. We get our readers to believe our stories by weaving the truth and fantasy into a tight, indistinguishable mesh.

    You absolutely should take aspects of those around you, their quirks, habits, vices, and hobbies. You should use those aspects to create three-dimensional characters. But you should also remember that fiction is fiction, and you must change enough about those people that they can’t sue you for libel or defamation of character. Change their names, appearances, speech patterns, everything.

    Writing is like a puzzle that can be put together many different ways. Unless you are writing non-fiction, you must make sure it is actually a fictional character, no matter how real it seems. Or you can take the advice of Anne Lamott if it is a man. Write that the character has a small penis.  No one will ever claim you were writing about him.

    In recent years, I’ve seen a lot of real life creep in to writing, mostly because I realized it was pointless to write about people living in cities. I’ve never been to a large city, much less lived in one. How could I possibly know what it is like to live in New York City or Los Angeles? Besides, there are more than enough writers writing about those settings. I am familiar with the rural, the suburban, and the dynamics of living in a place where everyone knows about you.

    Very few writers can duplicate that knowledge. I know what it is like to be known by everyone in your area. I know what is like to live in a place where secrets are hard to keep and the difference between friends and enemies is defined by days, rather than names. I know what it is like to have to worry about reputation, not in the media or your career, with your neighbors.

    As such, I dove into reading Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and others who wrote about similar places. These environments are a part of my life, their people a part of my history, and my fiction is richer for using them.

    Don’t be afraid to use the parts of your life that seem mundane. What is mundane for one may be exotic for another. Spice your writing with the ingredients of your life, and make it a truly special concoction.

  • Seriously, Try This at Home

    Sometimes external influences are awesome for writing. Sometimes they’re really not. Sometimes only in moderation.

    There are three things that do wonders for my writing ability when consumed in moderation:  caffeine, sugar, and alcohol. Of those three, caffeine has the most positive effect on me… it is also what I can have the most of before my story mutinies against me and my fingers vomit letters on the page—sometimes they even form words, even more rarely they form complete thoughts. That’s all provided that the shaking doesn’t do me in first and I don’t end up in the fetal position twitching. (more…)

  • You Influence Me, You Really Influence Me

    Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way.

    Television gives me an idea of what works and what doesn’t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in the telling. Sometimes it’s more about recognizing patterns in a particular show. The same writers, the same characters, the same circumstances—in some shows that pattern gives away the murderer to someone who’s spent several seasons analyzing each episode. It doesn’t mean it’s a mistake, necessarily. But it is something for a writer to take away to either use or avoid in her own work.

    Movies, like TV, are for learning what works and doesn’t work. In this longer form, I can learn about the effective (and ineffective) use of tension and how it rises and falls to carry the story forward. I believe you can learn as much, if not more, from a bad movie as you can a good one.

    Food has to come into play, too. In my series, I have a closet monster who’s a gourmet chef. I am not a gourmet chef. This means I have to pay attention when we go out for a really good meal. A special New Year’s Eve menu we had at a local restaurant two years ago made its way into book two. The scene required a very fancy menu, and I still had the menu from New Year’s. I ate that meal myself. It was phenomenal. So I reused it on a dinner-cruise scene.

    Music is not so much about learning for me as it is about mood.

    I don’t think there’s a quicker way to influence a person’s mood than with music. Songs tend to be short, maybe three minutes long, and yet in the space of that time I can have all my worries lifted off my shoulders or be reduced to tears. It’s a kind of magic all on its own. When I write, I only play music without lyrics, since I need my own words to go on the page. But mood is everything. When I’m writing about Zoey, I often to listen to the Final Fantasy station on iTunes radio. When I write my djinn stories, I listen to music that sounds more like it’s for belly dancing.

    Art is for inspiration more than any other medium. I can stand in front of a painting of a woman in a chair for a half hour, wondering about her life, whether she was happy, if she had any pets or children or bad habits. After a day spent at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, my fingers itch. My eyes are unfocused and my thoughts are far away. All those paintings and sculptures swirl around in my head and form characters and scenes in faraway places.

    For a writer, everything is influential. It’s all or nothing. If we closed ourselves off from our surroundings, we wouldn’t have anything to write about.

  • Input/Output

    Just as writers get ideas from all around us, we also are influenced by everything we come into contact with. I dedicated a portion of my own personal blog entries to this phenomenon, which I affectionately call the Input/Output modes. Anything we take in inevitably affects what comes out.

    As a writer, I talk a lot about other writers and books that influence me, but sometimes I forget how much the other categories of art inspire me, as well.

    Music is a powerful one. When I listen to instrumental music, new worlds unfold inside my mind, and I envision scenes to fit with that music. When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed listening to my favorite movie soundtracks and make up new stories to go with them. Hell, I still do that sometimes. For some novels, I’ll create a Pandora station based around certain songs or bands for a certain mood. For others, I will pick one specific instrumental movie soundtrack and listen to it over and over, which shapes my story quite a bit, inspiring scenes I wouldn’t have otherwise fathomed.

    Visual arts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs – also trigger stories in me. I have always struggled with setting and description. I have a vague idea of what a person or place looks like, but the details are usually missing in my writing. Visual representations help me really consider the details.  Sometimes a picture will really speak to me and I’ll be driven to write a story that fits the scene. I’ll want to tell the story of how that domed city on the cliff came to be, or why the sky has inexplicable green miasma in it, or where that dragon got all of those books. Then characters will start to wander around inside the images to answer all of these questions for me.

    The arts aren’t the only other medium that influence my writing, however.

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  • You’re Derivative. Get Over It.

    How similar is my own writing to that of the authors I like?

    Right off the bat, I was not a fan of this question.  It really turned me off.  Maybe even pissed me off a little.

    I was all like, “[BLEEP] you, voice on high” (otherwise known as the Café’s editors).  “I don’t write like anybody.  My style is my own.  Maybe you’re the ones who are a bunch of derivative mother-[BLEEP]ers.”

    I’m not going to lie.  It wasn’t pretty.  I went on like that for a good, solid five . . . days, but really who’s counting?  The point is I had this immediate protective reaction for not only the stories I create but the way I create them.  The thought that this voice I’m trying to cultivate might have its origins with someone else was upsetting and disheartening, and it sent my brain spiraling into what I can only describe as a mental hissy fit.

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  • A Monk of the Order of Bradbury

    “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

    I am a collector of worthless books.  For some unknown, deep-seated, pathological reason, I have the need to hoard large number of books.  Most were purchased for a buck or two from used bookstores and will never have a financial value worthy of their shelf space.

    Yet, I love them.  I read them.  I gaze at the spectrum of colors and shapes they produce on my bookshelves.  I shamefully smell their crisp, yellowing pages.  But, I rarely re-read them.

    Certainly, I have books I enjoy, even books I love, but with the sort of memory I have, the idea of wasting time reading a book I have already read seems inefficient and clumsy.  The exception has come with two or three particular books.  I enjoy them immensely, but my favorite book of all-time is Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

    As a reader, I go through spurts of reading a particular writer.  One of my Bradbury spurts happened along at the same time I was really learning to write fiction.  I’ve read countless tomes on grammar, mechanics, plot and structure.  Most were individually forgettable, although I did get some nugget of information from each that will hopefully someday bear fruit.

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