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How often are your characters influenced by other media, either in direct inspiration or as a base template to extrapolate and 'grow' from?
For example in Becoming Robin Nicole is loosely based on an original character of mine from several years ago. The key differences are age and upbringing, and of course Raven Wing is based on Nicole.
A better example though, is Jennifer Baker, one of Robin's other friends. I wanted to create in Jennifer the unique combination of laid-back but wise that I had in a dear friend when I was Robin's age, that I've lost touch with for several years now.
Rather than modeling her after Katherine though, I took inspiration from, appropriately enough, a couple of Disney movies: specifically Johnny Tsunami and Rip Girls.
Jennifer is nothing like any of the characters in either of these movies (in Rip Girls, Sydney has never visited her home before where Jennifer goes back every summer, but that's the closest connection I can see), but both have a lot of heart (Or maybe I'm just overly-sentimental :-P) and gave me a lot of indirect inspiration for the character I wanted to craft.
So, what are your thoughts?
Why is a Raven like a Writer?
Both are fascinated by the bright shiny bits they carry back to the nest. A fragment of conversation overheard in line in a restaurant; the unsettling feeling you get when a poem makes you cry and you aren't sure why; the half-remembered twist ending to a mystery novel you read when you were ten; the commercial for something you would never buy; the cartoon with the neat visual play on words.
It's all grist for the mill, sand for the hourglass, gravel for the road you want to build between your castles in the sky.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I think I love you :-D
That is probably one of the greatest analogies I've ever read. :-D
I kind of suspected as much, but in a lot of ways I'm still exploring the whole writing phenomenon.
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Erin said it better
I think we as individuals kinda form our personalities the same way as fictional characters. The people you interact with or observe in life - whether as a kid or adult - leave a memory and that gets mixed into experiences and sometimes into our personalities and actions. Whenever I go to bite my nails I still hear my fathers voice telling me off as a child in the back of my mind and the modest sized circles above my letter 'i's are taken from the handwriting of a girl who sat next to me in college that I thought had the coolest handwriting.
For fictional characters, I think short of living in some cave in the mountains with no tv or mobile or satellite signal (got to wonder if such caves exist anymore!), it would be really difficult not to be influenced by other media given our constant exposure to it. You'd also have to be isolated from other people not to be influenced by them. People are just too darn inspirational!
I think the fun part is where as a writer you take the various influences and weave them into a character that takes on a personality of its own. And at that point it becomes fun for the reader because the character feels more real.
If any of the above makes any sense, I'd be amazed re-reading it. Darn it, I should have just said 'ditto' after Erin's rather fabulous comment!!
PS. Zoe, you were watching way to many turn of the Millenium Disney shows. :p
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Characters
I believe that everything I write is influenced by what I read, what I feel and how I percieve the world around me. A great many of the characters that I come up with are at least slightly magical. I think much of that is because I have witnessed many strange and wonderful things, and my writings reflect that. If you see the world as a dark and terrible place, your writings will reflect that, too. My Dad writes, too, and he says that there are very few original ideas, but millions of ways to see or express an idea. I'll have to admit, we fought about that a lot, but he might be right (um, I didn't say that, by the way). Reading here at BCTS has influenced my writing, too. I hope that my influences, Like Portia, Bailey, Andrea and so many others, will come through in stories I have barely begun to write. Thank you, all!
Love
Wren
Puts on lecturers gown
As a linguist I had to study literary creativity in depth, and there is a concept called intertextuality which, in fact, forms the bulk of studies in a Masters in English Literature. The idea is that all texts are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by other texts. Now, "text" does not mean a piece of writing, it includes all communications, pictures, music and so on. Genette proposed fve subsets of it....yawn.
In essence, you can have a direct reference such as Horace's ode "Dulce et decorum est" as used by both Wilfred Owen and Ezra Pound for anti-war purposes, or the retcon theme sweeping BC at the moment, or references gleaned with or without intention from your environment.
My story draws very heavily on my life. The plot is derivative and predictable, so there is intertextuality there, but I am trying my best to drive the story wth the personality and inner struggle of Steph, which draws on my own life--so it's also intertextual.
There s a follow on from that, in which it is alleged that no text is worth more than any other, but, pace my lecturers, that's just bollocks.