Influences Outside of Literature

[Will Lavender]

Most of my influences can be found, obviously, in 20th century novels.

But there are some things outside of literature in pop culture that have had profound influences on my work.

Is there anything--music, movies, television, mass culture, etc.--in the culture that has shaped your writing?

Two I can think of right off the top of my head:

The film The Truman Show
David Lynch's Twin Peaks

[blacbird]

Talisker.
Laphroaig.

caw

[Azraelsbane]

I get some of my ideas from the strangest places. I once got an idea for a plot twist from a misspelled theater marquee. :)

Some other things that influence my writing are popular misconceptions about aspects of certain religions. I play off them a lot in my writing.

[Shady Lane]

I'm so inspired by movies...usually individual lines from movies. I'll hear one, and it'll just stick in my head.

[Simon Woodhouse]

I'm struggling to think of anything in popular culture that influences my writing. I tend to get more of my ideas and inspirations from people watching, as well as empathising with people who live very different lives to myself.

I might get the odd visual cue from movies, but on the whole I don't look to the big screen for examples of human behaviour. Music sometimes helps with a mood whilst I'm writing, though it doesn't really inspire me. Books I've read help me decide how far I can take a subject – where are the boundaries, am I stepping over the line of what's acceptable.

[WriterInChains]

Two things have influenced my writing more than anything else (except contemporary novels): the monetarily-challenged, multi-ethinic area where I grew up, and music.

I listen to music almost all the time, and will listen to the same piece[s] over and over, sometimes for years at a time. It's difficult to explain the way it's manifested in my writing because it's so variable: a mis-heard lyric will turn into a title or premise, some songs "wake up" certain characters or themes, I never know what'll happen next. :)

A couple that come immediately to mind: anything by Itzak Perlman or Yo Yo Ma, the entire Alice In Chains catalog, The Allman Bro's Idlewild South, and Pearl Jam's Ten album.

The area where I grew up taught me the difference between conflict and the kind of conflict that gets everyone's attention, and how differently various cultures interpret the same things/situations.

Cool thread, Will! :)

[Alexandra Little]

I get a lot of my ideas from musicals--even though many of my favorites are based on books (Phantom of the Opera, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Jane Eyre, etc), they still change up the plot and end up sparking an idea. I even use the songs as inspiration to listen to while I'm writing a scene.

I also use volcanoes, strangely, as inspiration. My obsession with them eventually led to a volcano-oriented fantasy book that I'm currently working on, and myths surrounding them have helped in creating a whole religion.

[Harper K]

I have a longstanding obsession with the movie West Side Story. I first saw it when I was 10 -- it was the first sad movie I saw, which was partly why it hit me so hard. Also, I loved dance and musicals and New York City and Latino culture and I thought "Maria" was the prettiest name ever. Right movie at the right time, I suppose. It had more influence over my elementary and middle school fiction writings than any book did. A few weeks after seeing it, I started writing my first novel. Even now, years later, I'll sometimes put on my well-worn DVD of the movie when my novel's going slowly and I need inspiration. My novel doesn't have a thing in common with West Side Story but seeing just a little bit of the movie will get me writing again.

Musicals and dance have inspired me again and again. The heightened emotion in a musical or a ballet will occasionally make me want to go home and do pirouettes or sing along with a soundtrack... but more often I'll be spurred on to create my own stories and characters.

I've also been influenced by my favorite band, the Decemberists. Many of their songs are basically historical fiction pieces set to music -- with the vocabulary to match! I love their unabashed use of melodrama and English-majory pedanticalness.

[janetbellinger]

I get most of my ideas from real life situations that either inspire or repulse me, make me want to write about it. Also come to think of it, I belive I'm influenced by genetics in the form of my clergyman grandfather.

[joetrain]

music's big. i don't know that i get ideas from it as much as inspiration and deeper understanding of words. i'm thinking leonard cohen and nick cave as obvious story teller wordsmiths, also, for some reason, radiohead's kid a. the way tom york's syllables play over the rhythms.

[Elodie-Caroline]

I wouldn't have had any literary influences in my work, as what I actually write, isn't within the genres of what I mostly read. I write romantic thrillers/crime stories, whereas I read a lot of non-fiction, and used to read a lot of horror when I was younger. I do love a good old romantic film though.

