Monday 25 February 2013

influence and inspiration

Where does my influence and inspiration come from? Having deliberated on my answer to this one I would have to say that it purely depends on what I happen to be writing. I am horribly inconsistent in what I prefer to write. Be it poems or prose fantasy or romance I can never really find a niche and stick to it. But for whatever I happen to be working on I can never be without my influences to help me find my own way of doing things. I guess the best thing to do here is to talk about my current sources of influence/inspiration

Lately iv'e been working on creating my own fantasy setting in which to base my own series of adventures. When it comes down to fantasy it goes almost without saying that the works of Tolkien inspire all modern fantasy writers without exception. But when it comes to the type of setting that i'm aiming to create I would count my greatest influence to be the dragon age series of RPG video games by Bioware. In these games there is much of the standard tropes of fantasy but with heavy emphasis on rich character development and drawing parallels between its world and our modern one. I'm also keen to follow their example in balancing darker and more adult themes with a heavy dose of dry wit and light toilet Humour


I would have to say that iv'e begun to find john Cheever's writing to be very influential to me. Like Terence Rattingan and F Scott  Fitzgerald he writes with a deep understanding of the human condition. His work has a strange and almost dreamlike quality to it as he masterfully draws you in to his well crafted tale. What draws me to him most however is that while he sets his stories in the contemporary world of his day and primarily focus on the drama of suburban america there are sometime's hints of sci/fi and horror in some stories with the swimmer being wonderfully metaphysical

So there are my current running reservoirs of inspiration. Yet i know that wider rivers and greater oceans of idea's await me. I look forward to finding them and i cant imagine where they will take me



Sunday 17 February 2013

ancient egyptian verses about the importance of writing


these anceint egyptian  verese should be bedside reading every night for every writer. the ancient egyptians knew the importance of writing as they believed it to be more lasting then any great tomb they could build

my writing: my letter to the world?

When Emily Dickinson wrote that her Writing was her letter to the world she was almost beingt literal. As an eccentric recluse she chose to communicate with the world at large via her poetry. For me I cannot say the same. I have no desire to live my life alone in one town but rather explore the wider world. By doing that I won't need to write letters to the world I can just visit it.


What I prefer to see my writing as is not a letter to the world as in the here and now but rather as a piece of myself I leave behind. Writer's can claim just as anyone who creates can also claim to be closer then anyone to immortality. Euripedes and Aristotle have been dead for well over two thousand years yet what they wrote has survived. that piece of themselves survives for centuries.

In 1840 archeologists excavating the ruins of Deir el-Medina the village that had been home to the workers building ancient egyptian temples found a huge store of papyri. These are now known as the Ramesside munuscripts and one contains a long verse poem in praise of writing. According to these paragraphs, whereas offering-chapels and families may not survive a thousand years, a writer is kept alive by his writings. In my next post I will post the verses in full because in truth they do more then I could ever do to prove my point

Sunday 10 February 2013

is it always wrong as a writer to pour you own flaws into your protagonist?

When you say that a protagonist who embody's the writers flaws detracts from the narrative you must first consider what kind of narrative is the piece supposed to have. If the piece is character driven with the protagonist's personal feelings and emotions driving the piece then it is much more likely that a writer using his own flaws as inspiration will be able to build a well developed character who will definitely capture a reader's attention. So in that case the challenge for the writer is to ensure that the Protagonist manages to not become too focused on their flaws. If the work becomes bogged down in the character's own struggle with too little attention being payed to plot or setting or even other character's then the piece becomes too personal.If we lose too much of the barrier between the author and the character that we can't tell either apart we are distracted from a narrative that is being replaced by uncomfortable reality.

Whereas in john Cheever's the swimmer Cheever has instead chosen to give his protagonist his own flaws yet deny him knowledge of what those are. On his odyssey through pools he falls from a wealthy pool lounging socialite to a pathetic half naked drunk. We are never distracted from the narrative by his flaws as they are woven into the narrative and are what make the narrative compelling. The knowledge that Cheever is being brutally honest about himself only adds extra weight and depth to a modern classic


"any portrait done with feeling is one of the artist not the sitter"
Oscar Wilde

Sunday 3 February 2013

the voice of america: why is cheever so very american

well what a question we have to answer. what does make a short story or novel a uniquely american piece of work? well then do we have to first know what it is unique to america?

one thing that we can decide is a uniquely american trait is the search for an identity or sense of self. america is in the grand scheme of things a young country. it is also unique among nations in so much as it is one of the few nations that chose to make itself exist. america declares itself loudly as the land of the free and this ideal bleeds into the writing of the country.

What americans seem to wish more then anything else is to have no set place in their world. To know that their lives can follow fluid and ever changing paths to new discoveries. Even when they are confident that they have found a settled place and identity it seems that anything can threaten that idyll. John Cheever embraces both of these concepts in his short stories . In "goodbye my brother" the Pommeroy family cling on to the crumbling beach house for the sake of nostalgia. When the pariah lawrence attempts to wake them up to harsh reality he ends up being violently assaulted for his attempts to shake them from their delusions. In "the common day" the gardener Nils defies his supposed role as a servant by refusing Mrs garrison's orders and pours out his long list of built up grievances against her to her face. In the enormous radio the past identity of Irene Wescott haunts the respectable housewife role she now assumes. While in "o city of broken dreams" the Malloy's break away from the honest small town life they had lived in the hopes of being part of the glamour of broadways elite but instead find that those that promise much riches are desperately poor themselves. In all of these stories one's identity is transient and uncertain and you may either fight to resist this fact or swim into the tide of uncertainty

in the case of English novels the issue of where one's place is is much more black and white. we have had thousands of years to establish a clear class system that define's ones place. in Oliver twist Oliver is not escaping from poverty to become a wealthy man. he is merely reclaiming what was rightfully his to begin with. his restoration to wealth redresses a temporal balnce in the well established class system. in the case of huckleberry finn he comes into wealth but is free to reject the trappings that wealth brings. he rejects what he considers civilization for a life of carefree adventure as he feels that is where he belongs. and that i would say is what makes a novel uniquely american. the notion of if not equality then freedom. freedom to carve out ones own destiny as it is never set in stone. to beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past