What do all of these people have in common?
Not a lot.
They all spent a life putting words on the page. That by itself doesn't impart a kinship.
One aspect of writing that's always stymied me is research. If you want to study a topic, you logically read everything associated with that topic. But if you begin to invest yourself in fashioning a world or a character, you sometimes find that the map charting your way is just too damn vague. Who do you go to to ratchet your imagination into kink? Lots of writers can look back and know who it was that made them want to write. I can't. There are writers who made deep impressions on me at one time -- most of the names on the list above would fall into that category -- but there's no one author who made me think once, "yeah, I wanna do that, but better." Or different. Or something.
And yet when I think of the word "influence", I think of a glut of images, phrases, cross-currents of story and nuance and caves of meaning. Okay. So far, so good. And creativity isn't math. That's a given. Okay. But everyone who does this still has had to seek out the node between the writers who helped give imaginative birth to them, to you, to me, and the ideas of one's own that grow into stories that leave the author's hand as expression for someone else to glut their imagination on. And the other bitch about writing something into being is -- get this -- you have to use words. These endless puzzle-boxes of immediacy and atavistic abstraction, of objected intimacy and, sometimes, simple bloody truths... these radio waves floating between the aisles at Barnes and Noble.
(Well, that's one of the other bitches about writing. The other other bitch about writing is that you can't ask these guys how THEY did it, cuz, check it out, they're dead. Well, you could ask Gaiman and Martin. Actually, you could just ask Gaiman. Martin blogs about football.)
And the other-to-the-third bitch about writing (Other-Cubed) is that you need a clean, well-lighted space to do it in. So there's all this STUFF that goes into the pot as it simmers before anyone else even SEES the product. And when they DO see it, it's a meal for them to savor that you had weeks ago, or months, or years.
True? True. Yet one mark of successful writing is how well the author has played that shell game between self and content and style and audience. Mystical -- not nebulous. Intimate -- not neurotic. Cool -- not too cool.
Shall we illustrate? With GRRM's (to the fanboys) long-overdue A Dance With Dragons out in July and the HBO adaptation on, I've spent some time thinking about the series recently. I'll always prefer Martin's series to Robert Jordan's equally popular Wheel of Time books (and to stuff like Terry Goodkind that just seems second-rate): both series are epic, but Jordan eschewed style for function. Whereas Martin, in three out of four books so far, nine out of ten geeks agree, has drawn up a river in which you can float downstream, looking at the clouds and seeing all your favorite shapes in them. (The fourth book is A Feast for Crows, which sucked. I'll have more to say on this in July.)
And so Martin, who began A Song of Ice and Fire in 1991 because he wanted to write something "huge and totally unfilmable" is getting his story filmed. The chance of Wheel of Time ever showing up on small screen or large? Almost nil. Unless Radiohead does the music, fahgettaboudit.
It looks like what I'm really talking about here is irony. Something seems to mean something but it really means something else. This can happen for a couple reasons:
A) It's what you want to have happen.
B) Two roads diverge in a wood. You take the one you hadn't planned on.
C) Some impulse buried inside your idea claws around like the Alien Queen and makes you want to be perverse. Sort of like the one Pixies song everyone knows because they put it at the end of Fight Club.
There's a thicket of motivation to weed and sort through around this phrase, and yeah, some writers spend a life sorting it. Kafka being the archtype. This didn't make him the life of the party. (Actually, he demanded that all of his writing be destroyed after his death. His publisher decided otherwise.)
And so it's fair to say that Kafka's ghost would be just as or more tormented by the fact that we read him than the man ever was. Disturbing! I'll sign off on that note.
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