Water from one source is easily poisoned. Likewise, taking
inspiration from only one source skews a written work. If you’re only drawing
from one experience to write a scene, how do you distance your character from
being an Author Avatar? You might love the Dresden Files or Discworld; how do
you stop your story being rip-offs of them? Want to build a world, but the only
fantasy world you’ve experienced was through Warcraft games? It’ll show
quickly.
The
easiest and best way to stop this is to take inspiration from multiple sources.
Not just other written work in the same genre as you’re writing; that’s still
water from the same source. Here’s some examples;
Music: More than any other media, music is the fastest
inspiration. In four to five minutes (prog rock/Primal Scream are exceptions)
the musician/s have to convey their emotions. While with a lot of music, the
emotion is ‘that guy/girl is hot! I would like to kiss him/her’, music is a
broad church. Listening to disparate music genres can influence your writing.
When I’m writing, I think what songs best convey the emotions I want in the
scene. What’s your character’s favourite song? If the producer making the film
adaptation asked you, what songs would you suggest for the score? Don’t just
listen to music you like either; power ballads or teen-pop have their place in
the world too.
Sometimes
the connections are easy; writing about a relationship breaking up? ‘Kayleigh’
by Marillion! Other times, multiple songs can go into a scene, especially if
the mood of it shifts around. Writing a complicated
break-up? Well ‘We used to be friends’ by Dandy Warhols is about a close
relationship long past. ‘Leave right now’ by Will Young is about someone
wanting out of a destructive relationship and vicious circle. The first verse
of ‘Work it out’ by Jurassic 5 is about realising after the fact how poorly you
treated someone. The score to the final scene of ‘Return of the King’ evokes a
separation for the better, difficult as it is. Mixing all these together helps
take the character’s experience away from your personal one, and makes the
character less of an avatar.
Films/TV:
My first drafts are often littered with Princess
Bride lines. It’s going to get me in trouble some day. Other times, I want the
pace of the scene up, so I start thinking about David Tennant’s Dr. Who and how
he’d rattle through an explanatory staccato monologue as fast as he could
before making the same point in conclusion; pick the pace up!
Films
and TV offer a lot of visual and audial inspirations to put into your story,
but don’t make the mistake of plagiarising scenes without any alteration. Some
authors can get away with it, but it can break the dramatic tension if a story
turns into parody or pastiche. Adding the idea of a scene, however, and
changing it to fit your characters and story, will make it unrecognisable. One
thing I do is listen to directors commentaries. Finding out the thought behind
a scene can help understand it and write something similar, but not superficially
the same. How would your protagonist react if thrown into the Rancor pit, or
was chased by the T-1000? What the film does and how your story progresses are
two different things.
Like
music, watching films from different genres can influence a scene. While
watching rom-coms is, for me, an excruciating way to deplete my finite
lifespan, I can appreciate that, when writing romantic plots, there are certain
notes you have to hit. I don’t much care for Disney films, but some of them
have inventive or memorable baddies. And even though kung fu films don’t
translate into novel form, watching how a clever choreographer can tell a story
through the fighting can be inspiring to writing.
Books:
Literature beyond the genre you want to write can help write a better story.
Not just classical or high literature either, though I’m not disparaging it.
Low-end trash novels can be inspiring, even if the inspiration is ‘God that was
awful; I can do better than that’. The worst book I’ve ever read had, I’ll
admit, some very vivid descriptions and scene setting. Mistakes others make, in
plotting or scene resolution, keep you sharp to when you do the same. Maybe one
plot thread turns out to go nowhere and you’re thinking ‘well that was
pointless’. When reading through your own stuff, you know what to look out for.
Or if a sentence, while grammatically correct, when you read it you have
trouble deciphering the sentence and, or perhaps or, the intent. I do this a
lot. Now that I’ve noticed and been irritated by it in other works, I don’t do
it so often now that I’ve noticed it. Writers group is a harsh lesson in
sentence structure as well; when you read something out loud, you notice
mistakes. Another writer at our group does hilariously overwritten parody; if
I’m writing something and start to hear it in his voice, I know it needs work.
Art:
Visualising your world helps make it more real in your mind, and so more
believable when you write it. There’s a lot of art out there; chances are, no
matter how new or amazing your idea is, someone’s drawn something similar. For
me, seeing an idea lets me flesh out the details rather than plucking them from
thin air. Art includes photography; looking at actor’s headshots can be
inspiring as well. Who would you cast in the film adaptation of your story? Who
would you contract as conceptual designer? Artwork and story can feed each
other; a friend drew one of my characters on a birthday card, and drew her with
pierced ears. A minor detail, but when I thought about the characters
back-story I wondered ‘would she have pierced ears?’ What does ear piercing
represent historically? In a fantasy setting, could it have negative
connotations? My friend had just added it as a detail, but I went on to write a
short piece about that character getting her ears pierced. Whether that piece
would fit into another story or not, the art gave me ideas I wouldn’t have come
up with independently.
Games:
Computer games are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and more cinematic in
their presentation. While, like films and TV, these storylines can be
inspiring, they’re very much set in stone; the character does this because the
plot does that. Games offer other inspiration, though, when they present
choices, more than what gun to fire or what swords to swing. Dwarf Fortress is nigh unplayable
without a computer science degree, but when your game ends (that’s when, not
if) you can have your failed settlement remain in the world as ruins; these
ruins might by overrun with animals or monsters, or just be a stark reminder to
the next doomed settlement. The graphics are non-existent, the gameplay is
frustrating and the coding is bizarre and deliberately obtuse, in terms of
building a world of collapsed empires, Dwarf
Fortress can help fill in the blanks. Likewise, most MMO games exist in a
state of quasi-choice; you can win the battle or lose, it doesn’t change the
world. But what if it did? What if the dungeon was finally cleared out? What if
the flag was captured for the last time, and the front line of the battle was shifted
to a new arena? What if the world was allowed to change?
To conclude; everything is inspiration. Look for other things to put in your story; you’ll be surprised at what can fit.
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