I am also really big into my music, especially from the early 1960s until late 1970s, which would mostly be love songs.
I do get inspiration for scenes for my novels from my music. For instance, one day, I am writing away and am listening to a new CD of Glen Campbell singing his love songs in the background. On comes this song 'Hey little one'... I had never heard it before and it overtakes me and evokes a really wonderful new scene for in my novel. The funny thing is, this novel was first inspired by watching a few minutes of the beginning of the film 'Transporter 2'. My novel is nothing like this film; but the guy getting into his car with the woman and her kid gave me a flash of inspiration for a story about a bodyguard.

Oh, and I am also very influenced by French films and the French actor Jean Reno. I started writing novels because I think that a lot of his parts in films don't suit him; so I write the kinds of stories I would personally like to see him star in as films.


Elodie

[scarletpeaches]

Music gives certain chapters their atmosphere. I don't know whether the reader would be able to tell, but I listen to particular albums while writing different sections. I say 'while', but I always write in silence. You could say I use different albums to prepare me to write different chapters or sections of a book. I listen to them on my mp3 player while out of the house and by the time I return, the songs have got me in the mood to nail a section, a scene or a chapter.

[JEMcGee]

Very few novels inspire my writing - I prefer to read autobiography's and books that contain the letters of real people.

I'm big into current events and read a lot of news articles about politics, science, social workings and economics. I like listening to talk radio and television shows like Law and Order that portray real life stories and I am very inspired by the obsessions people have in pop culture. There are some movies that inspire me, but more the characters in them than the story lines or settings.

[Jamesaritchie]

Most of my influence comes from 19th and 20th century novels and poetry, but contemporary music and culture are things I try to keep up with. I don;t think they can be anything but an influence to people who live in today's world.

I do my best not to be influenced by TV and movies. I believe TV and movies should be influenced by writing, not the other way around.

[JoNightshade]

Among other things, I am hugely influenced by comic books and comic book characters. I love the interaction between words and pictures-- how just a couple of words combined with a simple image can really hit home. I think the same thing can be applied to writing regarding description and dialogue. I also love the archetypal themes and personalities played out in infinite variation. I love how the same story is told over and over but in slightly different ways or from different viewpoints. Comic fans often get in a bunch over continuity errors or blatant rewriting of background stories, but I love this. Comics are the myths we tell each other around the campfire, updated for the modern world. Every telling is different. You can tell the same basic story a thousand times and if it's done well, I'll be back the thousand-and-first time.

[sunna]

My family. Watching them is like having my very own live soap opera/comedy/action movie 24-7. It's great. Pity they would rend me limb from limb if I ever wrote about them. :D

For some reason landscapes generally make me want to write - something. I don't always manage to come up with anything worth reading, but still. One day when I'm rich I'm going to live on a hill in a house with big windows.

People-watching. Especially listening to one side of a stranger's phone conversation, for some reason.

[Manat]

[quote=WriterInChains;1492800]Two things have influenced my writing more than anything else (except contemporary novels): the monetarily-challenged, multi-ethinic area where I grew up, and music.

A couple that come immediately to mind: anything by Itzak Perlman or Yo Yo Ma, the entire Alice In Chains catalog, The Allman Bro's Idlewild South, and Pearl Jam's Ten album.

Wow~

I was stuck on Pearlman's Sarasate Fantasy, his solo makes my hair stand on end and fueled The Haunting, and the Allman brother's Freebird took me where I needed to go with my first novel. It seems you come from a diverse background and have eclectic tastes and I think I'd be interested in reading what you write.

Music does it for me as well, also a fascination and lifelong love of history and adventure, and 17 years as a shrink, 10 of them in maximum security and 6 in the Far North working with Innuit and aboriginal offenders. Sounds corny, but saw some mighty strange things, heard some really bizarre stories, and saw the best and the worst of the human spirit. As a result my stories are pretty dark and intense and the characters are pretty complicated, but I can give them the happy ending that's so elusive in real life.

Good question!

[javili]

Street culture, stuff you hear people talking about when sharing taxis or standing around eating tacos.

High quality sex comics like Mil Chistes or Chambedoras.

Myths and local legends. Catholic/animist/santeria insanity.

Urban myths. (In Mexico it is VERY hard to sort out urban myths from news, culture, philosophy, politics and bigotry.

