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

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

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

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

is there any place for the truth in writing fiction?

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?”

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country


When one sits down to write a story in any way shape or form they should never think of it as inventing false events situations and characters. If I could perhaps coin a term I would call them "micro-truths". as they appear on the page and as they occur in the piece all that is there is true. You should not be asking your audience or reader to suspend their disbelief but rather to embrace your micro-truth for as long as they are reading or watching. So they may say that writers are liars. But writers can never call themselves as such. We merely invent micro truths.

In Oscar Wilde's the decay of lying he states that the true nature of art is "the telling of beautiful untrue things"
Wilde being a romantic at heart wrote this essay as a protest against the trends of literature in his time becoming too focused on real life and real people. His argument was that one should write as one wishes about the world and that eventually life would imitate art. The best message this essay can give to the writers of today is that they should not feel they have to write about the world as everyone see's it but write from one's own viewpoint. Others may disagree but in my humble opinion the best way to write is to reject other's reality and substitute your own

How is it that I became a writer?

I have been writing shot stories poems and various other bits and pieces since I was around 12. But I never once considered myself a writer until recently. In my childhood I always thought of writers as people one would never even see or meet. Most of the writers whose work I read where dead and those that where alive where always being talked about excitedly by the adults around me. It almost felt sometimes that writers where  merely names on the front of books that someone had invented a personality around. Being a writer never seemed to me something that real people did. I thought i was merely having fun by imitating what had come before me.

But as I reached college and university  I became more and more aware that writer's did exist. not only that but they could sometimes even be fairly ordinary if not dull. suddenly the mystique was gone. but knowing that writers where not all that special did not upset me. Rather it made me think that if being a writer is something that these people could manage then why not me? Maybe one day I would be a name on a book that someone might pick up and read believing the author to be a wonderfully talented fellow. They would never know that the person who wrote that book once spent 4 hours playing brickbreaker on his phone