Let me note, apologetically, that I've been away from the blog for some time. Nothing serious, just a real lack of motivation on my part. Not for the writing. For life. For the other, less significant parts of life, at least. I won't go on at length about how I'm sorry and this will never happen again because, well, I'd be lying. And even in the Internet Age I'm bad at lying. It will happen, from time to time, that I'll just bug out for a few days or a few weeks. No big.
The good news, I came back with new material.
I've been thinking the last few days about the difference between being influenced and imitating. I think the line gets blurry sometimes. Think of what makes you want to write, what really inspires you. For most of us, the solid answer is going to be books. Writers inspire you to write, for a variety of reasons. You might also find that music, or video games, or movies, or pornography, or birds make you want to write, but chances are those other influences aren't quite as strong.
What I want to know is, when does inspiration become imitation?
A number of great writers (Orson Scott Card and Steven King and Brandon Sanderson among them) have said that they were first drawn to storytelling by reading books, but that they held off writing for fear of just re-writing what they read. This seems particularly true with genre writers. Fantasy writers are trying to avoid re-writing The Lord of the Rings or, more modernly, The Wheel of Time. Science Fiction writers are trying to stray away from Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan and the greats. I'm sure it's true in other places. Horror writers are probably trying desperately to avoid being compared to Stephen King and those who write military fiction are probably trying to distance themselves from Tom Clancy.
A certain number of people are totally trying to cash in on those writers (and others) by writing thinly veiled plaigarisms to garner sales. Look at the number of bogus vampire novels that have come out since Twilight, or how popular kids as wizards were when everyone was going batshit for Harry Potter. Look at any successful book and you'll find a hundred copycats looking for money.
But the writers, the people who have some intrinsic need to tell stories, are always thinking of how to tell new stories, to say things differently from the works that inspired them.
Fantasy, as a genre, has been around a while and although its popularity isn't necessarily mainstream, it comes close sometimes. I love that, because for years Fantasy was looked down on. A bunch of geeks and losers trying to re-create Tolkien. I don't know that the stereotype was ever true. I've read probably two hundred books in the genre and although the influence is certainly there, I don't see much else. Not in the last ten years or so. Some, like the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms series still use the epic quest undertaken by a few, but I think that's going to last forever. The hero goes on a quest is a basic element of storytelling that existed long before Tolkien's opus. I use it myself. It may not be so sprawling and epic as that of the Fellowship across Middle Earth or Rand al'Thor venturing across the Westlands before the Last Battle, but the heroic quest is always present in some context.
These other works of fantasy, though, are more complex than a simple re-write. They're fully realized worlds of their own, with novel characters and fresh conflicts. They're much more about the way that real people react to conflicts than about the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron's oppression. Even the worlds are changing. Many of them are still the sort of untouched beauty of ancient Scandanavia, but I daresay Tolkien didn't invent that idea.
The point is that modern Fantasy (and other like genres) are becoming less and less reimaginings of the men who brought them to our collective attention and more about new storytellers spinning out yarns we've never seen before. It just took us a while to get here.
So how do you avoid falling into that trap? How do you escape the mistakes of so many others and become part of this wild new era of original stories?
Read a lot, but read widely. Even if you only want to read a specific genre, you can do this without too much trouble. See, one benefit of all this diaspora is the sheer wealth of ideas out there. The good and the bad. Reading widely, even in a single genre, is a great way to keep yourself from repeating the same stories, while also learning what does and doesn't appeal to you as a reader. Or, what works and what doesn't.
I find my fiction often evolves when I get into a book, but not so much that it takes on that writer's style. I like to blend the elements I'm most attracted to with my own style. It keeps me fresh, keeps me excited about this world and this story that's unfolding at my fingertips, without ever deviating from being my story, my world, my words.
So if you ever get the chance to read one of my novels, take away from it what you will for your own work. But don't tell the same story. Tell your story, and I'll endeavor to do the same.
Graciously,
-S.R.
