a fool's musings

Boreas by Waterhouse
Fool, said my muse to me,
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2002-01-18 - 12:45 p.m.

authors and influences

Gah! Diaryland was down for like *HOURS* and I couldn't get my fix. Man, I'm shaking. I'm *jonesing* for my journal.

I'm kidding.

Well, sort of.

I wrote this whole long thing, and then couldn't upload it, and that was driving me nuts, because I'm impatient.

Obviously, though, my persistence has paid off, and things are working again.

I know you must just be dying for new vic-thoughts, eh? *g*

Anyway, Thamiris wrote...

Mostly as a result of a recent discussion begun by melymbrosia, in her entry on Auteur Theory, I started wondering how conscious fanfic writers are of their influences, however you want to define the term. Who influences your style? Your content? Why? How? Other fannish writers? Pro writers? Your betas? Your friends? Your readers? Is it all for the good, or do you feel trapped by your influences?

I think it's an incredibly interesting question. This response was way too long to fit in the comments section, so I'm just going to link to it from there. *g*

My influences?

As a kid, Tolkien, all the way, in the sense of wanting to build a whole world, and starting with a language. Of course, an 8-year-old isn't exactly going to be linguistically competent, but I had a lot of fun making up my own language and drawing maps to go with it. Never did finish any of those stories, though. *g*

In term of my writing now, I've read so much that I can't really say definitively, but I will say that stylistically, I'd most like to be like Hemingway, who I think is the master American stylist. And I get excited whenever someone calls my prose "clean" or "precise." I do like to experiment with other styles, and there I'd guess that both Henry James and William Faulkner have been strong influences. Though I never do quite get that Faulknerian flow going.

In terms of content, I'm obviously much more influenced by all the Regency romances I read as a teenager, because most of my fic is shipper fic. *g*

I also tend to take plots of famous stories [e.g., Casablanca became Harbor in the Tempest, The Princess Bride -> The Mutant Bride, Tamlane -> heh, I managed to wring two separate fics out of Tamlane, one in the Angelverse (In the Service of the Queen, which is the best non-X-Men fic I've written) and A Touch of Frost in X-Men] and rewrite them to fit the fic universe I'm obsessed with.

From fanfic, I've taken some fanon in my main fandom and run with it, and I've certainly been influenced by a wide variety of fic authors in X-Men movieverse, from Elizabeth and Molly to Jenn and Diebin, but mostly the stuff I can point to and say, "Hey, that's X's influence" is going to be backstory detail [e.g., Logan as womanizer] or technical detail [e.g., using tights and condoms for Rogue to have safe sex], or treatment of the main romantic quadrangle in the fandom [e.g., Shana Nolen's Perfect Ring of Scars and Sare-Liz's No Secret at All were a huge influence on my own Things Change], than any stylistic stuff.

I don't have much of a style, and I find that when I write longer pieces, I can't really sustain one. I mean, I managed to get a bit Euripidean *and* Faulknerian in The Very Sickness of My Heart, and I think the poetic style in Envious Moon and The Space Between worked well, but for anything over, say, seven pages, I find it hard to keep up. It seems very forced and somewhat pretentious to me.

I guess my own poetry writing has also influenced me (as well as the poetry of others - Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Keats, Byron, Milton, Shakespeare etc.) because I'm far more willing to sacrifice grammar for rhythm than most people. I choose words on how they sound fairly frequently, and if they fit the rhythm of the sentence or paragraph I'm constructing, which is definitely something that comes from writing poetry for many years. I've always said I'm a poet more than a prose writer at heart, which I think comes through clearly in my fight against overly explicit description and my willingness to be very elliptical.

Philosophically, I've been influenced by almost everything I've read, from Euripides to Milton to Faulkner to LeGuin to Heller to Fitzgerald to Stephen King... and the list goes on and on. Music is also a *huge* influence on my writing, from mood-setting to giving me plot ideas to giving me lines to twist and play with.

Although, hey - I actually do have some serious influences on the type of original fic I'd like to write: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Andrew Vachss. With a smidge of Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard thrown in.

Hardboiled crime novels that make you want to take a shower afterward, and yet leavened with some humor.

I think this shows up in fic like The Soiled Dove and Jim Morrison's Dead, most strongly.

My biggest strength in writing is dialogue, which is influenced by my own great enjoyment of conversation, and studying shows/movies/books that I think have really good, realistic yet definitely stylized dialogue (Moonlighting, Buffy, Homicide, West Wing, David Mamet *g*), as well as engaging in lots and lots of conversation and paying close attention to the way different people express themselves.

One thing I have noticed I do is write reactionary fic. If I read something that totally goes against how I view a situation or character, I'll feel the need to "rectify" that in my own mind and so I'll write a "response", even if it never references the fic to which I'm responding. So I can be very influenced by what I'm reading, to the point that I had to completely stop reading Logan/Jean, because it was heavily influencing my characterization of Jean (and making me incredibly queasy, as well), who I happen not to like to begin with, and she wasn't getting a fair shake *at all* from me. So I stopped.

I still don't like her, but seeing some of the wretchedly OOC ways she's written has led me to try even *harder* to write her fairly. That wound up being the impetus behind 32 Flavors, much as the early anti-Scott fervor in movieverse led me to write him the way *I* see him, which is as pretty dang cool. That was what got me started on Best-Laid Plans, which I'm told has influenced many other fic writers in their portrayal of Scott.

So in fanfic it's a whole big circle of influence - it never does go one way in fandom.

As for my betas, they've definitely been *very* influential, but mostly technically - making sure I don't repeat words too much, cutting away the unnecessary chatter, toning down my penchant for melodrama, stuff like that, which, a year and a half ago, I'd never have noticed, but now I consciously look out for and edit for even *before* I send something out to them.

They also tell me when I need to add description in, since I tend to not put any at all. I think that's a result of not liking to *read* it. There's definitely a whole 'nother essay in that one thought - about how our *reading* preferences are probably the biggest influence on our writing.

Hmm...

<*thinks*>

Maybe later. *g*

I'm sure I was influenced by teachers over the course of my education, but since I can't remember from whom I learned what at this point, I'll just say thank you to all of them. *g*

My mom, of course, has always been a big influence, both in theory and in practice, and her insistence on proper grammar even when speaking informally has been invaluable. Not that I speak properly anymore, but at least I know how and that means I can write it.

Whew.

~victoria

PS: I don't really have the shakes from diary withdrawal, though there might be some who'll try to convince you otherwise ::looks darkly at Pete, then realizes he's probably not reading this. *g*::

PPS: All of my fic that I mentioned can be found at The Muse's Fool

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The painting is "Boreas" by John William Waterhouse. Again, not a muse, but I like her. She suits the color scheme.

The quote is from Sir Philip Sidney.

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