Authorly Influences

    Hello, everybody! Welcome back to Hats, Boots, & Chocolate, where we discuss everything from hot chocolate and Christmas-light shows to cloaks and cozy beanies!

    Today, I want to talk about influence.

    Namely, how authors influence each other.

    For those of you who write: Have you ever noticed, after reading a book, that your stories start to take on characteristics of the book you just read? I have. And there are a lot of other people who have, too, because this is a perfectly normal phenomenon. (Hah! Normal phenomenon. Do you like my oxymoron?)

    Take, for example, the story I started after reading Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series (which is a very good series, if not clean enough for my "Clean Books" list. Sorry.). It is the one labeled as Earthsong on the "My Books" page of this blog. Earthsong, in its original inception in my brain, was supposed to be an assassin story (inspired by the Ravenwood Saga trilogy, which is clean enough for the "Clean Books" list.). However, after reading Butcher's books, my sense of romance was thoroughly piqued, and I quickly found myself delving into the romance aspects of the tale--in more detail than I was expecting. Fortunately for anyone who ever reads it, which is mostly me right now, I held myself back; but Butcher thoroughly corrupted my brain for about a month after I finished the Codex Alera, and romance was all I wanted to write.

    More recently, I've been reading the Stormwatch Diaries (another good series, potentially worthy of the "Clean Books" list, but only if you like haunted-house inspired stories, which I usually don't. These ones were much better than I would have thought, though, and it's really only the second book that's scary. Besides, the author says she loves Jesus, so I think we're safe. ;). The thing about these books is that they have a hefty dose of puns and absurdity, and as a result, one of my more recent story ideas took on an absurd note during a brainstorming session. See, I want to create an interconnected universe sort of like what Brandon Sanderson is doing with his Cosmere books, and due to the influence of the books I've been reading, I had the bright idea to call my universe The BubbleVerse. Ooooohhhh!

    Absurdity at it's finest, right?

    Heh. We'll see how long it lasts. If you like it, let me know in the comments. It could actually be kind of fun to play around with a bunch of worlds in bubbles, but I want to make sure I actually like the idea, and that I'm not completely insane, first.

    Of course, I did get even more absurdity to add to the mix when a conversation at work that same day steered around to the topic of stacking chickens, a hobby I occasionally engage in when I have two broodies in the same henhouse and want to make myself giggle. Just imagine, for a moment, two fluffed-up chickens, one perching on the other's back, until they both realize they don't like that situation very much. Then, to fit with that conversation I mentioned, make that stack of chickens three or four times as big, and try not to giggle at the thought.

    So you see, authors are easily influenced. We're crazy people, and we'll snatch up any bright idea that comes our way as quick as a handful of grain brings goats to the fence at my workplace--which is to say, very quickly indeed. Is it any wonder that in our idea-gathering, we snitch ideas from the books we read? I mean, I would never have dreamed of trying an interconnected universe if I hadn't started reading Brandon Sanderson's books, and I wouldn't be pondering the mysteries of the BubbleVerse if not for Kristiana Sfirlea--nor would I be tossing around ideas for some kind of magic system involving gloves without the works of Shannon Messenger.

    Naturally, a good deal of one's own ingenuity must also come into play. You don't get a good book by stealing ingredients from other peoples' stories and mixing them together in a bowl that you toss out to your readers. It doesn't work that way. Try taking the yeast out of a loaf of bread and mixing it with the eggs from a batch of cookies and the flour from the latest bag of croutons. If you use yeast and eggs and flour in their natural, raw forms, it works great; but trying to steal those ingredients from something somebody else already baked isn't going to work. You're going to end up with clumps of bread and cookie and crouton in the bowl, and everybody's going to know you didn't invent this recipe yourself, and it's just awful because none of the ingredients were a) extracted from their stories completely, and b) intended to go together that way in the first place. If it's a rough analogy, please forgive me. But I think it fits.

    No, the better thing to do when ripping off other peoples' ideas is to take the idea, put it on a piece of paper, and think of as many ways to spin it off as you can. See, I don't have the brain cells to make any interconnected universe on the scale of the Cosmere--nor have I a team large enough to keep what few brain cells I do have straight while attempting such a project. But I want an interconnected universe, and the simplest way to achieve that is through a single character who shows up in story after story, mysteriously, with (at first) little explanation as to why. I can handle throwing a character into any story they fit in to start tying everything together, and if some small threads of plotline start weaving between stories, hooray! If not, it's okay, because the universe is only loosely connected to begin with. This way, you can probably tell I was inspired by Sanderson, but it's not going to feel like plagiarism, because it isn't. I'm not taking The Stormlight Archive and rewriting it with different characters and terms for everything. That would just ruin the beauty of the book. But I am taking an element of the Cosmere that I love and integrating it into my own stories. If I were a gambler (which I'm not, but, eh, who cares?) I'd be willing to bet that Sanderson does this same thing all the time.

    What you really want, when stealing ideas, is to combine them with a literal ton of other ideas, changing each enough that only a reader who reads all the same things you do could ever tell that you borrowed ideas from somebody. Others might suspect, but they'll have no proof if they don't have access to all your source material. In that way, the more influencers you can borrow from, the better off you'll be. In addition, combining so many ideas this way pretty much guarantees you can't rewrite something someone else already wrote, because each element is going to throw its own kinks and curveballs into the story. You'll end up with something inspired by a whole lot of other peoples' work, yet it will still be original, your own doing, because you were the person who had to make all those things come together smoothly and work out the kinks. That takes a lot of original creation, and by the time you're done, the source material can be almost unrecognizable.

    Now. Take none of what I say at face value, because your writing journey is different than mine. But if I were to offer advice on this, here's what I have to say: Don't think about combining ideas from a bunch of different places. Your brain will gather them naturally, then feed them back to you as appropriate through the guidance of the Holy Ghost (assuming you try to work with him when you're writing. I do, but that may not be part of your process. Otherwise, your brain will do as it's designed to and make connections for you). Just relax and let those ideas, those bits and pieces and inspirations, flow. As the author of The Artist's Way would say, you are, ultimately, not the creator of whatever it is you're working on. You're just the channel for the true Creator's creative energy. Let it flow. (I highly recommend The Artist's Way. Good book, that.)

    Basically, recognize that you're being influenced by the media you consume, and let yourself store away the cool bits that you like. There's a lot of people who think that there's no such thing as an original story anymore, and I think they're probably right. There do seem to be a handful of basic storylines that people follow over and over again. The originality comes from each author's own unique perspective and outlook on that storyline, and on the story they're trying to tell.

    Good luck on your writing journey!

    See you next week!