Terrible moves about professional wrestlers fighting crime in capes and masks, drug dealers running the border to screw blonds and shoot hordes of gringos, silly sex comedy like La Escuelita, narcrocorrido stories like Lord of the Skies or Jefe de Jefes.

My parents and grandparents tales about the old days.

My newspaper stories. I am lucky enough to live in a crazy, violent place with beautiful women, daily machine-gun shootings, and macho pistolero drug culture. Sinaloa is the Sicily of Mexico, President Fox called it the "cradle of drug trade", the largest producer of heroin in the Western Hemisphere and a central passing point for cocaine. It's also the place a lot of the popular music in Mexico came from. It adds up.

[Death Wizard]

A fresh, soft breeze in a quiet place.

[Danger Jane]

Music that is full of emotion. I can't post it all here because it's too much.

Movies. I totally respect film as a separate-but-equal art to writing. Certain scenes--I just saw the Queen, and the scene where she's sitting and the stag comes is an example--they just make me want to write. Quiet scenes usually where not much is physically going on but there's sooo much space for interpretation and thought.

Wikipedia

[Manderley]

My garden.

It's full of colours, sounds, smells, textures, shapes and tastes. At the moment I'm trying to bring more senses into my writing, so spending time in the garden reminds me of this and helps me sharpen my experience of my surroundings so that I can use it in the writing.

[NeuroFizz]

Science.

Neuroscience in particular. There's nothing like thinking about thinking (and thinking about the ability to think about thinking) that gets the mind in the kind of tangles that lets writing flow. I think I'll have a donut.

[Devil Ledbetter]

The people I know influence me, especially my sisters.

[OddButInteresting]

I am not a reader, personally. I barely read at all. This may shock you all, but I do not believe that one needs to be a reader in order to write a great story that can reach out and touch people. Yes, you need a good idea of how to tell a story in a form that readers can buy in to, but great storytelling is not grounded in literature.

I always wanted to be a film-maker. It wasn't until recently that I realised that the novel was a much better medium with which to convey my more theme-heavy, narratively complex and visually ambitious ideas.

I grew up with films and videogames. Films like Memento and Pulp Fiction have greatly inspired my skills at constructing a narrative. Star Wars showed us all just how far the imagination can stretch. And Far-Eastern cinema is a great example of how art is often synonymous with storytelling.

I don't like PC games, personally. I find controlling with a keyboard difficult, and I dislike open-ended games with vast customisation options like MMORPGs and strategy games. No, I am a console gamer. I like games with a strong sense of narrative direction, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But not only that, the gameplay also needs to be appealing in a way that does not hinder the above (MMORPGs are an example of how too much freedom can harm the story).

Resident Evil and Silent Hill educated me in the art of suspense, and generating an atmosphere and ambience befitting a scene or situation. Metal Gear Solid demonstrated how you can craft a deep and complex story, and tie it plausibly to the world in which we live; grounding it in a believable reality. Tomb Raider does the same, but on a milder, less politically-orientated scale. Final Fantasy, like Star Wars, showcased the potential of the imagination, and the way in which a storyteller can whisk away their audience to a wholly fictional world, but a world that they can believe in at the same time.

Videogames deserve more credit than they get. And personally, I would say they are my primary influence. But, of course, the techniques employed by the games I listed above were first derived from cinema. Therefore, cinema is my chief influence.

[Jack Nog]

Certain lines in certain songs sometimes turn into entire scenes.

New Stories have formed the basis for five or six of my "Ideas" for novels and one that became a novel that I just finished.

My current WIP is based on the area I live in and a town about ten miles away that has 10-12 ghosts that populate it.

[javili]

Two I forgot.

The ocean and foreign women.

[Spiny Norman]

I think it's a lot harder to separate out what doesn't affect your writing. You take bits of everything in your life without knowing it, toss it into your head, then make soup and start doling it out. Separating out all the various parts is tough and probably shouldn't be done - some soups use bizarre and disturbing ingredients that wind up tasting great.

Course, as any chef knows, presentation is really important. The right spring of parsley and maybe a little cilantro can make a bowl of soup a lot more appetizing.

This metaphor is fun.

[javili]

Oh yes, that's another influence. Cilantro. How did I forget?