Inspirations, Part One
Jan. 12th, 2012 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truebluehorrorPeople naturally have others that have inspired them in their lives. Mankind, in a lot of ways, is a single organism. A kind of hive-mind really, and we decide what we admire and draw from others when we find something we like. We find something in others that we aspire to be.
As a writer, there's quite a few people I have to thank for how and what I write. I think I'd just list and talk about a few.
J.R.R. Tolkien:
Tolkien, in a lot of ways, was the first real storyteller I came to have knowledge of, and who I wanted to write like. When I was little my dad would read excerpts of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to me as bed-time stories, and I grew up living off of the animated versions of those stories as well (hell, I even liked Bakshi's animated version of Rings. I still have an odd soft spot for it). In a lot of ways, while it was Tolkien's writing that inspired me, what inspired me even more was the world he created.
See, I was a scaredy cat as a kid. But I was also a sucker for stories of the mystical and the fantastic and the mythical. And high fantasy, like Tolkien wrote - hell, like he defined - that appealed to me on a very large level as a child, even a small one. Fantasy was my first love as a genre, and while horror and sci-fi have somewhat supplanted it as my favorite genre, it's still something I hold an incredible love for. I'm a sucker for fantasy trappings and stories, and while I don't get to write them very often their still something that means a lot to me, and that's due to my early indoctrination of Tolkien.
Stephen King
Stephen King is probably the author I have the biggest history with on this list, or at least one of them. And for a very good reason.
While I was a coward as a child, one thing I noticed my dad read a lot of was scary stories by a man named Stephen King. And being a little boy who wanted to imitate his dad, I wanted to read Stephen King. My dad, being a wise man, didn't start me off with his horror, but rather gave me a copy of Eyes of the Dragon, a fantasy story King had written for his own daughter and one of her friends that would go on to be published. Fantasy still being my genre love at the time, I devoured it. A little bit later, I would sneak one of King's short story collections out of my dad's bookshelf.
The collection was Night Shift, and I still believe it to be a collection of some of King's best work, and some of the best horror short stories ever written in general. I don't know if my dad figured out that I had snuck that book out of his collection - I kind of suspect he did - but shortly after when I turned thirteen, my dad bought me a copy of The Stand (unabridged) to read that summer.
I devoured that book.
From there I read most of King's horror stories. It was also around that time I started to be less of a coward, and my tastes in stories started to shift from fantasy (although I would never fall too far from it), to much grimmer fair. How much of this was solely because of my new preoccupation with King and horror, and how much was added to it just from the fact I was moving into being a teenager, I don't know. Either way, King pretty much took a hold of my interests, especially The Dark Tower series and IT. Really, as much as I love Tolkien, I think it was King with The Dark Tower that really got me interested in the idea of world building.
Fun fact: I once wrote a short story very similar in tone and theme, in a childish kind of copy-cat, when I was in highschool as probably the first short story I'd ever written to completion that wasn't fanfiction. Luckily, I no longer have a copy. So no. You'll never be seeing that.
I think it was King, more than anyone, who made me less afraid of looking at the world in a terrifying way. He made it more interesting to seek out the morbid, the creepy, the supernatural. I used to hide from shadows, but it was from King that I learned you gain insight from staring at them. And if you stare at them long enough, who knows what story you can unravel.
I don't follow King as much as I did. But I still think he's one of the major people who've shaped how I write.
Harlan Ellison:
If Stephen King was a step from being a child to being a teen, you could say Harlan Ellison was the writer who took me from being a teen to an adult. Tolkien planted my imagination. King fed my imagination to have it grow. Ellison cultivated it.
To say Stephen King is "immature" is not accurate, not to me at least. I think his works stand alongside any worth while author. However, I think, in Ellison, you tend to find more human stories. It's hard to describe, really. There's a great bit of humanity in King's writing as well, but I wouldn't say it's displayed quite as well as Ellison's is. Ellison's is, in a way, more realistic.
In the stories of Stephen King, there usually is a very set "black and white" of how things are. Sure, there can be moral conundrums and gray lines, but more often than not we see what is good and what is evil, and while good may not always win fully, or have a bittersweet ending, that doesn't change the fact of what good and evil is most time. This isn't true for all his stories, but it quite often is true, and you can see where the line between good and evil is supposed to be drawn (there's also King's ridiculous technophobia, but that's a topic I could go on forever and isn't what we're here for). He reflects the world, but it's still a reflection that relies a lot on generalized understandings.
Ellison was the first author I read that disregarded those. In Ellison, the world is filled with grey things as much as it is with steps of black and white. One of his stories that especially got me was "Hitler Painted Roses", a story that essentially postulates the afterlife, and what we're condemned to, to be due to perceptions of other people of who we are rather than who we might of been, and how it's easy to miss the beauty that might be cultivated in even the worst of people (though I suppose I should state here that Hitler himself isn't a sympathized with character in the story, at least not in any traditional sense).
I think it's also from Ellison, along with Jhonen Vasquez (who I'll talk about in part two of this list), that I got my idea of a much crueler world. Maybe cruel isn't the right word, but it's the word coming most easy to me at the moment. As children, we're taught that not only is there an inherent right and wrong in the world, there's also a sort of inherent justice in there as well. And this patently isn't true. I think part of why I like Ellison's work is that he examines, a lot of times, how that isn't true. How the world, for lack of a better term, is a mean son of a bitch in so many ways we can't really comprehend it.
But it's also the most pretty mean son of a bitch you'll ever see, at the same time. The beauty of it isn't so much hidden under the dirt as it is mixed in with it.
It's also from Ellison that I think I get a lot of my dryer humor, though I don't show that part of myself as much. If you haven't read Ellison, I really would suggest him, especially his short story collection "Strange Wine".
