They say that the books you love to read, the movies you love to watch and the things that stick with you the most can be seen in your own writing.
What you love is often reflected in your writing and once you know yourself well enough you write better. Once you throw yourself into all of your passions and are writing things based on your passions or similar to your passions unashamedly, you will develop your style and you will therefore come across as unique and fresh in the genres you write.
As long as you stay true only to yourself, do not write for the market, write for you!
I hope this is true. If it is, then you can more or less guess from my likes and dislikes what could end up being in my novels.
I don’t like to be predictable though, but it is true that there is a little of what I love in everything that I do
Below is a list of stories, books or movies in which I mentally visit and live in a lot, for some reason or another, I am dragged back there to relive scenes or add new ones in my mind. However, I never write those reimagining’s down through fear of becoming a fraud! Though I have sometimes thought about doing fanfiction!
1922 By Stephen king – this story in particular has actually influenced a horror I am writing, which is based around a well in a garden too, funnily enough. But the story concept is poles apart besides the setting of a well.
Spider By Hanns Heinz Ewers – Every time I see a spider I remember the story. Every time I see a woman working at a loom or spinning yarn, I think of this story. You would think that wouldn’t be very often then, but I know a lot of prepper, homesteading type ladies who do this regularly. I have wanted to do this myself; I have always wanted to make my own felt too.
The complete collection of The Wizard of Oz By Frank L Baum – So many imaginative things in all the stories, living china dolls, servant monkeys, it’s absolute joy! The landscape descriptions, oh my word, they are divine, I just can’t help but bring myself back to those scenes.
Smoke and Mirrors By Neil Gaiman – So many lovely stories and poems in this book, I presume they are poems in any case? I see them as such, I love the prose, I just love the way he writes! It is very soulful writing.
The man in the picture By Susan Hill – This is the only book in my entire reading history, of such length, that I have read and could not put down even for a toilet break! It is just so gripping and I loved it, it had a similar air to Dorian Grey, but in my opinion much better executed. I love Venice, never been, but still, always wanted to, love with a passion masquerades and carnival life.
Matilda By Roald Dahl – Ever since I was little, since Victoria Wood read this on TV I have loved this story and nagged my mum in buying me the book, but she never did. I must have borrowed this book a hundred times from the library before I became an adult and bought it as part of a trilogy compilation. How I wished that my soul got angry enough with the people in my life that I could play with the supernatural like she did! It may have solved a lot of my childhood problems, or created worse ones, who knows?
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll – Very alike to Wizard of Oz, the scenes are great, but I also like crazy characters, madness or at least the descent into it ideas. I love kooky takes on animal and plant life and this was such a joy to behold. The artwork etc, I love everything about Alice in Wonderland and I have an addiction to collecting Alice in Wonderland novelties. There were times I pranced around in life hoping I fell down a hole where things were very different too.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – If you can actually manage to read the whole book and get past the awful main scene, you will actually find this book very deep on an emotional level that is not just traumatic, but beautiful too. If you read deeply, push past the horrible stuff, it is very meaningful. How the dead view the living, how the living cannot move on until the dead does, what dead children do in the heavens. Living out their wildest imaginations; yes, a lot of it is weird and sickening, but I urge you to try and edit those horrible bits out of your mind and read it without those bits. It takes strong stuff to do that, I know! But honestly, it is a lovely book besides. Try to skim the nasties.
Confessions of an ugly step-sister by Gregory Maguire – I love Cinderella anyway, but this plot was good and more to the way that I thought it was behind the scenes. I love how I learned real history in this book too, the bit about the tulips in Holland. By the way, that’s another addiction I have – tulips.
I.T By Stephen King – I used to be scared of clowns, big time, before I even learned about Pennywise, but it is funny to actually say that I loved the character Pennywise so much it lessened my fear of them. Weird I know! In the past two years in particular, I have lost my fear of clowns entirely and now enjoy them, in fact, they are becoming the main projects for my art! I just hate the scene of little Georgie.
The Mad Max Movies – I have a thing for life on the road, roguish living, post-apocalyptic tribal societies and the general chaos of survival as whole societies descend into madness. For this reason too, I think I like the next movie;
Reign of fire movie – I love subterranean settings and when you throw in dragons in a post-apocalyptic world I am in my element.
Gregor the Overlander series by Suzanne Collins is another subterranean setting I love, full of gothic elements such as bats, rats, roaches and gore with an edge of the apocalypse feel to it.
The Blue Bird starring Shirley Temple – this has been in my mind since I was a very small child, a lot of things about this movie can be seen in small snippets of some of my work. I have mentioned Old father time and I have cats and dogs which can take on a human form, children trapped in dream time in a couple of my stories to date so far. No Spoilers, because they were just passing things in the plot, not the actual plot at all.
The Karnstein Trilogy – I love this much more than Dracula, I love the movies and the books they were based on. I loved it so much that I had been heavily influenced by this trilogy my whole life; I have had to be careful when writing my vampires in fear of coming off as a plagiarist. You may see what I mean with what I mentioned in “The Blue Bird” paragraph. I have had to learn to chop up everything I love and move them around genres and different stories, like some experimental stir fries.
I shall write about the tropes and scenes and types of characters I like in future posts – keep eye out for those!
Happy reading!
A writer’s thoughts
I have read somewhere in the past, that you are what you read and I believe that. The more I read the more defined my tastes have become, my skills, my genre leanings and this influences my writing and art.
With each good book I learn how I want to write and what I want to write about.
With each bad book I read, I learn how I do not want to write and what I dislike.
I do not believe that as a writer you must write things outside of your comfort zone, I believe you should be comfortable with what you are writing – although on an emotional matter, that’s quite different. You must write outside of your emotional comfort zone if you wish to write fear, pain and heartbreak effectively, unfortunately that means opening up your old wounds.
A lot of the time, I like to write about horror, trauma etc. and each time I do, I open up real and old wounds, this is why I often become quiet as a writer and have prolonged periods of not writing, whilst I emotionally recuperate.
I was once told that writers and artists generally go mad after a time and I believe it, we send ourselves mad for our art and stories because we are constantly reliving the horrors of our past for your entertainment and as a collective, we seldom are known or recognized for it.
I am not moaning about my lack of recognition as a writer and artist, because personally I think that’s my own fault. I think I am generally a lazy person and have not bothered to find myself a publisher or to advertise my work very much over the years at all. On the one occasion I did contact a publisher to see whether or not they liked an idea of mine, I was lucky enough to get a letter back within three weeks, but this terrified me, because they loved what I sent them and praised me highly for it; I never contacted them again, I was worried about becoming famous and at the time I was young and didn’t know about pseudonyms.
These days I am more prepared for whatever life throws at me because I will be totally blatant about what I can and cannot do and what I will and will not allow.
Other than twitter, my blog and magazines are there any other steps I should take to get myself known?
Please comment below.
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