Neriad13
Premium Member
I'm really not sure where to put this. It's not a fanfiction, but it does pertain specifically to writers. So...for the time being, here, I guess?
My nosy question is this: what are the influences that have shaped your writing style?
Mine are an odd-ish mix of mangaka and mostly British fantasy writers.
- Dianna Wynne Jones - author of Hexwood, Howl's Moving Castle, the Chrestomanci Chronicles, A Tale of Time City and many others. What I love about her writing the best is the fact that there is always this huge external story that involves monsters and magic and saving the world and whatnot, but just as important as that is the internal story that's happening inside the characters. So many of her books have characters discovering something about themselves, oftentimes something that's obvious to everyone around them except themselves. And not all good either. But as the reader is seeing things from the inside of this character's mind, the obvious thing is not quite so obvious and comes as just as much of a shock to the reader as well.
Probably the most brilliant example of this technique has to do with a girl in The Merlin Conspiracy. After following her and her best friend for two hundred pages or so, she discovers that her friend has been continuously casting a love spell on her for most of her life, which causes her to constantly fuss about him protectively like a mother hen (normal behavior from her point of view, a bizarre occurrence to anyone else). He's found out by another wizard, who has the power to remove the spell and intends to do so. But she's terrified of that because she's had the spell on her for so long and doesn't know what sort of person she'll be without it. Now that, was riveting reading.
- Terry Pratchett - author of the Discworld series. Far and away the most hilarious writer I have ever read in my life. He never hesitates to make his characters look utterly foolish, even in a comparatively serious work. And for all the hilarity that goes on in his books, all of them do contain an extremely serious undertone, one which has the power to change how the reader views the world ever after, which shocks and awes with the scope of its beauty, which is made even more glorious when it comes out of what you'd thought was a simple comedy. His work deals with very dark topics, when you think on it. Possibly the most pervasive, fleshed-out and indeed, likable character in Discworld is the Grim Reaper himself.
This is most true in his final book, Nation, written very shortly after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's about a boy whose entire world and everything he knew within it was completely destroyed in the space of a day. It's a book that's constantly questioning the existence of God in the midst of a heartless reality and coming up with an ambiguous, though not altogether negative answer. And yet, as I read this, I found ample reason to laugh.
- Kentaro Miura - artist and writer of the dark fantasy manga, Berserk. Ever since I first read and saw this a year or two ago, it has become the most overpowering and pervasive influence on a great deal of my work. It's a story that holds nothing back, that talks of Life in all its raw and terrible glory. Every character matters and just about all of them come with a life-altering character arc. And all of them deal with the hideous evil that is locked away inside the hearts of every human being, contained only by sheer willpower and possibly love.
My favorite chapter centers around one evening in the company of two former lovers. Casca, the only person Guts could ever talk to in his life, the only shoulder he ever had to cry on, has been driven insane by the betrayal of his best friend and no longer knows who he is. Still, he loves her and knows now that he will have to spend the rest of his life taking care of her, though she fears him now. But the ghost of rage that is possessing him and his hunger for revenge against the friend who betrayed everything he held dear has other ambitions. That part of him also knows that Casca is slowing him down and holding him back, dragging on him as surely as a ball and chain. With her gone, he'd be free to carry out his overwhelming desires. And possessed by this idea, he tries to kill the person he loves most.
- Osamu Tezuka - the godfather of manga, artist and author of Astro Boy, Dororo, Buddha, Black Jack, Phoenix and literally a hundred other works that you probably know about but don't realize the connection to. The guy was tireless, defining nearly every genre of the medium in which he worked, drawing something like ten pages a day for forty years straight. The Phoenix series is his unfinished masterwork and the story that best exemplifies his favorite themes - namely death and reincarnation, inevitable fate, enduring love, self-sacrifice, optimism in a bleak world, creeping despair and the beauty that emerges from crushing, total tragedy. He's written some of the saddest scenes I've ever read in my life, ones that stick with a person forever after.
The one that I remember best is the death of Astro Boy - not the one in which he is rebuilt as an evil robot, his real, final death, so far as I know. It all started when an alien accidentally transported him back in time to the sixties. He tries and tries to find a way home, getting increasingly lonely in a place and time where he has no right to exist. Every lead he gets only leads him to another dead end. And to make matters worse, his fuel source hasn't been invented yet and his energy will run out if he doesn't conserve it. That isn't something he can do easily. The time in which he has landed in one rocked by turmoil and he is not the type of hero to stand idly by. At the end of the story, he finds himself in Vietnam, in a small farming village that is doomed to be bombed by enemy troops. He decides to use the last of his energy to turn back the planes and save the village. After doing so, he collapses, smiling and is buried by the villagers at the bottom of nearby river. The next day more bombers arrive and wipe the village from the map. Heavy stuff for what is normally considered a kids' book.
- Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell - creators of The Edge Chronicles. Two words: WORLD BUILDING. These two think of everything - from the function of complex machinery, to the breeding patterns of fantastical creatures, to the bizarre social strata of the places they've created, all the way up to an entirely new system of physics - everything is fresh and fascinating and not a detail is left out. It's a series of books as much about exploration as adventure and the plot is no slouch either.
I began reading these books starting with the second in the series. It wasn't until I was halfway or more through the entire series that I finally got a hold of the first book. I was shocked at how brutal and direct it was. The story is an exceedingly simple one - a kid gets horribly, irrevocably lost in a dangerous forest in which everything that moves is trying to eat him, as he searches for his dad. Things go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. He goes halfway down the gullet of a carnivorous tree. He sees a little girl who had been his friend transform into a bloodthirsty monster. The book is nothing more than him stumbling into trouble after trouble and coming out worse for wear every single time. It goes on for so long that the reader begins to believe that he'll never escape, that he'll never reach his goal. And then...he steps into a clearing and his dad is there. The moment actually made me tear up - I've seldom seen a resolution so well-earned.
- J. R. R. Tolkien - need I say any more? Father of fantasy, root of just about all the tropes we've come to expect in the genre. I have a map of Middle Earth on my bedroom wall. With that in mind, he's another great one for world building. I've even heard his works hailed as fantastical travelogues. The flavor of the Shire, the trees of Lothlorien, the heat of Mordor - they're all things that a reader can capture so easily in one's mind, perhaps better than many real places - that much detail is put into their descriptions and they have such an enduring place in the public eye.
- Margaret Mitchell - author of Gone with the Wind, my favorite book of all time. I spent a summer savoring this book, slowly working through it. Every night, when my mom and I would go for a walk around the block, I'd tell her about all the crazy things Scarlett's been up to, as though she were a real person. In fact, I do believe that she is a real person and will continue to live until the last copy of her story crumbles into dust. The reader is so thoroughly integrated into her life, knows every intimate detail about her, feels for everything that's happened to her and recoils in horror at the terrible things she must do to live.
However, that was not the aspect of the book that blew my mind - it was the dual nature of the story. On one hand, you have a very small, intimate story about one woman's will to survive. On the other, there's a plot as big as a continent, about the fall of a civilization, the end of a way of life, the destruction of thousands of dreams and the birth of thousands more. Scarlett's tiny part in these events are what bring this massive story down to earth, earth-shaking tragedy to an understandable, human level. The delicate balance is marvelously beautiful and a monument to ingenuity.
My nosy question is this: what are the influences that have shaped your writing style?
Mine are an odd-ish mix of mangaka and mostly British fantasy writers.
- Dianna Wynne Jones - author of Hexwood, Howl's Moving Castle, the Chrestomanci Chronicles, A Tale of Time City and many others. What I love about her writing the best is the fact that there is always this huge external story that involves monsters and magic and saving the world and whatnot, but just as important as that is the internal story that's happening inside the characters. So many of her books have characters discovering something about themselves, oftentimes something that's obvious to everyone around them except themselves. And not all good either. But as the reader is seeing things from the inside of this character's mind, the obvious thing is not quite so obvious and comes as just as much of a shock to the reader as well.
Probably the most brilliant example of this technique has to do with a girl in The Merlin Conspiracy. After following her and her best friend for two hundred pages or so, she discovers that her friend has been continuously casting a love spell on her for most of her life, which causes her to constantly fuss about him protectively like a mother hen (normal behavior from her point of view, a bizarre occurrence to anyone else). He's found out by another wizard, who has the power to remove the spell and intends to do so. But she's terrified of that because she's had the spell on her for so long and doesn't know what sort of person she'll be without it. Now that, was riveting reading.
- Terry Pratchett - author of the Discworld series. Far and away the most hilarious writer I have ever read in my life. He never hesitates to make his characters look utterly foolish, even in a comparatively serious work. And for all the hilarity that goes on in his books, all of them do contain an extremely serious undertone, one which has the power to change how the reader views the world ever after, which shocks and awes with the scope of its beauty, which is made even more glorious when it comes out of what you'd thought was a simple comedy. His work deals with very dark topics, when you think on it. Possibly the most pervasive, fleshed-out and indeed, likable character in Discworld is the Grim Reaper himself.
This is most true in his final book, Nation, written very shortly after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's about a boy whose entire world and everything he knew within it was completely destroyed in the space of a day. It's a book that's constantly questioning the existence of God in the midst of a heartless reality and coming up with an ambiguous, though not altogether negative answer. And yet, as I read this, I found ample reason to laugh.
- Kentaro Miura - artist and writer of the dark fantasy manga, Berserk. Ever since I first read and saw this a year or two ago, it has become the most overpowering and pervasive influence on a great deal of my work. It's a story that holds nothing back, that talks of Life in all its raw and terrible glory. Every character matters and just about all of them come with a life-altering character arc. And all of them deal with the hideous evil that is locked away inside the hearts of every human being, contained only by sheer willpower and possibly love.