That's it for this part. You could say these are the "big three" of who have defined me as a writer. I'll be talking about some others who have defined me in a future post.
As a writer, there's quite a few people I have to thank for how and what I write. I think I'd just list and talk about a few.
J.R.R. Tolkien:
Tolkien, in a lot of ways, was the first real storyteller I came to have knowledge of, and who I wanted to write like. When I was little my dad would read excerpts of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to me as bed-time stories, and I grew up living off of the animated versions of those stories as well (hell, I even liked Bakshi's animated version of Rings. I still have an odd soft spot for it). In a lot of ways, while it was Tolkien's writing that inspired me, what inspired me even more was the world he created.
See, I was a scaredy cat as a kid. But I was also a sucker for stories of the mystical and the fantastic and the mythical. And high fantasy, like Tolkien wrote - hell, like he defined - that appealed to me on a very large level as a child, even a small one. Fantasy was my first love as a genre, and while horror and sci-fi have somewhat supplanted it as my favorite genre, it's still something I hold an incredible love for. I'm a sucker for fantasy trappings and stories, and while I don't get to write them very often their still something that means a lot to me, and that's due to my early indoctrination of Tolkien.
Stephen King
Stephen King is probably the author I have the biggest history with on this list, or at least one of them. And for a very good reason.
While I was a coward as a child, one thing I noticed my dad read a lot of was scary stories by a man named Stephen King. And being a little boy who wanted to imitate his dad, I wanted to read Stephen King. My dad, being a wise man, didn't start me off with his horror, but rather gave me a copy of Eyes of the Dragon, a fantasy story King had written for his own daughter and one of her friends that would go on to be published. Fantasy still being my genre love at the time, I devoured it. A little bit later, I would sneak one of King's short story collections out of my dad's bookshelf.
The collection was Night Shift, and I still believe it to be a collection of some of King's best work, and some of the best horror short stories ever written in general. I don't know if my dad figured out that I had snuck that book out of his collection - I kind of suspect he did - but shortly after when I turned thirteen, my dad bought me a copy of The Stand (unabridged) to read that summer.
I devoured that book.
From there I read most of King's horror stories. It was also around that time I started to be less of a coward, and my tastes in stories started to shift from fantasy (although I would never fall too far from it), to much grimmer fair. How much of this was solely because of my new preoccupation with King and horror, and how much was added to it just from the fact I was moving into being a teenager, I don't know. Either way, King pretty much took a hold of my interests, especially The Dark Tower series and IT. Really, as much as I love Tolkien, I think it was King with The Dark Tower that really got me interested in the idea of world building.
Fun fact: I once wrote a short story very similar in tone and theme, in a childish kind of copy-cat, when I was in highschool as probably the first short story I'd ever written to completion that wasn't fanfiction. Luckily, I no longer have a copy. So no. You'll never be seeing that.
I think it was King, more than anyone, who made me less afraid of looking at the world in a terrifying way. He made it more interesting to seek out the morbid, the creepy, the supernatural. I used to hide from shadows, but it was from King that I learned you gain insight from staring at them. And if you stare at them long enough, who knows what story you can unravel.
I don't follow King as much as I did. But I still think he's one of the major people who've shaped how I write.
Harlan Ellison:
If Stephen King was a step from being a child to being a teen, you could say Harlan Ellison was the writer who took me from being a teen to an adult. Tolkien planted my imagination. King fed my imagination to have it grow. Ellison cultivated it.
To say Stephen King is "immature" is not accurate, not to me at least. I think his works stand alongside any worth while author. However, I think, in Ellison, you tend to find more human stories. It's hard to describe, really. There's a great bit of humanity in King's writing as well, but I wouldn't say it's displayed quite as well as Ellison's is. Ellison's is, in a way, more realistic.
In the stories of Stephen King, there usually is a very set "black and white" of how things are. Sure, there can be moral conundrums and gray lines, but more often than not we see what is good and what is evil, and while good may not always win fully, or have a bittersweet ending, that doesn't change the fact of what good and evil is most time. This isn't true for all his stories, but it quite often is true, and you can see where the line between good and evil is supposed to be drawn (there's also King's ridiculous technophobia, but that's a topic I could go on forever and isn't what we're here for). He reflects the world, but it's still a reflection that relies a lot on generalized understandings.
Ellison was the first author I read that disregarded those. In Ellison, the world is filled with grey things as much as it is with steps of black and white. One of his stories that especially got me was "Hitler Painted Roses", a story that essentially postulates the afterlife, and what we're condemned to, to be due to perceptions of other people of who we are rather than who we might of been, and how it's easy to miss the beauty that might be cultivated in even the worst of people (though I suppose I should state here that Hitler himself isn't a sympathized with character in the story, at least not in any traditional sense).
I think it's also from Ellison, along with Jhonen Vasquez (who I'll talk about in part two of this list), that I got my idea of a much crueler world. Maybe cruel isn't the right word, but it's the word coming most easy to me at the moment. As children, we're taught that not only is there an inherent right and wrong in the world, there's also a sort of inherent justice in there as well. And this patently isn't true. I think part of why I like Ellison's work is that he examines, a lot of times, how that isn't true. How the world, for lack of a better term, is a mean son of a bitch in so many ways we can't really comprehend it.
But it's also the most pretty mean son of a bitch you'll ever see, at the same time. The beauty of it isn't so much hidden under the dirt as it is mixed in with it.
It's also from Ellison that I think I get a lot of my dryer humor, though I don't show that part of myself as much. If you haven't read Ellison, I really would suggest him, especially his short story collection "Strange Wine".
That's it for this part. You could say these are the "big three" of who have defined me as a writer. I'll be talking about some others who have defined me in a future post.