My favorite chapter centers around one evening in the company of two former lovers. Casca, the only person Guts could ever talk to in his life, the only shoulder he ever had to cry on, has been driven insane by the betrayal of his best friend and no longer knows who he is. Still, he loves her and knows now that he will have to spend the rest of his life taking care of her, though she fears him now. But the ghost of rage that is possessing him and his hunger for revenge against the friend who betrayed everything he held dear has other ambitions. That part of him also knows that Casca is slowing him down and holding him back, dragging on him as surely as a ball and chain. With her gone, he'd be free to carry out his overwhelming desires. And possessed by this idea, he tries to kill the person he loves most.
- Osamu Tezuka - the godfather of manga, artist and author of Astro Boy, Dororo, Buddha, Black Jack, Phoenix and literally a hundred other works that you probably know about but don't realize the connection to. The guy was tireless, defining nearly every genre of the medium in which he worked, drawing something like ten pages a day for forty years straight. The Phoenix series is his unfinished masterwork and the story that best exemplifies his favorite themes - namely death and reincarnation, inevitable fate, enduring love, self-sacrifice, optimism in a bleak world, creeping despair and the beauty that emerges from crushing, total tragedy. He's written some of the saddest scenes I've ever read in my life, ones that stick with a person forever after.
The one that I remember best is the death of Astro Boy - not the one in which he is rebuilt as an evil robot, his real, final death, so far as I know. It all started when an alien accidentally transported him back in time to the sixties. He tries and tries to find a way home, getting increasingly lonely in a place and time where he has no right to exist. Every lead he gets only leads him to another dead end. And to make matters worse, his fuel source hasn't been invented yet and his energy will run out if he doesn't conserve it. That isn't something he can do easily. The time in which he has landed in one rocked by turmoil and he is not the type of hero to stand idly by. At the end of the story, he finds himself in Vietnam, in a small farming village that is doomed to be bombed by enemy troops. He decides to use the last of his energy to turn back the planes and save the village. After doing so, he collapses, smiling and is buried by the villagers at the bottom of nearby river. The next day more bombers arrive and wipe the village from the map. Heavy stuff for what is normally considered a kids' book.
- Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell - creators of The Edge Chronicles. Two words: WORLD BUILDING. These two think of everything - from the function of complex machinery, to the breeding patterns of fantastical creatures, to the bizarre social strata of the places they've created, all the way up to an entirely new system of physics - everything is fresh and fascinating and not a detail is left out. It's a series of books as much about exploration as adventure and the plot is no slouch either.
I began reading these books starting with the second in the series. It wasn't until I was halfway or more through the entire series that I finally got a hold of the first book. I was shocked at how brutal and direct it was. The story is an exceedingly simple one - a kid gets horribly, irrevocably lost in a dangerous forest in which everything that moves is trying to eat him, as he searches for his dad. Things go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. He goes halfway down the gullet of a carnivorous tree. He sees a little girl who had been his friend transform into a bloodthirsty monster. The book is nothing more than him stumbling into trouble after trouble and coming out worse for wear every single time. It goes on for so long that the reader begins to believe that he'll never escape, that he'll never reach his goal. And then...he steps into a clearing and his dad is there. The moment actually made me tear up - I've seldom seen a resolution so well-earned.
- J. R. R. Tolkien - need I say any more? Father of fantasy, root of just about all the tropes we've come to expect in the genre. I have a map of Middle Earth on my bedroom wall. With that in mind, he's another great one for world building. I've even heard his works hailed as fantastical travelogues. The flavor of the Shire, the trees of Lothlorien, the heat of Mordor - they're all things that a reader can capture so easily in one's mind, perhaps better than many real places - that much detail is put into their descriptions and they have such an enduring place in the public eye.
- Margaret Mitchell - author of Gone with the Wind, my favorite book of all time. I spent a summer savoring this book, slowly working through it. Every night, when my mom and I would go for a walk around the block, I'd tell her about all the crazy things Scarlett's been up to, as though she were a real person. In fact, I do believe that she is a real person and will continue to live until the last copy of her story crumbles into dust. The reader is so thoroughly integrated into her life, knows every intimate detail about her, feels for everything that's happened to her and recoils in horror at the terrible things she must do to live.
However, that was not the aspect of the book that blew my mind - it was the dual nature of the story. On one hand, you have a very small, intimate story about one woman's will to survive. On the other, there's a plot as big as a continent, about the fall of a civilization, the end of a way of life, the destruction of thousands of dreams and the birth of thousands more. Scarlett's tiny part in these events are what bring this massive story down to earth, earth-shaking tragedy to an understandable, human level. The delicate balance is marvelously beautiful and a monument to ingenuity.
